Love Quote by Francis Wright

Wright isn’t merely scolding greed; she’s diagnosing a social technology. By calling selfish interest and competition a "principle", she frames them as an organizing doctrine, not a personal flaw. The target is a system that trains people to behave as if life is a market and other humans are rivals. "Carried to its extreme point" signals a tipping moment: competition stops being a spur to excellence and becomes a solvent that dissolves community.

Her sharpest move is anatomical. She doesn’t say society has gotten harsher; she says it has "isolated the heart of man". The phrasing turns moral life into something physically quarantined, as if the culture has locked empathy in solitary confinement. Then comes the crescendo of damage: sensibilities "blunted", impulses "annihilated". Those verbs matter. Blunting implies repeated abrasion - everyday practices that wear down feeling. Annihilation implies something more final: a near-total erasure of generosity and sympathy as usable instincts.

The subtext is reformist and strategic. Wright, a radical activist in the early industrial era, is speaking into a world where wage labor, urbanization, and emergent capitalist norms were rearranging family, faith, and civic duty. Her critique isn’t nostalgia for a gentler past; it’s a warning that a society organized around competitive self-interest produces emotionally stunted citizens - easier to govern, harder to unite, less capable of solidarity. In that sense, the line doubles as recruitment copy: if your best instincts feel harder to access, it’s not just you. It’s the system doing its work.