Alain De Botton Status Anxiety Quotes

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. 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.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.

We are not always humiliated by failing at things; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement, and then do not reach it.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

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.

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.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. 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.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

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.

We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another's approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person's views deserve to be listened to.

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. 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.

People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution.

Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.

Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

It follows that the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy.

Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

يُعد اهتمام الآخرين مُهمَا لنا لأننا بحكم طبيعتنا مُبتلون بانعدام يقين نحو قيمتنا الخاصة، و نتيجة لهذه البلوى فإننا ندع تقييمات الآخر لنا تلعب دوراً حاسماً في الطريقة التي نرى بها أنفسنا. إن إحساسنا بالهوية أسير في قبضة أحكام مَن نعيش بينهم.

معنى إبداء الحب لنا أن نشعر أننا محط اهتمام و عناية : حضورنا ملاحظ ، اسمنا مسجل ، آراؤنا ينصت إليها ، عيوبنا تقابل بالتساهل ، و حاجاتنا ملباة ، و في ظل مثل تلك الرعاية ننتعش و نزدهر

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: ‘Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.

With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society's expectations

کتاب‌فروشی‌ها ارزشمندترین مقصد افراد تنها است. گواه این امر تعداد کتاب‌هایی است که علت نگارش آن‌ها این بوده که نویسندگانشان کسی را برای حرف زدن پیدا نکرده‌اند.

There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements than to wonder who among our acquaintances would make the trip to the hospital bed.

[L]ife 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. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

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.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue.

نبدو مَدِنين لعواطف الآخرين التي لولاها لعجزنا عن تحمل أنفسنا.

إننا نحسدُ فقط أؤلئك الذين نشعر بأننا أشباهٌ لهم.

Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?

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.

the word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth

The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale.

However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable— even, somehow, natural.

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.

But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.

إن التخلي عن الطموحات الكبيرة لهو نعمة جالبة للارتياح بمثل قدر تحقيقها تمامًا.

We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies’.

يُمكن أن نتصوٌر (الأنا) أو فكرتنا عن أنفسنا مثل بالون يُسرب، فهو دائماً و أبداً بحاجةٍ لضخّ هيليوم المحبة الخارجية ليبقي مُنتفخاً، و هو دائماً و أبداً فريسة سهلة لأصغر ثقوب الإهمال.

What matters is not what we seem to a random group, but what we know we are. In Schopenhauer’s words: ‘Every reproach can hurt only to the extent that it hits the mark. Whoever actually knows that he does not deserve a reproach can and will confidently treat it with contempt.

The travails of being an employee include not only uncertainty about the duration of one's employment, but also the humiliation of many working practices and dynamics. With most businesses shaped like pyramids, in which a wide base of employees gives way to a narrow tip of managers, the question of who will be rewarded - and who left behind - typically develops into one of the most oppressive of the workplace, and one which, like all anxieties, feeds off uncertainty. Because achievement in most fields is difficult to monitor reliably, the path to promotion or its oppositie can acquire an apparently haphazard connection to results. The succesful alpinist of organizational pyramids may not be the best at their jobs, but those who have best mastered a range of dark political arts in which civilized life does not usually offer instruction.

Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision. It is the tragedian's task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions.

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of "the wretchedness of man's situation," and poured scorn on "all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort. Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied. One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manner that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly, the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.

تمثلت المفارقة في أن الانخفاض الحاد في مستويات العوز الحقيقي قد يصحبه إحساس متواصل بل متصاعد بالخوف من العوز. لقد حظوا بثروات وإمكانات تفوق أي شيء تخيله أسلافهم ممن حرثوا التربة متقلبة المزاج لأوروبا العصور الوسطى، وعلى الرغم من ذلك فقد أبدى أبناء العصور الحديثة مشاعر مبالغ فيها بأن لا شيء يكفي بالمرة، سواء من حيث هوياتهم كأشخاص، أو من حيث ممتلكاتهم.

بقدر ما توفِّر المجتمعات المتقدمة لأفرادها دخولًا مرتفعة بدرجة غير مسبوقة، فإنها تبدو كما لو أنها تجعلنا أشد ثراءً. لكن محصلتها النهائية، في حقيقة الأمر، قد تكون إفقارنا، لما تعزّزه فينا من تطلعاتٍ غير محدودة، ما يحفظ بقاء فجوةٍ دائمة بين ما نريد وما نستطيع دفع ثمنه، بين ما نكونه وما نحن عليه في الحقيقة. مثل تلك التفاوتات قد تخلّف فينا شعورًا بالحرمان أشد مما ذاقه المتوحشون البدائيون، الذين كما ألح جان جاك روسو في كتابه "خطاب حول أصل عدم المساواة" (وهنا تصل حجّته إلى حدود الوجاهة والإقناع) لم يشعروا بأنهم يفتقرون إلى أي شيء في العالم ما دام عندهم سقف فوق رؤوسهم، وبضع ثمار تفاح وجوز ليأكلوها ووقت فراغ ليقضوا أمسياتهم في العزف على بعض الآلات الموسيقية الفجة أو استعمال الأحجار حادة الحواف لصنع قارب صيد صغير.

How seldom we notice rooftops; how easily our eyes are drawn to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church.

We may be happy with little when we have come to expect little. And we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to expect everything.

There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.

A fine remedy for our anxieties over our low status in society may be to travel—whether literally or figuratively, by viewing works of art—through the gigantic spaces of the world.

Unfortunately for our esteem, societies of the West are not known for their conduciveness to the surrender of pretensions, to the acceptance of age or fat, let alone poverty and obscurity.

We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it.

Herodotus reported that it was the custom, towards the end of Egyptian feasts, when the revellers were at their most exuberant, for servants to march through the banqueting hall and among the tables carrying skeletons on stretchers.

Because societies are trusted to be meritocratic, financial achievements are understood to be deserved. The ability to accumulate wealth is prized for reflecting the presence of atleast four cardinal virtues: creativity, courage, intelligence and stamina. The presence of other virtues - humility and godliness - rarely detains attention. Achievements are not attributed, as in past societies, to luck or providence - a reflection of modern societies' faith in individual willpower. Financial failures are similarly judged to be merited, with unemployment bearing some of the shame of physical cowardice in warrior eras.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

One can be certain that every generally held idea, every received notion, will be an idiocy, because it has been able to appeal to a majority,’ observed Chamfort, adding that what is flatteringly called common sense is usually little short of common nonsense, suffering as it does from simplification and illogicality, prejudice and shallowness: ‘The most absurd customs and the most ridiculous ceremonies are everywhere excused by an appeal to the phrase, but that’s the tradition. This is exactly what the Hottentots say when Europeans ask them why they eat grasshoppers and devour their body lice. That’s the tradition, they explain.

The word ‘snobbery’ came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) or ‘s.nob.’ next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers.

the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom: the freedom not to have to take the achievements of quite so many people in society as reference points—and so find themselves severely wanting in status and importance as a result.

that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma,” writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, efficiently summing up Draper, Grey, and Trump in one blow. “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.

The offerings of Machiavelli (1469–1527), Guicciardini (1483–1540), La Rochefoucauld (1613–80) and La Bruyère (1645–96) give us an indication of the manoeuvres that workers may, aside from their regular advertised roles, have to perform in order to flourish: The need to beware of colleagues: ‘Men are so false, so insidious, so deceitful and cunning in their wiles, so avid in their own interest, and so oblivious to others’ interests, that you cannot go wrong if you believe little and trust less.’ GUICCIARDINI ‘We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies’. LA BRUYÈRE The need to lie and exaggerate: ‘The world more often rewards signs of merit than merit itself.’ LA ROCHEFOUCAULD ‘If you are involved in important affairs, you must always hide failures and exaggerate successes. It is 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 ‘You are an honest man, and do not make it your business either to please or displease the favourites. You are merely attached to your master and to your duty. You are finished.’ LA BRUYÈRE The need to threaten: ‘It is much safer to be feared than loved. Love is sustained by a bond of gratitude which, because men are excessively self-interested, is broken whenever they see a chance to benefit themselves. But fear is sustained by a dread of punishment that is always effective.’ MACHIAVELLI ‘Since the majority of men are either not very good or not very wise, one must rely more on severity than on kindness.’ GUICCIARDINI

....Antik dönemde filozoflar,insanın mutlu olabilmesi için hangi maddi koşulların gerekli hangilerinin gereksiz olduğu konusunda ateşli tartışmalar girmişlerdir.Örneğin Epikür, insana yalnızca yemek ve barınağın yeterli olduğunu iddia ediyor, felsefeyle akıl yürüten akılcı insanların pahalı evlerden ve mükellef yemeklerden kolayca vazgeçebileceklerini söylüyordu.Ancak aynı konuya yüzlerce yıl sonra yeniden değinen Adam Smith,Ulusların Zenginliği adlı eserinde, modern ve maddiyatçı toplumlarda, insanların, fiziksel yaşamın devamlılığı açısından hiç de gereksinimleri olmayan sayısız şeyle çevrili olduğunu,ancak pratik hayatta gereksiz gibi görünen birçok şeyin,toplumun gözünde "gereksinimler" kategorisinde yer aldığını anlatıyordu.Bu "gereksinimler" olmadan hiç kimse, toplum içinde sayıldığını hissedemiyor ve onlara sahip olmadan psikolojik açıdan rahata eremiyordu.

إن العقوبة القصوى تكمن غالبا و ربما أولا في التحدي الذي تفرضه المكانة المتدنية على إحساس المرء باحترامه لنفسه ، فمن الممكن تحمل المشقة البدنية لفترات طويلة دونما شكوى مالم تصاحبها المهانة. و للبرهان على هذا ليس علينا سوى أن نلقي نظرة على مثال العديد من الجنود والمستكشفين ممن تسامحوا عن طيب خاطر على مدى القرون مع أشكال من البؤس والحرمان تفوق بمراحل كل ما يعانيه أفقر أفراد مجتمعاتهم ، ماداموا مستندين في مواجهة كل تلك المصاعب على إدراكهم للتقدير الذي يمنحهم إياه الآخرون

With his Policraticus (1159), John of Salisbury had become the most famous Christian writer to compare society to a human body and to use that analogy to justify a system of natural inequality. In Salisbury’s formulation, every element in the state had an anatomical counterpart: the ruler was the head, the parliament was the heart, the court was the sides, officials and judges were the eyes, ears and tongue, the treasury was the belly and intestines, the army was the hands and the peasantry and labouring classes were the feet.

In the United States in 1907, a book entitled Three Acres and Liberty seized the imagination of the reading public. The author, Bolton Hall, began by taking for granted the awkwardness of having to work for someone else, and so advised his readers that they could win their freedom by leaving their offices and factories and buying three acres apiece of inexpensive farmland in middle America. This acreage would soon enable them to grow enough food for a family of four and to build a simple but comfortable home, and best of all, relieve them of any need ever again to flatter or negotiate with colleagues and superiors.

Perhaps we can define love, at once in its familial, sexual and worldly forms, as a kind of respect, a sensitivity on the part of one person to another’s existence. To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish. There may be differences between romantic and status forms of love—the latter has no sexual dimension, it cannot end in marriage, those who offer it usually bear secondary motives—and yet status beloveds will, just like romantic ones, enjoy protection under the benevolent gaze of appreciative others.

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will guarantee us an enduring satisfaction. We are led to imagine ourselves scaling the steep sides of the cliff face of happiness to reach a wide, high plateau on which to continue our lives; we are not reminded that soon after reaching the summit we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

On the one hand, we may try to achieve more; and on the other, we may reduce the number of things we want to achieve.

The word “snobbery” came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility), or “s.nob, ” next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word’s earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others,

How are we affected by an absence of love? Why should being ignored drive us to a "rage and impotent despair" beside which torture itself would be a relief?- The Importance of Love

Thomas Paine İnsan Hakları (1791) adlı eserinde “Edebiyatın ve bütün bilimlerin miras ilkesine göre işlediğini varsayalım, böyle bir durumda bütün ağırlıklarını ve önemlerini yitirirlerdi. Bunu düşününce kendi kendime gülümsüyorum. Sonra da aynı düşünceyi hükümetlerin işleyişine taşıyorum. Bir yöneticinin miras ilkesine göre başa geçmiş olması, bir yazarın miras ilkesine göre ünlü olması kadar saçmadır. Homeros'un ya da Öklid'in oğulları var mıydı bilmiyorum; ama eğer olsaydı ve de bu yazarlar eserlerini tamamlayamadan göçüp gitselerdi, eminim ki oğullar babalarının yarım kalmış eserlerini tamamlayamazlardı.” Napolyon da Paine'in izinden gitmiş, hükümdarlığının ilk dönemlerinde carrières ouvertes aux talents (yeteneklilere açık kariyerler) sistemi adını verdiği bir sistemi oturtmaya çalışan ilk Batılı lider olmuştur. Yaşamının son günlerinde Saint Helena'da, gururla “Birçok generalimi çamurun içinden bulup çıkardım” demiştir. “Nerede bir yetenek gördüysem onu ödüllendirdim.” Napolyon'un böylesine övünmesi yersiz değildi. Napolyon döneminin Fransası, feodal ayrıcalıkların son bulduğu ve her toplumsal mevkiden kişiye açık ilk unvan olan Légion d'honneur'ün (Fransız Liyakat Nişanı) yaygınlaştırıldığı bir Fransa oldu. Eğitim sistemi yeniden inşa edildi: liseler bütün toplumsal kesimlerden insanlara açık hale getirildi ve 1794'te başlatılan uygulamayla bir teknik okul, fakir öğrencilere de cömertçe burs sağladı (bu sayede teknik okulun ilk yıllarında öğrencilerin yarısı köylü ve esnaf çocuklarından oluşuyordu). Napolyon'un önde gelen adamları (İçişleri Bakanlığı'ndaki görevliler, bilimsel danışmanlar ve senatörler) gayet mütevazı özgeçmişlere sahiptiler. Napolyon'un kelimeleriyle ifade edecek olursak, mirasyedi asiller “ulusun baş belalarıdır, embesildir onlar... mirasyedi götler!

By 1690, the English naturalist the Reverend John Banister was reporting that the Indians of the Hudson Bay area had been successfully tempted by traders to want ‘many things which they had not wanted before, because they never had them, but which by means of trade are now highly necessary to them’. Two decades later, the traveller Robert Beverley observed, ‘The Europeans have introduced luxury among the Indians which has multiplied their wants and made them desire a thousand things they never even dreamt of before.

one ATM could do the work of no fewer than thirty-seven human tellers (and, into the bargain, rarely fell ill). In the United States, about half of all those employed in retail banking—some 500,000 people—lost their jobs between 1980 and 1995, thanks in large part to the invention of these silkily efficient machines.

The word ‘snobbery’ came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) or ‘s.nob.’ next to the names of ordinary students on examination lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the

The distinctive mark of snobs is not simple discrimination, it is an insistence on a flawless equation between social rank and human worth.