17 Jul Fear-induced snobbery (ALLAIN DE BOTTON)
To try to understand the problem, it is perhaps only ever fear that is to blame. 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.
The fear flows down the generations. In a pattern common to all abusive behaviour, snobs generate snobs. An older generation inflicts its own unusually powerful association between modest rank and catastrophe, denying its offspring the layer of emotional bedding that would grant them the inner ease to imagine that low status (their own and that of others) does not neatly equate with unworthiness, nor high status with excellence.
‘There go the Spicer Wilcoxes, Mamma!’ a daughter exclaims to her mother while walking in Hyde Park on a spring morning in a Punch cartoon of 1892. ‘I’m told they’re dying to know us. Hadn’t we better call?’
‘Certainly not, dear,’ replies the mother. ‘If they’re dying to know us, they’re not worth knowing. The only people worth our knowing are the people who don’t want to know us!’
Unless Mamma can be helped to heal the scars to which her behaviour testifies, there is little hope that she will ever be capable of a more rounded interest in the Spicer Wilcoxes – and so little hope that the cycles of fear-induced snobbery will ever be interrupted.
STATUS ANXIETY
ALLAIN DE BOTTON
