A Human Strategy, Matt Berry, aphorism 50
50
The profit-loss man, lacking all taste, has at least purchased a little tact through the demands of the marketplace: he has had to influence people on a daily basis and therefore knows how to move people to his own advantage. Those who have been sheltered by luxury and good taste have never felt themselves moved in this manner and thus confuse his salesmanship with taste; perhaps they even feel themselves indebted to him. It may be said that a refined and inherited taste preserves and cultivates only what tact will harvest later. That is to say, the tactful acquire the sensibilities of the privileged ... and soon thereafter, their graceful signatures. Tact over taste — it seems to conform to the natural justice of the species ... as when the privileged have lost their grip on the fundamentals to their power and so lose it over a truffle.
The profit-loss man, lacking all taste, has at least purchased a little tact through the demands of the marketplace: he has had to influence people on a daily basis and therefore knows how to move people to his own advantage. Those who have been sheltered by luxury and good taste have never felt themselves moved in this manner and thus confuse his salesmanship with taste; perhaps they even feel themselves indebted to him. It may be said that a refined and inherited taste preserves and cultivates only what tact will harvest later. That is to say, the tactful acquire the sensibilities of the privileged ... and soon thereafter, their graceful signatures. Tact over taste — it seems to conform to the natural justice of the species ... as when the privileged have lost their grip on the fundamentals to their power and so lose it over a truffle.