"Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people"
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Nathan lands the punch with a class joke that’s also a class diagnosis: the social order doesn’t just distribute money and power, it distributes permission. “Common sense” is framed as a tool of the bourgeoisie because the middle class survives by being legible to systems - budgets, schedules, reputations, the moral bookkeeping of “respectability.” Prudence isn’t a virtue here; it’s a coping mechanism that keeps the machine humming. If you’re climbing, you can’t afford to be weird.
“Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy” flips what sounds like frivolity into a kind of sovereign immunity. The old elites can indulge in eccentricity, aestheticism, even scandal, because consequences are for other people. Their “nonsense” reads as charm, not instability; as individuality, not irresponsibility. Nathan’s cynicism is that culture often mistakes insulation for genius. When the safety net is inherited, performance becomes “personality.”
Then he twists the knife: “The worries of the world are for the common people.” It’s not only labor but anxiety that gets outsourced downward. The working class doesn’t get the romance of nonsense or the dignity of common sense; they get triage. Nathan, an editor steeped in the early 20th-century American press, is writing in an era when “bourgeois” ambition, lingering aristocratic pretension, and mass economic precarity all rubbed elbows. The subtext is editorial: society’s stories about merit and character are often just etiquette manuals for inequality, disguising who has to be rational, who gets to be ridiculous, and who is simply allowed to be exhausted.
“Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy” flips what sounds like frivolity into a kind of sovereign immunity. The old elites can indulge in eccentricity, aestheticism, even scandal, because consequences are for other people. Their “nonsense” reads as charm, not instability; as individuality, not irresponsibility. Nathan’s cynicism is that culture often mistakes insulation for genius. When the safety net is inherited, performance becomes “personality.”
Then he twists the knife: “The worries of the world are for the common people.” It’s not only labor but anxiety that gets outsourced downward. The working class doesn’t get the romance of nonsense or the dignity of common sense; they get triage. Nathan, an editor steeped in the early 20th-century American press, is writing in an era when “bourgeois” ambition, lingering aristocratic pretension, and mass economic precarity all rubbed elbows. The subtext is editorial: society’s stories about merit and character are often just etiquette manuals for inequality, disguising who has to be rational, who gets to be ridiculous, and who is simply allowed to be exhausted.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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