"Quicksilver in a nest of cracks"

A character in Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, makes a stunningly true observation at one point, in speaking of his overbearing nephew—the protagonist of the tale, George Amberson Minafer: "the most arrogant people that I've known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people's opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can't stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism."

It strikes me that this seeming paradox was the same I once tried to explain in an earlier blog post, apropos of our then-president Trump and his legions of followers. What most puzzled me about them was how disproportionate their rage seemed in light of the actual hand they had been dealt by life. Trump, after all, is a child of privilege; whatever American society offers of fame, glitz, and power, he has gobbled up with far too few obstacles in his path. And his followers, though often mythologized as somehow disenfranchised, always show up in demographic surveys as among the relatively advantaged. 

Revisiting the topic in the dawn of 2023, I find that Trump is still the most glaring example of the phenomenon Tarkington described. His whole original campaign, after all, was launched in reaction to a single crack at his expense that Obama made at a White House press correspondents' dinner (and under aggravated provocation, we must add; since this was in response to Trump's own "birther" bullying). If we were looking for instances of people of towering arrogance and grandiosity who are nonetheless easily cut to the quick by the "faintest breath of criticism," Trump must surely stand uppermost. 

But now we also have a few other names to add to the list. Since I wrote the earlier post in 2017, after all, Vladimir Putin has hauled off and invaded Ukraine. How much of this brutal aggression and fury had its origins in a remark Obama made almost a decade ago, after Putin's annexation of Crimea, in which he described Russia as a "regional power" that could not seriously jeopardize American interests? Perhaps more than a little—in which case, we have now at least two would-be autocrats who have led their assaults on Western democracy in response to a single critical remark. 

Then, of course, there are the Elon Musks of the world. The planet's single richest man (at least until recently), Musk nonetheless seems not to mind spending his day in petty sniping on social media and polls asking whether people like him. He is, like the former president, and like the Russian dictator, yet another thin-skinned man of enormous apparent real-world power and astoundingly little emotional resilience. Why does power go hand-in-hand with this particular kind of weakness? Why does the mystery that George Minafer's uncle describes continuously manifest itself in human affairs? 

I continue to believe the answer lies in the inherent dynamic of power; and here too, Tarkington's novel shows uncommon percipience. Call it the Hegelian master/slave dialect or what you will, the fact is that there is no form of social power that lacks the same fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, power has the effect of elevating a person above others, and therefore of seeming to render them less dependent upon other human beings. This often forms the basis for an arrogant view of life. In Tarkington's novel, for instance, the scion of the Amberson dynasty is forever dismissing his neighbors as "riffraff."

At the same time, however, power is nothing other than the opinion of other people. This is true regardless of the form of power one claims to possess. Has one got a lot of money? The value of that money (or real estate, or gold, or any other asset) is due only to society's belief that it possesses value. Do you possess a lot of political power, or a leadership role? You can only retain it so long as enough relevant people with enough power of their own agree to recognize your leadership. As Ortega y Gasset observes, in The Revolt of the Masses, every form of political power therefore depends on public opinion. 

Of course, George Amberson Minafer is forever declaring that he is superior to both possessions and opinion. He disdains to pursue any remunerative profession because he believes that "doing things" is far inferior to "being things." And he regards the opinion and gossip of various local "riffraff" as utterly beneath contempt. In these regards, he aspires to the ideal that William James once described as the most gentlemanly—the aristocratic conception of life in its pure and un-debased form—and which seems at first blush to transcend the limitations of the sorts of power described above: it is the ideal of the "men who are" as opposed to the "men who have."

But even this is but an illusory refuge from dependence on public opinion, as George Minafer eventually discovers. After all, even if aristocratic prestige could truly be divorced from its economic foundation (a doubtful proposition, as we've discussed before in a previous post), and it could be shown that there was such a thing as a person endowed with social power simply by family prestige—what then is that prestige other than reputation? And what is "reputation" in turn other than the views of innumerable other members of society whom the arrogant would-be aristocrat has condemned as riffraff? 

In a sense, therefore, the true "aristocrat by birth rather by fortune" is even more dependent—at least, more directly dependent—upon public opinion than people whose power derives from holding nominal office or possessing a lot of resources. This probably accounts for why the true-born aristocrats are the most sensitive on points of honor and go to the greatest lengths—including death and murder—to avenge perceived affronts to their dignity—as chronicled in, say, William Godwin's Caleb Williams, where the gentlemanly Mr. Falkland is gradually deranged by a perceived threat to his good name. 

Tarkington's George Minafer is no exception to the rule. Despite claiming to hold the gossip and tattling of local "riffraff" in contempt, he nonetheless creates a scene and ultimately ruins his mother's one chance for happiness by seeking to confront it directly. And ultimately, when he is brought low in preparation for his final redemption as a character, his humiliation comes from realizing that his beloved "family name" perished alongside his family fortune. The Ambersons are erased from the local histories as well as from the local street names, as soon as they are no longer rich, and he is left with nothing in the way of public opinion, and therefore nothing of his former prestige. 

This is the heart of the dynamic: people with wealth, privilege, and power—the Trumps, the Minafers, the Musks, the Putins of the world—inherit from their experience of life an expectation of independence from the opinions of others. Their position allows them to boss people around, after all—Musk's overbearing leadership style in the workplace comes to mind, as do Trump's constant attempts to override members of his administration when they informed him that many of his orders were patently unlawful—and so they start to believe that they are actually in control of their own fate; they are exempt from the universal rules; they do not need anyone else and therefore do not need to respect the feelings or opinions of anyone else. 

Yet, as Minafer discovers, none of them can escape the fact of dependence; and the more they try to burnish in their own minds the myth of their independence, the more their dependence is revealed in fact. Trump could be a rich celebrity; yet he couldn't stop people—including the president—from meeting his insults and lies with mockery of their own. Musk could be the richest man in the world for a time, but when he did not use this wealth and power responsibly, he quickly started to lose the support of investors, day traders, media analysts and everyone else who had formerly kept his brand afloat. 

And so there is no escape from public opinion, no matter how much wealth and power you achieve. Better to use one's power wisely and to the benefit of others, therefore; otherwise, it may evaporate or fall (to borrow a refrain from Tarkington's novel) like "quicksilver in a nest of cracks." This is the sense in which the proverb is true—that pride goeth before a fall; and it is a mechanism that operates without supernatural oversight. It is a product, simply, of the natural human condition, which is inherently and necessarily social, and in which power therefore is only ever defined by "the other," if it is ever to be enjoyed by the self.