Time & Perspective Quote by Jeremy Bentham

Asceticism, Bentham implies, isn’t merely impractical; it’s structurally self-defeating. The line lands like a utilitarian trapdoor: if you actually try to live by the doctrine that virtue equals self-denial, you don’t get sainthood at scale, you get a world engineered for suffering. The jab is aimed at moral systems that treat pain as inherently ennobling, as if misery were a kind of currency that purchases goodness. Bentham’s insistence on “consistently” is the knife twist. Most people flirt with austerity, preach restraint, admire it in others. But taken literally and universally, it becomes a policy program: the deliberate production of deprivation.

The subtext is political as much as personal. Bentham is writing in an era when religious and moral orthodoxies still carried real institutional force, when “virtue” often meant policing pleasure rather than reducing harm. His utilitarian project needs a villain, and asceticism is perfect: it smuggles cruelty in under the banner of discipline. By moving from “any living creature” to “one tenth part of the inhabitants,” he scales the thought experiment from psychology to society. Even a minority, if organized around the ethic of denial, can normalize scarcity, punish enjoyment, and turn everyday life into a moral tribunal.

“Hell” isn’t just rhetorical heat; it’s Bentham’s diagnosis of an incentive system. If suffering is treated as proof of righteousness, there’s no limiting principle. The cruelty can always be intensified, and someone will call it purity. Bentham’s warning is that moral ideals become dangerous when they reward pain for its own sake.