I still believe that capitalism is too harsh and I believe that, even within that, there is a lot of satisfaction and beauty if you happen to be one of the lucky ones, although that doesn’t eradicate the reality of the suffering. It’s all true at once, kind of humming and sublime.

Saunders holds two seemingly opposed perceptions together: capitalism as a system that produces real suffering and inequality, and capitalism as a lived environment in which many people nonetheless find genuine pleasures, meaning, and aesthetic richness—often because they are “lucky” beneficiaries of its distribution. The key claim is not a compromise but a simultaneity: moral clarity about harm does not cancel the felt beauty of ordinary life, and the presence of beauty does not excuse structural cruelty. “Humming and sublime” suggests a constant background vibration—an unresolved, almost musical tension—inviting readers to resist simplistic verdicts and to cultivate a more ethically alert, emotionally capacious realism.