"The great principle of Western society is that competition rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man - that is to say, the strongest and cleverest - is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the most beautiful person"
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Hearn distills a stark social law: in the West, competition is the master narrative, and even love is drafted into its service. He casts courtship as a market where winners capture prizes, the man winning by strength and cleverness, the woman valued chiefly for beauty. The pairing reveals a deliberately gendered calculus. On one side, power, wit, and achievement; on the other, appearance and desirability. He is not celebrating this arrangement so much as exposing the ideology that underwrites it. When the terms are set by competitive selection, romance becomes a transactional sorting mechanism, and the language of merit slides quietly into the language of possession.
The phrase rules here as it rules in everything else shifts the observation from manners to metaphysics. Competition is not merely a social habit; it is a cosmology that explains and justifies outcomes. The strongest and cleverest deserve the most beautiful; success is proof of worth; beauty is proof of value. By calling these figures the best, Hearn ironizes a standard that confuses fitness with goodness and attractiveness with virtue. The coupling makes visible an asymmetry: men are agents striving to secure, women are assets to be secured.
Late 19th-century Europe and America breathed such assumptions. Darwinian language migrated from biology to economics and marriage, and Spencerian ideas made rivalry seem natural, even moral. Hearn, a cosmopolitan observer who lived in the United States and later in Japan, often juxtaposed Western individualism with other social orders. The sly chill of his sentence suggests a critique of Western materialism and the commodification of intimacy, not a neutral description.
The provocation remains current. Dating economies and status hierarchies still reward the traits he names, and the market metaphor endures. Hearn’s formulation is sharp precisely because it unmasks the story behind the story: the way a society’s master principle sneaks into its most intimate bonds, teaching people whom to desire and how to measure themselves.
The phrase rules here as it rules in everything else shifts the observation from manners to metaphysics. Competition is not merely a social habit; it is a cosmology that explains and justifies outcomes. The strongest and cleverest deserve the most beautiful; success is proof of worth; beauty is proof of value. By calling these figures the best, Hearn ironizes a standard that confuses fitness with goodness and attractiveness with virtue. The coupling makes visible an asymmetry: men are agents striving to secure, women are assets to be secured.
Late 19th-century Europe and America breathed such assumptions. Darwinian language migrated from biology to economics and marriage, and Spencerian ideas made rivalry seem natural, even moral. Hearn, a cosmopolitan observer who lived in the United States and later in Japan, often juxtaposed Western individualism with other social orders. The sly chill of his sentence suggests a critique of Western materialism and the commodification of intimacy, not a neutral description.
The provocation remains current. Dating economies and status hierarchies still reward the traits he names, and the market metaphor endures. Hearn’s formulation is sharp precisely because it unmasks the story behind the story: the way a society’s master principle sneaks into its most intimate bonds, teaching people whom to desire and how to measure themselves.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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