Posted on 08/07/2004 5:59:12 PM PDT by shrinkermd
David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, calls it "bourgeoisophobia" - the hatred of success, most particularly the hatred of commercial achievement. In no small part, it's the kind of mind-set that pushed Mohamed Atta to smash a passenger plane into the World Trade Center, the kind of resentment that drives the Arab street to cheer when a 10-year-old blows himself up in a trendy Israeli discotheque. Brooks points to the anti-bourgeois stance of the French intelligentsia in the 19th century: "Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world. Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts" - not unlike the traders "running the world" from the World Trade Center, people judged by Mr. Atta to be his "spiritual inferiors."
These 19th-century self-made merchants, lacking the pedigree and high style of the European aristocracy, were viewed by the French intelligentsia as "vulgar materialists," writes Brooks, "who half the time failed even to acknowledge their moral and spiritual inferiority to the artists and intellectuals."
This new entrepreneurial class, in short, was too rich, too unlearned, too guiltless for the sensibilities of men such as French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) of "Madame Bovary" fame - a portrayal of the alleged immorality of provincial bourgeois life. The hatred of the bourgeoisie, wrote Flaubert, "is the beginning of all virtue." He signed his letters "Bourgeoisophobus" to show how much he despised "stupid grocers and their ilk."
(Excerpt) Read more at pittsburghlive.com ...
"Hatred of the bourgeois is a singularly bourgeois sentiment."
Infiltrator alert!
"this account has been banned or suspended."
My 14 pound Siamese Viking Kitty didn't even have time to get his helmet on.
From 19th century French socialism, to Ludwig von Mises, to the arab Israeli mess... it's a sloppy road paved with bad history and sloppy sociology.
Amazing. Religion had absolutely nothing to do with it?
The concept of this article is more fitting to describe Democrats than Muslims.
"In order to console himself and to restore his self-assertion, such a man is in search of a scapegoat. He tries to persuade himself that he failed through no fault of his own. He was too decent to resort to the base tricks to which his successful rivals owe their ascendancy. The nefarious social order does not accord the prizes to the most meritorious men; it crowns the dishonest, unscrupulous scoundrel, the swindler, the exploiter, the `rugged individualist.'"Yet the Bible addresses the same concept - that the wicked often prosper more than the righteous (e.g. Psalm 73) - yet there have been no Jews or Christians flying airliners into skyscrapers. Religion is a factor here.Within this scapegoat paradigm, the Jews are to blame for Arab misery, and America is to blame for the decline of Muslim civilization. From there, it's a short step to flying a passenger jet into a Manhattan skyscraper ...
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