"The privileged man, whether he be privileged politically or economically, is a man depraved in intellect and heart"
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Bakunin, the 19th-century anarchist and revolutionary, saw privilege as a structural force that warps both cognition and character. To call the privileged "depraved in intellect and heart" is to argue that advantage is not just an unfair distribution of goods but a machine that manufactures bad thinking and stunted feeling. Political privilege breeds habits of command and the constant temptation to mistake one's interest for the common good. Economic privilege insulates from dependence on others and from the feedback of necessity, so reality arrives filtered, if at all. The result is an epistemology of comfort: theories that rationalize dominance, blindness to suffering that is not proximate, and a shrinking of solidarity into class loyalty.
Heirs to power learn to generalize from their own ease; rulers habituate themselves to obedience from below; both become adept at self-justifying abstractions. For Bakunin, the state and capital are schoolmasters of this deformation. He does not mean that every privileged individual is a monster, but that the position itself exerts a corrosive influence. Intellect becomes sophistry in the service of possession; heart becomes paternalism or indifference.
The context is a broader anarchist conviction that power does not merely sit on top of society; it reproduces the conditions of its own legitimacy. Privilege fabricates ideologies, salaries experts, and builds institutions that sanctify hierarchy. To seek emancipation only through replacing one elite with another would repeat the cycle; liberation requires dismantling the structures that confer privilege in the first place.
The statement also warns against romanticizing competency among elites. The more people are shielded from consequences, the less they can apprehend the needs and creativity of those below. Democratic intelligence, for Bakunin, grows from mutual dependence and struggle. Moral clarity comes from shared vulnerability. If privilege deforms the mind and heart, the cure is not virtue campaigns for the powerful but the creation of conditions where no one can rule.
Heirs to power learn to generalize from their own ease; rulers habituate themselves to obedience from below; both become adept at self-justifying abstractions. For Bakunin, the state and capital are schoolmasters of this deformation. He does not mean that every privileged individual is a monster, but that the position itself exerts a corrosive influence. Intellect becomes sophistry in the service of possession; heart becomes paternalism or indifference.
The context is a broader anarchist conviction that power does not merely sit on top of society; it reproduces the conditions of its own legitimacy. Privilege fabricates ideologies, salaries experts, and builds institutions that sanctify hierarchy. To seek emancipation only through replacing one elite with another would repeat the cycle; liberation requires dismantling the structures that confer privilege in the first place.
The statement also warns against romanticizing competency among elites. The more people are shielded from consequences, the less they can apprehend the needs and creativity of those below. Democratic intelligence, for Bakunin, grows from mutual dependence and struggle. Moral clarity comes from shared vulnerability. If privilege deforms the mind and heart, the cure is not virtue campaigns for the powerful but the creation of conditions where no one can rule.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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