Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard de Mandeville

Mandeville slices through moral common sense with a surgeon's calm: if brazen behavior is bad, then its opposite is not automatically good. The line is a trapdoor under the era's favorite shortcut - turning social approval into a proxy for virtue. By calling modesty "built upon shame", he demotes it from halo to mechanism. Shame isn't a moral compass; it's a social sensor, calibrated to what the crowd rewards or punishes. That makes modesty less a stable character trait than a strategy for navigating reputation.

The subtext is classic Mandeville: hypocrisy is the real fuel of polite society. In The Fable of the Bees, he argues that private vices can generate public benefits, and here he's testing another sacred cow of bourgeois morality. Modesty, often advertised as purity, can just as easily be self-protection, a bid for status, or a way to launder desire into acceptability. He refuses to grant motives automatic moral credit. What matters is what shame drives you to do: does it restrain harm, or does it produce cowardice, silence, and compliance?

Context sharpens the blade. Early modern Britain was building a commercial culture that needed disciplined citizens - prudent, deferential, "respectable". Modesty functioned as social glue, especially for women and the poor, enforced through gossip and exclusion. Mandeville's provocation is to treat that glue as morally ambiguous. He doesn't romanticize impudence; he just insists that virtue isn't a mirror image of vice. In an age of manners-as-morality, that's not a nuance. It's an indictment.