Social inferiority

“ This rather than intellectual inferiority explains the lack of social sympathy, the presence of such barbarous institutions as cannibalism and slavery, the low position of woman, inefficiency in the industrial and mechanical arts, the low type of group morals, rudimentary art-sense, lack of race-pride and self-assertiveness, and in intellectual and religious life largely synonymous with fetishism and sorcery. ”

“ Its general tendency is to weaken in man his inborn sense of personal independence; to debase his mind with notions of fictitious inferiority; to degrade his social dignity by inducing sycophantic and obsequious habits ”

“ If there were infallible marks by which individuals of inferior intellect, and inferior character, could be selected at their birth—would not the interests of society be served, and would not some sort of fitness seem to require, that they should be selected for the inferior and servile offices? And if this race be generally marked by such inferiority, is it not fit that they should fill them? ”

“ But the cruellest indignity of all is that, although we regard them as inferiors, we still look to them to admire and live up to our standards; and they are to conform to our civilization, yet without the income it requires or the social recognition it should secure. ”

“ For a man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself to right them in so far as he has strength, there is disappointment and bitterness. ”

“ These are too commonly composed of degenerate beings, corrupted and enfeebled by the vices of society, without being benefited by its civilization. That proud independence which formed the main pillar of savage virtue has been shaken down, and the whole moral fabric lies in ruins. Their spirits are humiliated and debased by a sense of inferiority, and their native courage cowed and daunted by the superior knowledge and power of their enlightened neighbors. Society has advanced upon them like one of those withering airs that will sometimes breed desolation over a whole region of fertility. ”

“ Yes! our superiority in enterprise, in learning, in the arts and in all that can dignify life, or embellish human nature, instead of exciting in them a laudable ambition to emulate, to equal, or excel us—excites the most hateful of all the passions—envy—and has caused them to endeavor for years past, by an unremitting series of vexatious, oppressive and unconstitutional acts, to retard our growth and prosperity, and if possible, to get rid altogether of a people whose presence so hourly reminds them of their own ignorance and inferiority. ”

“ I should believe so, did I not know that the love of social superiority, that very impulse of the human heart, which is the main-spring of civilization and the chief source of all human improvement, is able, when suffered to work on, uncontrolled by other more generous emotions, to corrupt man's whole nature, and to drive him to acts the most horrid and detestable. ”

“ Long established customs of hurtful character could formerly fence themselves in, and do their evil work with social impunity. Knowledge was then confined and enjoyed by the privileged few, and the multitude walked on in mental darkness. ”

“ Those of one class, not realizing what they are and what they might be, take life as it comes, believe that they are born to be slaves, and content themselves with the little that is given them in exchange for their labor. But there are others, on the contrary, who think, who study, and who, looking about them, discover social iniquities. Is it their fault if they see clearly and suffer at seeing others suffer? ”

“ Since I have learned that I have learned something else—what a cad and what a coward I have been all my life. I looked down upon those whom I considered my social inferiors. I did not think you good enough to bear my name. ”

“ I come now to the last sociological problem which I will connect with the fact of superiority and inferiority. On the one hand superiority and inferiority constitute a form of the objective organization of society. On the other hand they are an expression of differences in the personal quality of men. What now is the relation of these two determinations to each other, and how is the form of socialization affected by the variations of this relation? ”

“ Their intimate intercourse with those more prosperous keeps the picture of wealth constantly before them, side by side with that of their own poverty, which is thus never forgotten. Social prejudices require them to gain their livelihood in a way which without being hygienically preferable, lays far greater burdens upon their shoulders than those borne by the day-laborer. The price paid for prosperity in their career is constant humiliations, suppression of then true character and denial of their own individuality, a yoke more galling to a nature of true nobility than material want. ”

“ This prejudice is based on the ground that bad economic conditions and an unwholesome environment are the source of all social evils, and that a better distribution of wealth, or a vast scheme of social welfare, is the one thing necessary, when that is achieved all other things being added unto us, without any further trouble on our part. ”

“ He had nothing but contempt for the sparrow-like frivolity of fashionable Society, and was repelled from the middle classes by their servitude to conventions, their prejudices social and political, and their non-receptivity to ideas. ”

“ Especially brutal, stupid and inexpedient—when we think of it—is the old way of lumping the poor with the degenerate as “the lower class,” and either leaving them to bear their discredited existence as best they may, or dealing out to them a contemptuous and unbrotherly alms. The confusion with the degraded of those who are keeping up the social standard in the face of exceptional difficulties is as mean and deadly a wrong as could well be. ”

“ Sometimes their reason—at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their anti-social ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly, their desires or fears for themselves—their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest. Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. ”

“ These are extreme instances, but they are also in a measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.
Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. ”

“ They were so strongly fixed in their pride and prejudices against social equality that they pursued their own gentle, even way, untouched by the convulsions and throes of fierce indignation around them. ”

“ So in the economy of society; if there be any who suffer physical privation or [29] moral degradation, whose bodily necessities are either not satisfied or satisfied in a manner which only brutish creatures can be content with, this, though not necessarily the crime of society, is pro tanto a failure of the social arrangements. And to assert as a mitigation of the evil that those who thus suffer are the weaker members of the community, morally or physically, is to add insult to misfortune. Is weakness a justification of suffering? ”

“ The ignorance of the working-class and the superior intelligence of the privileged class are superstitions—are superstitions fostered by intellectual mercenaries, by universities and churches, and by all the centers of privilege. ”

“ Of the former, the example is of infinite value to society, in refining its tone, and giving to social life an unembarrassed ease, which, if not true politeness, is its true substitute; and, of the latter, the mischief done to society is enhanced by the multitude of low people ready to imitate their vices, inanities, and follies. ”

“ Perhaps, through mistaken or ill-directed hospitality, or from the prompt disposition to cheer and countenance the stranger, prevalent among my countrymen, they may have been treated with unwonted respect in America; and, having been accustomed all their lives to consider themselves below the surface of good society, and brought up in a servile feeling of inferiority, they become arrogant, on the common boon of civility; they attribute to the lowliness of others their own elevation ”

“ An Englishman who should propose to sit down at a café-door would find himself remembering that he is exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social inferiors. The danger is great, because his social inferiors are so numerous ”

“ I think it was more the vulgarity and insolence of those I saw decked in the regalia of wealth than anything else—than even my own poverty—that changed my views and turned me for a time from my easy indifference as to social conditions toward a recognition that those conditions are ridiculously antiquated, a bent I have never quite got over, though I was later drawn back to a more conservative point of view than, under the hatred of sham and the spur of want, I was driven to occupy for some time. They have no traditions and no ideals. ”

“ In a word, they believed—even those who longed to believe otherwise—the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive force of society. ”

“ As far as vanity alone is concerned, this ambitious display of rank and parentage, might, at this time of day, be dismissed with a smile. But there lurks a more serious evil in the absurd and invidious system so studiously preserved by our first nobility. Surrounded by their own dependents, and avoided by the gentry, who are seldom disposed for an intercourse in which a sense of inferiority prevails, few of the grandees are exempt from the natural consequences of such a life—gross ignorance, intolerable conceit, and sometimes, though seldom, a strong dose of vulgarity. ”

“ I saw a man whose eyes had gone behind every scene, whose back had turned, he believed, on every illusion, tolerant of every frailty, amused at little hypocrisies and of those greater shams which an arrogant society imposes on the outsider and itself defies with impunity: steeped in this class cynicism, without realizing that in the strong nourishing forces of civilization this society is but the scum that rises to the surface and that in the old pot-au-feu below are the vital nourishments of the race. ”

“ During the century which has elapsed the triumphant bourgeois have steadily persisted in throwing around themselves a practically impenetrable wall of legal and social privilege in their turn. And now there is a spontaneous upheaval of the excluded, unprivileged, inferior class. ”

“ Dependent, having to be fed and cared for by some man, the victors take their pick perhaps, but the vanquished take what is left; and the poor women, "marrying for a home," take anything. As a consequence the inferior male is as free to transmit his inferiority as the superior to give better qualities, and does so—beyond computation. ”

“ The effects of property, education, natural talent, would soon dispel the greater part of their own sense of inferiority, without proportionally altering the opinions of the whites; and the sullen ill-will, which even now occasionally exists, would be exchanged for the more bitter and implacable animosity that arises between equals and rivals struggling for the mastery. ”

“ Hence it has become one of the most fruitful sources of human misery and human degradation, and the satisfaction of its imperious cravings in civilised countries lies at the root of our worst social evils. ”

“ In exactly the same way the worker, rising in the social scale, seeks to prove himself a bourgeois. Both efforts are mistaken. Each class and sex has that to give to the common stock of achievement, knowledge, thought, which it alone can give, and robs itself and the community by inferior imitation. ”

“ Now it is one of the worst social errors to pauperize people; it demoralizes them through and through; it ruins their personal character and makes them socially harmful; it lowers their aims and makes sure that they will never have good ones; it corrupts their family life and makes sure that they will entail sordid and unworthy principles of action on their children. ”

“ After some commonplace and laborious replies, exchanged apropos of trivial topics then current, the conversation gradually became general, and finally settled down upon the subject of correctness in society life.
All these poor devils, all these poor wretches, male and female, forgetting their own social irregularities, showed a strangely implacable severity toward persons whom it was allowable to suspect, not even of stains or blemishes, but simply of some formal lack of respect for society laws,—the only ones that ought to be obeyed. ”

“ How many times have I borne the society of inferior people with ungracious tolerance, and hastened from them with undisguised relief? How often when dealing with the poor and ignorant in the exercise of conventional philanthropy, have I been careful to preserve the sense of a great gulf that yawned between me and them? And what was my daily life after all but a life existing for its own purposes, as most other men's lives were; and what credit could I take for the fact that the nature of those purposes was a trifle more consonant with what the world calls high ideals than theirs? ”

“ Surrounded by opportunity and trained with care, he grows into the type of Civilized Man; but, on the other hand, shut out from opportunity and neglected by the world, he remains stationary, always a man, entitled from his manhood to Equal Rights, but an example of inferiority, if not of degradation. ”