Becoming a modern-day Person of Quality

​Court etiquette of the European pre-industrial era demanded that the nobility—Persons of Quality—did not speak of money. To do so was considered base and dirty. Why? Because it betrayed a concern for wealth, a concern for a thing which the nobility were supposed to be completely indifferent to. For the nobility, wealth was as much a right as is freedom of speech in the Western world. It was not a privilege but a fact of their existence. 

Because of this stance, people who did talk of money and bent their will on attaining it were looked down upon. Merchants, for example, were looked down upon because they sullied themselves in the rivers of commerce and trade.

To be truly noble was to have an abundant, nearly unlimited supply of wealth. As such, a true member of the nobility did not fret over the cost of latest fashions or the expense required to maintain a stable and a household staff. 

I think we’d do well to adopt a similar attitude. Not to our wealth, but to our ideas. See, the nobility considered their wealth as inexhaustible so they didn’t concern themselves with hoarding or protecting it—or at least, appearing to. Human beings are creative by nature, we have ideas in abundance. So in a similar vein, we should not hoard our ideas. We should give them freely, spend them willingly, safe in the knowledge that we will always have more to call upon.