Wealth & Money Quote by Mary Douglas

There is a cool provocation tucked inside Mary Douglas's praise: she is admiring Mormon "strength" less as a spiritual virtue than as an institutional technology. The line is built like a social-science hot take, but it functions as something sharper: an argument that hierarchy, not equality, is the lubricant of confidence and material competence. "Handle wealth" is doing a lot of work here. It suggests not merely earning money, but metabolizing it without the moral vertigo that afflicts groups whose status order is contested, improvised, or guilt-ridden.

Douglas, an anthropologist famous for reading purity, pollution, and rule-systems as ways societies manage anxiety, is signaling her larger thesis: communities don't collapse under "rules", they collapse under ambiguous rules. Her compliment is really about clarity. A "firmly defined system of relative status" means fewer status fights, fewer interpretive wars about who's in charge, and a ready-made script for who owes what to whom. "Responsible command" frames authority as service, not domination, a rhetorical move that turns hierarchy from a moral problem into a governance solution.

The subtext is risky and culturally loaded. Written in an era when "equality" was becoming an organizing ideal in the liberal West, Douglas is flirting with an illiberal inference: egalitarian norms can produce paralysis, while stratified systems produce resilience. It's also a snapshot of mid-century social science's fascination with cohesive, high-demand religious communities as counter-models to atomized modernity. Admiration and critique sit uncomfortably together: the sentence flatters Mormons, but it also reduces them to a case study in how obedience can be marketed as confidence.