How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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of superiority, then you must choose a very definite set of tools for your purpose. The best of these essentially unsportsmanlike devices for making yourself seem superior, at the expense of the neighbour who is struggling at your side, are depreciation, humiliation of your competitors, trickery, cheating, crime in general, envy, jealousy, ridicule, sarcasm, discouragement, and the insistence of an authoritarian attitude towards those who are in an inferior position by accident of age, birth, or position. You have no doubt seen the man who roars at waiters, frightens his office boy, humiliates his servants, browbeats bus conductors, and considers himself greatly superior to the nationals of some foreign country, or to the people sitting in the gallery of a theatre. He is usually the man who is abjectly humble and servile in the face of constitutional authority, a coward who must rescue his unstable sense of self-esteem at the expense of degrading another human being. The professional patriots, the people who are proud of their class, their good breeding, their social status, their membership of an exclusive club or fashionable church, are to be numbered among these unhappy souls who thus narrow their activity to some unimportant, artificial by-path of human life. They breed revolutions and hate and animosity among their neighbours, and stifling bigotry in their own souls. To those who have followed our thesis it must be quite obvious that no true human happiness is to be found in this way of living. For one thing the individual who narrows his sphere of activity to an artificial and snobbish alley betrays his hidden fear and his unconscious realization of the inefficiency of his technique by making the walls higher and higher, until his defences are so perfect that he chokes all zest and happiness out of his life. La Fontaine, when he wrote the fable of the fox and the grapes, described another false technique of living in which the evasion of the normal goals of responsibility, contribution, and cooperation is achieved by a categorical denial that these goals are worth while. This raises an