Nature & Animals Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson is doing what he does best: dressing a provocation in the calm, marmoreal tone of “obvious truth,” then letting it sting. “Subordination” is a loaded, almost bureaucratic word for something visceral: hierarchy, deference, knowing your place. He doesn’t merely defend it as practical; he sells it as psychologically necessary. Without rank, he claims, we’d be reduced to “mere animal pleasure” - a phrase that both flatters the refined reader (you are not an animal) and warns of social flattening as moral degradation.

The intent is conservative, but not simple-minded. Johnson is arguing that happiness isn’t just comfort or freedom; it’s structure. Subtext: people crave recognition, and recognition requires gradations - someone to look up to, someone to be responsible for, someone whose judgment counts. Equality, in this frame, isn’t justice; it’s an aesthetic and emotional impoverishment, a world where status can’t be earned, displayed, or honored, leaving only the body’s appetites as “enjoyment.”

Context matters. Johnson writes in an 18th-century Britain where class, patronage, and inherited station were the operating system, and where early democratic ideals were beginning to look less like philosophy and more like a threat. His anxiety isn’t only about politics; it’s about meaning. Take away the social ladder and you don’t just redistribute power - you scramble the narratives that tell people who they are. The irony is that Johnson, a self-made man who disliked aristocratic frivolity, still defends hierarchy because he sees it as the scaffold for dignity, restraint, and ambition - the very things that keep “happiness” from collapsing into consumption.