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Few of us are determined aesthetes or sybarites, yet almost all of us hunger for dignity; and if a future society were to offer love as a reward for accumulating small plastic discs, then it would not be long before such worthless items too assumed a central place in our most zealous aspirations and anxieties. 4.
Instead, we each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities. We discern evidence of both cleverness and stupidity, humour and dullness, importance and superfluity. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.
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Our “ego” or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated, and ever vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.
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A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense or fear of deprivation. Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil
Such feelings of deprivation may seem less peculiar if we consider the psychology behind the way we decide precisely how much is enough. Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us.
It is the feeling that we might, under different circumstances, be something other than what we are—a feeling inspired by exposure to the superior achievements of those whom we take to be our equals—that generates anxiety and resentment.
It follows that the greater the number of people whom we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more there will be for us to envy.
delusion which experience quickly corrects. When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. But when everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed
“To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified. There is a strange lightness in the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular area is accepted in good faith. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”
Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything.
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
Faith in an increasingly reliable connection between merit and worldly success in turn endowed money with a new moral quality.
But there was also, inevitably, a darker side to the story for those of low status. If the successful merited their success, it necessarily followed that the failures had to merit their failure. In a meritocratic age, an element of justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty no less than that of wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable but also deserved.
The Social Darwinists furthermore insisted that the sufferings and untimely deaths of the poor benefitted society as a whole and should therefore under no circumstances be prevented by government interference. The weak were nature’s mistakes and must be allowed to perish before they could reproduce and thereby contaminate the rest of the population. Just as the animal kingdom spawned its share of malformed creatures, so, too, did mankind. The most humane thing was to let the feeble die without misguided mercy. In his Social Statics (1851), the English Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer asserted
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To the injury of poverty, a meritocratic system now added the insult of shame.
Up until a certain age, no one minds much what we do, existence alone is enough to earn us unconditional affection. We can burp up our food, scream at the top of our voice, throw the cutlery on the floor, spend the day gazing blankly out of the window, relieve ourselves in the flower pot—and still know that someone will come and stroke our hair, change our clothes and sing us songs. We begin our time on earth in the hands of a mother, who asks little more of us than that we continue to live. Even those who are not our own mothers, be they men or women, behave as indulgently: they smile when
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The company of the snobbish has the power to enrage and unnerve because we sense how little of who we are deep down—that is, how little of who we are outside of our status—will be able to govern their behaviour towards us. We may be endowed with the wisdom of Solomon and have the resourcefulness and intelligence of Odysseus, but if we are unable to wield socially recognized badges of our qualities, our existence will remain a matter of raw indifference to them.
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement:
Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.
Status now rarely depends on an unchangeable identity handed down the generations; rather, it hangs on performance in a fast-moving and implacable economy.
Dependence on Fickle Talent
2. Dependence on Luck
3. Dependence on an Employer
The world more often rewards outward signs of merit than merit itself. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD If you are involved in important affairs …, you must always hide your failures and exaggerate your successes. It is a form of swindling, but since your fate more often depends upon the opinion of others rather than on facts, it is a good idea to create the impression that things are going well. GUICCIARDINI Youu are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or to displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished. LA BRUYÈRE
4. Dependence on an Employer’s Profitability
5. Dependence on the Global Economy
If we are anguished by the thought of failure, it may be because success seems the only dependable incentive for the world to grant us its goodwill. A family bond, a friendship or a sexual attraction may at times render material incentives unnecessary, but only a reckless optimist would rely on emotional currencies for the regular fulfilment of his or her needs. Humans rarely smile without having some robust reason to do so.
While we may look askance at those who resort to violence to answer questions of honour, we are nevertheless liable ourselves to share the most significant aspect of their mind-set—that is, an extreme vulnerability to the disdain of others.
Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world. Yet if we concede the worth of some feelings of anxiousness in helping us to find safety and develop our talents, we may be entitled to challenge the usefulness of other emotions in relation to precisely the same goals. We may feel envy, for instance, over a condition or possession that would in fact make us unhappy if we secured it. Likewise, we may experience ambitions unconnected to our real needs.
Intelligent Misanthropy
“Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.”
3. Painful though it may be to acknowledge the poverty of public opinion, the very act of doing so may somewhat ease our anxieties about status, mitigate our exhausting desire to ensure that others think well of us, and calm our panicked longing for signs of love.
The approval of others may be said to matter to us in two very different ways: materially, because the neglect of the community can bring with it physical discomfort and danger; and psychologically, because it can prove impossible to retain confidence in ourselves once others have ceased to accord us signs of respect. It is in relation to this second consequence of inattention that the benefits of the philosophical approach best reveal themselves, for rather than allow every instance of opposition or neglect to wound us, we are invited by the philosophers first to examine the justice of
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We shall then see that whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honour,” argued Arthur Schopenhauer, a leading model of philosophical misanthropy.
nothing could more quickly correct the desire to be liked by others than a brief investigation into those others’ true characters,
Or as Schopenhauer put the question, “Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of his audience if it were known to him that, with the exception of one or two, it consisted entirely of deaf people?”
The disadvantage of this otherwise usefully clear-eyed view of humanity is that it may leave us with few friends.
What are we to understand by Arnold’s phrase? First, and perhaps most obvious, that life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error.
By waging political battle, different groups may always attempt to transform the honour systems of their communities and win dignity for themselves over the opposition of all those with a stake in the prior arrangement.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754). In this text, Rousseau begins by charging that however independent-minded we may believe ourselves to be, we are in fact dangerously inept at deciphering our own needs. Our souls rarely articulate what they must have in order to be fulfilled, and when they do manage to mumble something, their requests are likely to be misfounded or contradictory.
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a privileged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves.
The defenders of commercial society have always had one answer for those sympathetic to the American Indians, and for anyone else who thought to complain of the corrupting effects of an advanced economy: no one forced the Indians to buy necklaces made of Venetian glass, ice chisels, guns, kettles, beads, hoes or mirrors. No one stopped them from living in tepees and made them aspire to owning wooden houses with porches and wine cellars.
This response illuminates why Rousseau placed so much emphasis, unedifying though it might be, on how difficult humans find it to make up their minds about what is important, and how strongly predisposed they are to listen to others’ suggestions about where their thoughts should be directed and what they should value in order to be happy.
The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—
We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.
