Success Quote by Albert J. Nock

Poverty, in Nock's telling, isn’t a melodrama; it’s almost a stage direction delivered with a dry eyebrow raise. “As might be supposed” is the giveaway: he assumes the reader already knows the script for an earnest American intellectual of modest origins, then quietly refuses to play the expected scene of grievance. The line pivots from material scarcity to moral atmosphere. “Quite poor” names the economic fact, but the sentence’s real subject is temperament: the household’s refusal to translate circumstance into resentment.

The subtext is a rebuke to a culture that treats discontent as proof of sophistication. Nock suggests that need is not identical with deprivation, and deprivation not identical with humiliation. “We somehow never seemed to lack anything we needed” isn’t naïveté; it’s a rhetorical demotion of consumer desire. The “somehow” matters, too: it hints at improvised competence, community networks, and the small domestic technologies of making-do, without romanticizing them into a social theory.

Contextually, Nock wrote in an America accelerating into mass consumption, mass politics, and mass persuasion. His broader project often distrusted institutions that promise to convert private restlessness into public programs. So the parents’ “cheerfulness” works as both portrait and argument: a lived counterexample to the idea that a good society is one that continuously manufactures dissatisfaction in order to justify its managers. It’s also a subtle inheritance claim. Nock isn’t boasting about bootstrap heroics; he’s crediting an ethic of inward independence, where dignity is not outsourced to circumstance.