The new American sickness - I am opressed ergo

There is a by now familiar before and after story here, a historical trauma theory. 

There was a time when people had a place and knew their place; and then there was a time, which we are still living in, when for various reasons they didn’t, when more and more people had to find a place in the world instead of simply inheriting one, when prestige was up for grabs. 

The project of the modern, unmoored, displaced individual (the oppressed one) is to find his value in the eyes of other people, and to resent this. 

It is a predicament that breeds new forms of megalomania and new forms of servility. The whole notion of ambition, of what people might want for themselves, is transformed. 

It is worth researching Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital 


The self-assertiveness required by the modern man/woman without (officially legitimated) qualities is frightening in its aggression and flair for provocation in their quest for authority. 

Hulme asserted, ‘the business of every honest man at the present moment to clean the world of those sloppy dregs of Romanticism’. Among those sloppy dregs was the unique entitled individual (the opressed) so dear to liberalism, and so costly, in Hulme’s view, for the vitality of culture.