"The responsibilities which are imposed by rank and privilege and good fortune can... become very onerous indeed"
About this Quote
Welch frames privilege not as a cheat code but as a mortgage. The line is built to sound like a sober reminder, the kind of sentence that lets the comfortable keep their self-respect: yes, you have more, but you also carry a heavier load. The key move is rhetorical judo. By emphasizing “responsibilities” and “onerous,” he converts rank and good fortune into a form of labor, a burden that deserves recognition. It’s a clever inversion of the usual moral accounting, where privilege is something you’re expected to justify. Here, privilege arrives pre-justified as duty.
The subtext is protective. It cushions the privileged against resentment by proposing a nobler self-image: elites aren’t parasites; they’re stewards. That’s an old argument with a modern purpose: if those at the top are already weighed down by obligation, demands from below can be recast as piling on rather than correcting imbalance. Notice how the phrase “imposed by” externalizes the whole arrangement, as if rank simply happens to a person, like weather, rather than being maintained by institutions and choices. “Can... become” adds a second layer of insulation, implying the burden is conditional and subjective, not structurally guaranteed.
Context matters because Welch’s broader ideological orbit prized order, hierarchy, and suspicion of egalitarian pressure. Read that way, the sentence works less as empathy and more as preemption: a warning against moralizing the fortunate, and a quiet plea to let them govern without being “onerously” challenged. It’s a compact piece of elite self-defense dressed up as ethical realism.
The subtext is protective. It cushions the privileged against resentment by proposing a nobler self-image: elites aren’t parasites; they’re stewards. That’s an old argument with a modern purpose: if those at the top are already weighed down by obligation, demands from below can be recast as piling on rather than correcting imbalance. Notice how the phrase “imposed by” externalizes the whole arrangement, as if rank simply happens to a person, like weather, rather than being maintained by institutions and choices. “Can... become” adds a second layer of insulation, implying the burden is conditional and subjective, not structurally guaranteed.
Context matters because Welch’s broader ideological orbit prized order, hierarchy, and suspicion of egalitarian pressure. Read that way, the sentence works less as empathy and more as preemption: a warning against moralizing the fortunate, and a quiet plea to let them govern without being “onerously” challenged. It’s a compact piece of elite self-defense dressed up as ethical realism.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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