This is my second read through of Alain De Botton’s Status Anxiety and I thought I would note down some of my favourite quotes. Unfortunately the blurb on the back of the book reads like something from the self help genre but it covers much more: the historic, social and political aspects which gave birth to status and the attempts through the ages to nullify it. From John Ruskin to Jane Austin to Jack Kerouac - Status Anxiety is a great read.
“Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.”
“Because snobs combine a weak capacity for independent judgement with an appetite for the views of influential people, their beliefs will, to a critical degree, be set by the atmosphere of the press.”
“It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren't good enough for us.”
“We will take ourselves to be fortunate only when we have as much as, or a little more than, the people we grow up with, work alongside, have as friends and identify with the public realm.”
“The American Revolution changed the basis upon which status was accorded, shifting societies from hereditary aristocratic hierarchies to dynamic economies.”
“Every time we seek something we can not 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 own.”
“Like aristocrats of old, meritocrats were prepared to accept a great deal of inequality but they wanted an initial period of complete equality of opportunity. Privileges would be merited - as would hardships.”
“In a meritocratic age, justice appeared to enter into the distribution of poverty as well as wealth. Low status came to seem not merely regrettable, but also deserved.”
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition because livelihoods and esteem depend on at least five unpredictable elements: talent, luck, employer, employer's profitability and economy.”
“Workers remain tools in a process in which their own happiness or economic well-being is necessarily incidental.”
“Only that which is both damning and true should be allowed to shatter our esteem.”
“By standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as imaginative counterweights to dominant conceptions of hierarchy.”
“In the hands of the best comics, laughter hence acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits.”
“The Indians [Native Americans], no different in their psychological makeup from other humans, succumbed to the easy lures of the trinkets of modern civilisation and ceased listening to the quiet voices that spoke of the modest pleasures of the community and of the beauty of the empty canyons at dusk.”
“There are natural phenomena so large as to make the variations between any two people seem mockingly small.”
“Status anxiety is the price we pay for acknowledging a public difference between a successful and an unsuccessful life.”