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When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.
Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest, of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority.
We must get rid of our arrogant assumption that it is the masses who can be led by the nose. As far as I can make out, the shoe is on the other foot. The only people who are really the dupes of their favourite newspapers are the intelligentsia.
First, they raise a fear that there may be something wrong about our method of intake, or its quantity (academic overproduction is possibly a real danger) or the structure of the educational ladder—in itself an admirable thing. Secondly, I fear that if this type continues it will in the next thirty years prove an extremely disastrous element in our national life. These are future schoolmasters and journalists or, worse still, unemployables with degrees. They could do great harm.
Adultery is an affair for law because it offends the Hobbesian principle ‘that men perform their covenants’. The fact that this particular breach of covenant involves the sexual act is (in the logical sense) an accident.
