Getting to know yourself …

… Stanford performs Priestley’s play about the 1%. That’s us. | The Book Haven.

Priestley considered himself a socialist and a man of the people, and I suspect he might have gone for an interpretation of  An Inspector Calls that focuses on privilege and deep pockets. But I think wealth merely serves as an avenue to agency – a sort of magnifying glass for everything in you already. People with more agency generally have more power to do good or evil. That’s why Shakespeare usually wrote about kings and not about shoemakers or chicken-pluckers. The “evils” committed by the Edwardian North Midlands family in this play include a furtive affair, the unfair dismissal of a worker, a nasty snub, snapping at a sales clerk – can any of us claim to be wholly innocent of any permutation of these?  Not, from what I’ve seen at Stanford – or anywhere else. It’s so easy to project these human failings onto the evil “Other.”

Precisely.