Josiah Bounderby and the Aspirational Society

I have in the past remarked how while Charles Dickens' Ebenezer Scrooge became so familiar a figure culturally that "Scrooge" is a byword for selfish callousness, Josiah Bounderby from Hard Times never got anywhere near so much attention--and indeed reference to him so scarce that the only recent ones I found were in an Indian Express blog post discussing one specimen of the type, and the comparison a South Korean judge drew between the Samsung executives in their recent high-profile trial and Dickens' creation.

It seemed to me that this is because the cult of the "self-made man," if probably universal today (the Indian item specifically attacked this) is so particularly strong in America today--and if discredited over and over again by those sociologists who actually attend to the facts, challenging it a cultural taboo, so much so that few dare do anything that could be construed as doing so.

Thinking about that in the past I have tended to focus on the ways in which this taboo is used to defend the validity of extreme differences in wealth, but that mainly in terms of how it does so by helping defend the claims to great wealth on the grounds that it is the product of great contributions to society. Factoring into this is what this is supposed to mean to the rest of the public--not only that the extreme difference in outcome is valid, but one way in which they and their house intellectuals deflect calls for egalitarianism, telling "the poors" that "You can do it too!"

Admitting to the reality of Josiah Bounderby would be to admit "No, you very likely can't, and certainly shouldn't pin your hopes on it"--and make it a good deal harder to avoid engaging with all to which such an outlook can lead.