npub10f…q3gda on Nostr: "... I am never envious, and so it is impossible for me to feel any sympathy for men ...

"... I am never envious, and so it is impossible for me to feel any sympathy for men who are. Per corollary, it is impossible for me to get any glow out of such hallucinations as democracy and Puritanism, for if you pump envy out of them, you empty them of their very life blood: they are all immovably grounded upon the inferior man's hatred of the man who is having a better time. One often hears them accounted for, of course, in other ways. Puritanism is represented as a lofty sort of obedience to God's law. Democracy is depicted as brotherhood, even as altruism. All such notions are in error. There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with the superior capacity for happiness - to bring him down to the miserable level of "good" men i.e., of stupid, cowardly and chronically unhappy men. And there is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it." - from H.L. Mencken's "A Blind Spot" (April 1920)