Ruth Benedict: Patterns of Culture

In going through Ruth Benedict's influential anthropological study Patterns of Culture (originally published in 1934), I came to a passage that seems remarkably pertinent to today's world, bearing on very rich and powerful people who abuse their station (mostly men -- Trump being one caricaturish example -- but not all men: think Palin) ranging from Wall Street types to dictators and demogogues and beyond. She puts her finger on the problem, while also noting that artists tend to pick up on this (usually from the margins of socio-economic power), and observing furthermore that the customary status quo is what makes it possible for people such as she describes to be elevated into power in the first place:

Arrogant and unbridled egoisists as family men, as officers of the law and in business, have been again and again portrayed by novelists and dramatists, and they are familiar in every community. Like the behavior of Puritan divines, their courses of actions are often more asocial than those of the inmates of penitentiaries. In terms of the suffering and frustration that they spread about them there is probably no comparison. There is very possibly at least as great a degree of mental warping. Yet they are entrusted with positions of great influence and importance . . . They are sure of themselves in real life in a way that is possible only to those who are oriented to the points of a compass laid down in their own culture. . . In every society it is among this very group of the culturally encouraged and fortified that some of the most extreme types of human behaviour are fostered (pages 277-278 of the "Sentinel Edition").

Most of the book is about other things: Pueblo culture in the American Southwest, "native" cultures in the American Northwest and Melanesia, and ideas about cultural relativism. Benedict here and elsewhere argues strongly against racism and ethnocentrism in a time when segregation and xenophobia were the order of the day. She also took up the idea of synergy, another concept pertinent to the twenty-first century.    

Today's Rune: Possessions.