Wealth & Money Quote by Theodor Adorno

Adorno lands the punch with a brutal symmetry: both poverty and wealth can be anti-intellectual, but by different mechanisms. The poor are "prevented" from thinking by "the discipline of others" - a phrase that smells of bosses, bureaucracies, schoolrooms, police, time clocks. Thinking is not just discouraged; it is made impractical. When your day is partitioned by surveillance, precarious hours, and the constant threat of punishment, reflection becomes a luxury good. The verb matters: prevented suggests active obstruction, an environment engineered to keep people reactive, not contemplative.

Then Adorno turns the knife: "the rich by their own". No overseer required. Privilege manufactures its own blinders. Comfort becomes a self-administered discipline: the need to justify inheritance, to protect status, to keep the world legible in ways that excuse your advantage. If the poor are managed from the outside, the rich become managers of their own cognition, curating ignorance with taste, philanthropy, and "common sense". It is not that wealth makes you stupid; it makes certain questions feel indecent, destabilizing, impolite.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in the shadow of fascism and in the rise of mass consumer culture, Adorno distrusted institutions that turn people into compliant parts - whether through force or through seduction. The line reads like an anti-meritocratic axiom: society doesn't sort people by clarity of mind; it manufactures mental limits across the class spectrum, just with different tools.