"There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals"
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Melville strips evil of its favorite disguise: prestige. “Purple” is the color of royalty and clerical authority; “rags” are the costume of the desperate. By pairing them, he refuses the comforting fiction that wickedness becomes somehow refined when it wears a crown, a uniform, or a respectable title. The line is less moral sermon than social x-ray: corruption doesn’t gain dignity through ceremony, and suffering doesn’t automatically sanctify whoever carries it out.
The second punch is nastier and funnier. “Hell is a democracy of devils” weaponizes a cherished 19th-century ideal against itself. Democracy, in the American imagination, promised equality as a moral achievement. Melville flips it: equality can also be the bleak leveling of vice. In hell, no one gets to be “better” at being bad; the hierarchy that kept the world running upstairs dissolves into a flat, infernal fraternity. It’s a cynical comfort: tyrants and thieves share the same destination, the same status, the same stink.
Underneath is a suspicion of moral exceptionalism, especially the kind draped in institutional power. Melville wrote in an era obsessed with rank, empire, and “civilizing” missions, while American capitalism was perfecting the art of laundering predation into respectability. The sentence works because it’s not arguing policy; it’s puncturing vanity. Wickedness wants to feel grand. Melville denies it the one thing it craves besides impunity: self-respect.
The second punch is nastier and funnier. “Hell is a democracy of devils” weaponizes a cherished 19th-century ideal against itself. Democracy, in the American imagination, promised equality as a moral achievement. Melville flips it: equality can also be the bleak leveling of vice. In hell, no one gets to be “better” at being bad; the hierarchy that kept the world running upstairs dissolves into a flat, infernal fraternity. It’s a cynical comfort: tyrants and thieves share the same destination, the same status, the same stink.
Underneath is a suspicion of moral exceptionalism, especially the kind draped in institutional power. Melville wrote in an era obsessed with rank, empire, and “civilizing” missions, while American capitalism was perfecting the art of laundering predation into respectability. The sentence works because it’s not arguing policy; it’s puncturing vanity. Wickedness wants to feel grand. Melville denies it the one thing it craves besides impunity: self-respect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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