"The Habit of Invidious Comparison"

One of Thorstein Veblen's more memorable traits as a writer was his constantly coining striking phrases simply by calling things what they are. Indeed, in his classic story of fascism-come-to-America It Can't Happen Here Sinclair Lewis' protagonist Doremus Jessup lamented to himself that the young people of his day were "[g]etting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen" (emphasis added).

One of those phrases of Veblen's that particularly stuck in my memory was the "habit of invidious comparison"--the habit of judging one thing, and especially one person, against one another not merely for the sake of better understanding their qualities or making rationalistic practical choices, but the hierarchy-obsessed establishment of some order of precedence in which one is "better" and the other "worse" that can only leave those below envying those on the top (hence, "invidious"), and this all the time, as a matter of course, because that is just what they do. Raised in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen identified that habit with said "leisure class"--and in turn, with the barbarian values that this exemplifies, not least their explanation of outcomes (the spoils of the hunt and the raid) in terms of a fuzzy notion of personal prowess rather than in any rationalistic way.

In this day and age, in which people brought up in a country that is officially a republic, which they will tell you has no social classes, and in which all are supposed to have been "created equal," will completely unthinkingly speak of one person as "better" than another because they were born to that supposedly nonexistent privilege and another was not, because they have money and the other does not, it is very clear that the "habit of invidious comparison" is exceedingly pervasive in our time, to the point of being a neurotic compulsion, with all that says about where we are along the spectrum extending from barbarism to civilization.