Well, Michael Springate, I looked, but I couldn't find the quote. Carrol Cox seems to think it exists. But to answer your questions let me say that I think it's just that the poor have to find their contentment in something other than a conspicuous consumption which requires wealth but is so importantly regarded in this country and beyond. They don't know how much of it they don't need like Thoreau's poor Irishman who had to have sugar for his tea. The articles by Tamas (I also looked at his "Two Hundred year War") were informative and did not surprize me. As Americans we unfortunately have the preconception that we know what's best for everyone else in the world and expect that conformity to our way of thinking will work elsewhere as well as it seems to at home. The "democratic" theory as Julius Evola ("Revolt Against the Modern World") saw it "is that anybody can become anything they wish to be, provided a certain amount of training and pedagogy be supplied; in other words man, in himself, is believed to be a shapeless and moldable substance, just like communism wants him to be when it regards as antirevolutionary and anti-Marxist the genetic theory of innate qualities elaborated in the field of biology." So that people do not feel the resentment of any percieved position of inferiority in which they may imagine themselves caught up, we Americans have devised that great formula-leveler against aristocracy, Wealth=Success. i.e. "My money is as good as his." "My money is good as yours." Again Evola, and here he writes of the American civil religion's recommendation of this formula- "I have previously discussed what religiosity is reduced to in Protestanism; once every principle of authority and hierarchy has been rejected and religiosity has rid itself of metaphysical interest, dogmas, rituals, symbols, and sacraments, it has thereby been reduced to mere moralism, which in Puritan Anglo-Saxon countries, and especially in America, is employed in the service of a conformist collectivity." Then quoting from A. Siegfried's "Les Etats-Unis d'aujour'hui" 1927, Evola continues explaining, "Siegfried has correctly pointed out that "the only American religion is Calvinism, understood as the view according to which the true cell of the social organism is not the individual, but the community, 'in which wealth is regarded, in one's mind as well as in others', as a sign of divine election. Thus 'it becomes difficult to distinguish between religious aspiration and the pursiut of wealth... It is regarded as a moral and even as a desirable thing for the religious spirit to become a factor of social progress and of economic development.' Consequently the traditional virtues that are required to achieve any supernatural goal eventually come to be regarded as useless and even harmful. In the eyes of a typical American, the ascetic is regarded as one who wastes time, when he is not looked down upon as a social parasite; the hero, in the ancient sense, is regarded as some kind of fanatic or lunatic to be neutralized through pacifism and humanitarianism while the fanatical puritan moralist is himself surrounded by a bright aura." One might compare as an example the average American's attitude toward, say, Ezra Pound and Billy Graham. Try it, if you dare. Evola then asks the poignant question, "Is all this that far off from Lenin's recommendation to ostracize 'every view that is supernatural or extraneous to class interests' and wipe out as an infectious disease any residue of independent spirituality?" One might criticize Evola for being nothing but another Italian fascist and a member of the aristocracy to boot, but he expresses sentiments not different from some of the greatest American thinkers. Emerson first comes to mind with his statement concerning conformity, and Twain could provide a wealth of ammunition for the same purpose, to defend individuality. Then there is Poe and Mencken, and Pound. And haven't we been engaged here for weeks in someone's attempt to pull Pound down from his "vitam aeream" and drag him through endless mud holes of pseudo violations against the "common man" when the truth is that his Cantos were as McLuhan pointed out in 1948 the reconstruction of a continuing deceitful and exploitive crime and the glances to a collateral life that might have been and might still be? No one expects him to fill stadiums like Billy Graham, but then he is not selling anyone pie in the sky. CDM