We can describe a simple formula here: a certain action, repeated, becomes customary; as a result, it comes to define the actor’s essential nature. Alternately, a person’s nature may be defined by how others have acted toward him in the past. To be an aristocrat is largely to insist that, in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since aristocrats don’t really do anything in particular: most spend their time simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state) and therefore should continue to do so. Much of the art of being such a person is that of treating oneself in such a
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