"Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping"
About this Quote
Ambition, Benson suggests, is less a ladder than a low tunnel: the posture required to rise can look suspiciously like the posture of submission. The line lands because it collapses two supposedly opposite movements - climbing and creeping - into the same bodily fact. Upward mobility is marketed as dignity; Benson reminds you that, in practice, it often demands abasement, flattery, and strategic smallness. His metaphor turns “progress” into a kind of choreography: elbows tucked, eyes down, moving forward by making yourself lesser.
The sting is in “meanest offices,” a phrase that points to the petty, sometimes degrading tasks people accept to stay in favor: running errands for the powerful, laundering someone else’s ego, performing loyalty rather than competence. Benson isn’t condemning work; he’s diagnosing the social economy around advancement, where proximity to authority can matter more than merit. The subtext is moral, but also sociological: ambition doesn’t just reveal character, it recruits it, training people to rationalize the humiliations they’d otherwise refuse.
Context matters. Benson, a late-Victorian/Edwardian English man of letters, wrote from inside institutions (Cambridge, the Church, elite cultural circles) where patronage, manners, and hierarchy shaped careers as much as talent. In that world, “creeping” wasn’t only a personal failing; it was a learned technique. The quote works because it punctures a comforting story: that ascent is proof of superiority. Sometimes it’s proof of pliancy.
The sting is in “meanest offices,” a phrase that points to the petty, sometimes degrading tasks people accept to stay in favor: running errands for the powerful, laundering someone else’s ego, performing loyalty rather than competence. Benson isn’t condemning work; he’s diagnosing the social economy around advancement, where proximity to authority can matter more than merit. The subtext is moral, but also sociological: ambition doesn’t just reveal character, it recruits it, training people to rationalize the humiliations they’d otherwise refuse.
Context matters. Benson, a late-Victorian/Edwardian English man of letters, wrote from inside institutions (Cambridge, the Church, elite cultural circles) where patronage, manners, and hierarchy shaped careers as much as talent. In that world, “creeping” wasn’t only a personal failing; it was a learned technique. The quote works because it punctures a comforting story: that ascent is proof of superiority. Sometimes it’s proof of pliancy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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