Science Quote by Mary Douglas

Douglas is diagnosing “dropping out” as less a personality quirk than a rational response to a rigged bargain. The phrase “I am sure” has the cool authority of someone who’s watched institutions operate up close: this isn’t a romantic defense of outsiders, it’s a structural hunch presented as near-certainty. Her key move is to shift attention from the deviance of the leaver to the incentive system of the center. People “opt out” not because they hate society, but because society has already opted them out of its payout.

The subtext is quietly brutal. “Mainstream society” sounds benign, even neutral, until Douglas reframes it as a rewards machine: status, security, recognition, the sense that effort will translate into a future. If that translation fails, loyalty becomes an expense. “No rewards” is deliberately broad, covering more than wages; it includes dignity, voice, belonging, and the everyday evidence that rules apply evenly. Douglas is pointing at the moment when participation feels like subsidizing your own erasure.

Context matters: as an anthropologist of purity, danger, and social classification, Douglas spent her career showing how communities draw boundaries and then moralize them. “Opting out” is often narrated as an individual moral failing; she reads it as the predictable consequence of exclusionary categories and blocked mobility. The line also anticipates contemporary politics: distrust in institutions, withdrawal from civic life, radical subcultures, and the appeal of alternative economies of meaning. Her intent isn’t to absolve every act committed outside the mainstream; it’s to remind the mainstream that exit is frequently an audit finding, not a tantrum.