There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better

This type which at present is to be found everywhere, and everywhere imposes his own spiritual barbarism, is, in fact, the spoiled child of human history.

The spoiled child is the heir who behaves exclusively as a mere heir. In this case the inheritance is civilization – with its conveniences, its security; in a word, with all its advantages. As we have seen, it is only in circumstances of easy existence such as our civilization has produced, that a type can arise, marked by such a collection of features, inspired by such a character. It is one of a number of deformities produced by luxury in human material.

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. Such is not the case, for reasons of the strictest and most fundamental nature, which this is not the place to enlarge upon. For the present, instead of those reasons, it is sufficient to recall the ever-recurrent fact which constitutes the tragedy of every hereditary aristocracy.

The aristocrat inherits, that is to say, he finds attributed to his person, conditions of life which he has not created, and which, therefore, are not produced in organic union with his personal, individual existence. At birth he finds himself installed, suddenly and without knowing how, in the midst of his riches and his prerogatives. In his own self, he has nothing to do with them, because they do not come from him. They are the giant armor of some other person, some other human being, his ancestor. And he has to live as an heir, that is to say, he has to wear the trappings of another existence.

What does this bring us to? What life is the “aristocrat” by inheritance going to lead, his own or that of his first noble ancestor? Neither one nor the other. He is condemned to represent the other man, consequently to be neither that other nor himself. Inevitably his life loses all authenticity, and is transformed into pure representation or fiction of another life. The abundance of resources that he is obliged to make use of gives him no chance to live out his own personal destiny, his life is atrophied. All life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. The difficulties which I meet with in order to realize my existence are precisely what awakens and mobilizes my activities, my capacities. If my body was not a weight to me, I should not be able to walk. If the atmosphere did not press on me, I should feel my body as something vague, flabby, unsubstantial. So in the “aristocratic” heir his whole individuality grows vague, for lack of use and vital effort. The result is that specific stupidity of “our old nobility” which is unlike anything else – a stupidity which, strictly speaking, has never yet been described in its intimate, tragic mechanism – that tragic mechanism which leads all hereditary aristocracy to irremediable degeneration.

So much merely to counteract our ingenuous tendency to believe that a superabundance of resources favors existence. Quite the contrary. A world superabundant* in possibilities automatically produces deformities, vicious types of human life, which may be brought under the general class, the “heir-man,” of which the “aristocrat” is only one particular case, the spoiled child another, and the mass-man of our time, more fully, more radically, a third (It would, moreover, be possible to make more detailed use of this last allusion to the “aristocrat,” by showing how many of his characteristic traits, in all times and among all peoples, germinate in the mass-man.

*The increase, and even the abundance, of resources are not to be confused with the excess. In the XIXth Century the facifities of life increase, and this produces the amazing growth-quantitative and qualitative-of life that I have noted above. But a moment has come when the civilised world, in relation to the capacity of the average man, has taken on an appearance of superabundance, of excess of riches, of superfluity. A single example of this: the security seemingly offered by progress.

Ortega y Gasset
The Revolt of the Masses