How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

and the consequent frequency of ugliness, fear of hunger and cold, exposure to crime and vice, are the shameful heritage of the poor child. The immediate evidence of great wealth on every side only serves* to exaggerate the helplessness of those who are on the “ outside looking in ”. Deprivation leads to the worship of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and pleasure-hunger leads directly to the gang, the brothel, the abuse of narcotics and alcohol, the prison and the asylum. Nothing is so well designed to produce frustration and inferiority complexes as the lack of proper food, housing, and recreation. If poverty leads to inferiority, to unfulfilled and inhuman ambition, to a hate of work and a worship of pleasure for pleasure’s sake, so also does great wealth. Pity the child of parents who are too rich. Private asylums are filled with the sons and daughters of rich and indulgent parents who have pampered their offspring with lavish bestowals of this world’s goods. The rich child meets with difficulty in finding his salvation in work because he is robbed of the opportunity of gaining satisfaction in it. He already has everything that he could gain by work. It requires the utmost emancipa¬ tion to make a good use of leisure, the curse of the rich, as deprivation is the curse of the poor. There is hardly a sadder spectacle in the wrhole human comedy than a rich man or woman drugged with leisure, and, as is so often the case, devoid of imagination and the sense of humour which might lead them out of their difficulties. Inferiority complexes grow lushly on the over-fertilized soil of wealth, as the far greater incidence of suicide among the wealthy all too tragically attests. Neither great poverty nor great wealth can compel you to have an inferiority complex— but they .make the attainment of human happiness much more difficult. For much the same reasons an unfavourable social constellation is likely to produce fear and inferiority in your attitude towards life and you are likely to suffer from an exaggeration of the normal sense of inadequacy if you happen to be born into a minority racial or religious