The sole distinction necessary is the wish to become better. The man who strives to be better becomes more humble, more approachable, more friendly even with those who owe him allegiance. But as he gains by being better known, he loses nothing in distinction, and he reaps the more respect in that he has sown the less pride.
XIII
THE EDUCATION FOR SIMPLICITY
THE simple life being above all else the product of a direction of mind, it is natural that education should have much to do with it.
In general but two methods of rearing children are practiced: the first is to bring them up for ourselves; the second, to bring them up for themselves.
In the first case the child is looked upon as a complement of the parents: he is part of their property, occupies a place among their possessions. Sometimes this place is the highest, especially when the parents value the life of the affections. Again, where material interests rule, the child holds second, third, or even the last place. In any case he is a nobody. While he is young, he gravitates round his parents, not only by obedience, which is right, but by the subordination of all his originality, all his being. As he grows older, this subordination becomes a veritable confiscation, extending to his ideas, his feelings, everything. His minority becomes perpetual. Instead of slowly evolving into independence, the man advances into slavery. He is what he is permitted to be, what his father's business, religious beliefs, political opinions or esthetic tastes require him to be. He will think, speak, act, and marry according to the understanding and limits of the paternal absolutism. This family tyranny may be exercised by people with no strength of character. It is only necessary for them to be convinced that good order requires the child to be the property of the parents. In default of mental force, they possess themselves of him by other means—by sighs, supplications, or base seductions. If they cannot fetter him, they snare his feet in traps. But that he should live in them, through them, for them, is the only thing admissible.
Education of this sort is not the practice of families only, but also of great social organizations whose chief educational function consists in putting a strong hand on every new-comer, in order to fit him, in the most iron-bound fashion, into existing forms. It is the attenuation, pulverization and assimilation of the individual in a social body, be it theocratic, communistic, or simply bureaucratic and routinary. Looked at from without, a like system seems the ideal of simplicity in education. Its processes, in fact, are absolutely simplistic, and if a man were not somebody, if he were only a sample of the race, this would be the perfect education. As all wild beasts, all fish and insects of the same genus and species have the same markings, so we should all be identical, having the same tastes, the same language, the same beliefs, the same tendencies. But man is not simply a specimen of the race, and for that reason this sort of education is far from being simple in its results. Men so vary from one another, that numberless methods have to be invented to repress, stupefy, and extinguish individual thought. And one never arrives at it then but in part, a fact which is continually deranging everything. At each moment, by some fissure, some interior force of initiative is making a violent way to the light, producing explosions, upheavals, all sorts of grave disorders. And where there are no outward manifestations, the evil lies dormant; beneath apparent order are hidden dumb revolt, flaws made by an abnormal existence, apathy, death.
The system is evil which produces such fruit, and however simple it may appear, in reality it brings forth all possible complications.