He was peering at Randolph now with that mixture of contempt and pity which the Chums in their contact with the ground population were sooner or later sure to evoke.
* * * * * * * * * *
Judging by this look Randolph expects to evoke from everybody he meets, maybe I'm an aeronaut!
It has been stated already, in various ways, that the boys in the sky, these Chums of Chances, are persons of higher quality than those bound to the earth. Metaphorically, they are above everybody else. They have higher ideals. They see the world more clearly and they know their purpose and their duty. When somebody rolling around in the muck of human passions and desires and, well, life in general, struggling with one existential crisis after another, meets somebody with a greater dignity, or a surer sense of themselves, or a strict code of behavior that they don't take for granted, well . . . that somebody can easily hate that seemingly self-righteous bastard. The contempt comes from knowing they have encountered somebody with actual ideals, somebody maybe willing to die for those ideals, and comparing that with what they know of their own sorely lacking beliefs. They must hate this better man because to admire him is to admit their own faults, their own intellectual laziness, and their careless disregard for their fellow creatures. Following closely on the contempt is the need to pity this creature because they don't know what they are missing. One must believe that choosing to live by any code means choosing to forgo freedom.
The righteous man turns a mirror on the unrighteous man. And where the unrighteous man thinks he feels contempt and pity for the righteous man, he is really being forced to feel those things for himself. But he will not acknowledge it, for self-reflection is a chore for which a free man has no patience.
Or maybe Nate is just such a capitalist hater of anarchists and lover of alcohol and money that he's forced to feel hate and sorrow for a person whose life is not ruled by money. What else even is there?!
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