“In truth it is inequality that is the illusion. The extreme disproportion between men, that we seem to see in life, is a thing of changing lights and lengthening shadows. A twilight full of fancies and distortions....It is the experience of men that always returns to the equality of men; it is the average that ultimately justifies the average man. It is when  men have seen and suffered much and come at the end of their elaborate experiments, that they see men under an equal light of death and daily laughter; and none the less mysterious for being many.”

 

What he means by this quote is that in the natural world, all human beings are created equally and anyone who is able to achieve some type of social or economic superiority does so using some type of game of smoke and mirrors. The only reason some people seem more powerful or more able to achieve a certain position in life is because they have figured out how to manipulate peoples' perceptions of the world around them, and their own capabilities. When he says that it is experience of men returns to the equality of men, he is saying that in the end we all share similar emotions and have the same basic needs. Without politics and economics, all human beings have the same capabilities and potential.

 

I agree with this statement because I have always felt that the drastic inequality between different members of the same society is extremely unnatural and is the root of a lot of problems we have in this country. The illusions of being so distant from each other on a social level makes it emotionally easier to exploit one another. We feel so different from each other because of what we have or where we come from that we feel no sense of loyalty. We don't feel like neighbors. It seems like people are either trying to protect what they have from people who want it, or trying to take something they want from people who have it. 

 

I think this relates to the class because a large part of our political system is based on the motives of the individuals who achieve high  positions within that system. It tends to be the case that most people high up in government got a head start in life which usually means coming from a wealthy family and given certain privileges and opportunities not available to the masses. The reason there is such a difference in where we all get our start in life is because of the illusions and manipulations that take place in our society and spawn such drastic inequality among citizens of the same country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of "giving themselves without reservation" to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of the "Revolution," our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law developed to meet the needs of the changing times."

          This quote is saying that no one who came to this country as an immigrant came because they love America. They came because they thought they could make better lives for themselves financially and had no intention of adopting new customs or shifting their loyalties to a new idea of American patriotism. In fact, most seemed very determined to maintain their loyalties to wherever they came from by doing whatever they could to stick to their customs and practices. America was advertised to the rest of the world as a place where you could do whatever you wanted and have the same rights as everyone else no matter where you came from or what your heritage is people saw that as opportunity to better themselves, not a whole new way of living and thinking all together.

He is also saying that this reality has slowed down the progress of this country. Instead of everyone participating in a new hybrid melting pot America where new customs evolve from "cross pollination" of older cultures, people are instead defensive of their own individual cultures to the point where they are routinized in older ways as a means of making sure they never fade out of existence. This is why mainstream American culture is predominately still Anglo-Saxon. Because the first Europeans to arrive were Anglo-Saxon, they were the majority when other cultures began making their way over. The resistance to blend together with each other kept everyone set on making sure their own cultures were no "corrupted by those surrounding them. That meant that even the Anglo-Saxon culture, the one with the biggest numbers, and the one that had the most, if not all the influence on the initial formation of our government, became just as routinized and resistant to change as the other smaller groups.

When he says our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, he is pointing out that the very people who fled to this land to seek freedom, and held a revolution to solidify that freedom, have hindered their own progress through stubbornness and are now more conservative then those they once saw as too conservative.