On the Nature of Selling Out

We all know the phrase “a person who’s for sale,” and most of us, I suspect, believe we’ve crossed paths with one or two along the way. But what does it actually mean? In my view, selling out is when, in making decisions, the key — and only — criterion is money. When money rises above every other value, or becomes the only value there is.

A few examples:

— When a woman stays with a man (or the other way around) purely for the money, ready at the first opportunity to trade her “sponsor” for a more lucrative one;

— When a business relationship holds only as long as the profit from it beats whatever the competition is offering;

— When a politician is willing to sacrifice his country’s interests for a personal payout from an outside player.

No argument here — money is one of the most obvious motivators and one of the clearest engines of success in our world. But it’s far from the only thing that matters. Plenty of people have built fortunes on deeply unethical ground. I’m no moralist, though, and our aim here is to think about the nature of selling out, not to judge it.

More than once I’ve watched my own deals or offers get turned down in favor of someone supposedly richer. Or the opposite — they’d pick a far less competent contractor over me simply because he quoted a lower price. It stung, seeing the financial angle put above logic and results. And how many times I’ve watched false notions of wealth rest on nothing but show, with no relationship to reality at all!

After the collapse of the USSR, Russia lived through a period when the hunger for money at any cost became the highest value of all — make it, and move it abroad.

And yet, as I learned from books on the theory of power, the real elite has always been marked by exactly one thing: it can’t be bought. Fortunes come and go, but those loyal to ideals and to a shared well-being — not only their own, but that of a wider circle, all the way up to entire nations — are the ones who stay “in the game.”

So how has selling out been fought over the centuries? One answer: private schools, where the rising generations of the aristocracy were raised to understand that dignity and values come first. This was — and still is — a way of forming an incorruptible caste of future elites, people who won’t betray the interests of their peers and their country for any amount of money.

In Russia, sadly, that kind of upbringing is still rare. But the progress, and the growing momentum in this direction, are plain to see.

And what, exactly, is wrong with thinking about nothing but money? Nothing — and nothing right about it either. It’s just that if money is your only goal, money is all you’ll get. I’ve met people who live that way… they had money, but I never found a truly wealthy, truly settled person among them. The thing is, certain social connections open only to those who share a wider range of meanings, and a sense of where each one belongs.

So how should we deal with people who are “for sale”? Very simply — accept them as they are, without judgment, and cooperate wherever it’s pragmatically worth it. But the strategic decisions are best made not with them, but directly with their potential “buyers” — because sooner or later, that sale is going to happen anyway.