Wealth isn’t smart or poverty stupid. The correlation between affluence and intelligence is more likely inverse.

Capitalism excoriates this truth as heretical. “If you’re so smart,” asks the old thigh-slapper, “why ain’t you rich?”

Test that thesis. Compile two lists: one the richest, the other the smartest folks you can think of. How many occupy both?

This is no accident. The accumulation of wealth is a tedious business, anathema to most lively intellects. Inherited wealth depends on luck, not IQ. Intelligence chafes at repetition, which is the key to success in business: devise a profitable process or product and reproduce it faster and cheaper. Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the prize.

Curiosity’s inclined to wander where others haven’t. Its aim may look like aimlessness. Big brains may be hard to follow. Innovations fail more often than they succeed. New artistic visions are predictably deplored. Unfamiliar ideas infuriate by contradicting a complacent consensus. Insecurity misconstrues revision as derision.

Capitalism equates success with wealth. So does any profession honor its ablest practitioners: scientists salute scientists, golfers golfers, writers writers, etc. Envy pants to possess the playthings of the rich without reckoning their true cost. Few would opt to be poor.

Wealth measured success in my boyhood home. No one acknowledged this, of course: instead of wealth we celebrated good taste, the right people, best schools, handsomest possessions, which only money could buy. Art flattered its patrons, overtly or slily endorsing their prejudices. One was known by the company one kept; ours excluded the indigent.

My parents’ views naturally shaped mine. Some of their lessons steered me right: courtesy, honesty, civility, decency help us weather storms. Other lessons misled: snobbery, avarice, anti-intellectualism, conspicuous piety, swagger. Love was neither displayed nor discussed, a sad omission. It took me half a lifetime to decide which of my parents’ principles to uphold and which to discard. Writers helped. Errors helped. Love helped.

Successors typically congratulate themselves for their adjustment of parental patterns. While susceptible to the temptation, I check myself. No one can imagine themselves in another’s skin. Each of us is shaped by tendencies, talents, sensitivities, experiences exclusively our own. My parents’ limitations were their fact, not their fault. I pray my kids will forgive mine.

Few souls I’ve revered have been rich. Exceptions to this rule I honored for avoiding stupefaction by their luck. The record suggests that wealth enfeebles, deludes, deprives. The only rich artists I can think of are Lord Byron, Mendelssohn and Caillebotte, though there must be others. Privilege shudders at the sacrifices creation requires.

America’s fixation on wealth has made us unhappy. No one has enough. The rich rob the poor. Taxes are accounted theft, not grateful contributions to the public weal. Plutocrats flaunt and taunt. Our rapacity keeps us so busy we forget to live, then wonder why we’re blue.

The greater the gap between rich and poor, the less understanding, more condescension, more resentment, more instability in the state. In America, for five decades, that gap has been widening, till its graph resembles alligator jaws. A majority of the rich are convinced that more for them is better for all, that wealth will “trickle down” from their overflowing coffers with seigneurial ease. History does not dissuade them because they do not read it. Who needs history when you’ve got luxury?

For me, retirement’s greatest gift has been relief from greed. Abracadabra, I had plenty, not less. I started hating goods for distracting me from the good. Less stuff meant more time – to cram with thought. Success was now a shapely phrase and a quiet heart.