Elisha Maxwell @MiloMaxwell1 - Twitter Profile

over 1 year ago

Many wonder why the overwhelming number of Americans went along with the most absurd edicts during the Covid period, as if they were obviously essential to life itself, descended directly from the gods of science, and anyone who doubted their wisdom was an obvious danger to the commonweal. One theory: it was simply social aspiration. We are very good at discerning what is good and bad for us in terms of the socio-cultural pecking order; we know how to get from here to there. Compliance with prevailing norms, even absurd ones invented yesterday, are the precondition to eventual professional success. H.L. Mencken in 1926 in Notes on Democracy explained the core social desiderata: "What, then, is the character that actually marks the American — that is, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European legend, then what is he? "We offer an answer in all humility, for the problem is complex, and there is but little illumination of it in the literature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born of 20 years' incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct. It is, in brief, this: That the thing that sets off the American from all other men, and gives a peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is to say, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least a step or two in the society that he is a part of — a passion to improve his position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achieve the countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and accepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it... "The American is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that his merits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token, he is sickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of the second fact, as we shall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits... "Such a thing as a secure position is practically unknown among us. There is no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, if he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to his progress. But neither is there any American who doesn't have to keep on fighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is there to protect him if he slips."

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Elisha Maxwell

@MiloMaxwell1

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