"The Hidden and Awful Wisdom Which Apportions The Destinies of Mankind"

At one point in recounting the sufferings of Amelia Sedley in Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray writes of "[t]he hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind" being "pleased . . . to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise, and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked," and this being the case admonishing the reader,

Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor's accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

To all evidences the view Thackeray explained in this paragraph is either completely incomprehensible or utterly taboo to at least 99 percent of those who have any appreciable platform from which to speak in this society. Instead they snarl about "hard work," and "genius," and the society in which we live as a "meritocracy" in which people get what they "deserve."

All that, of course, is to their very great discredit.