In this week’s Takimag, the dubious doctor discusses the modern tendency of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement after reading of the removal of a Damian Hirst “masterpiece” from a German museum.

This is not to decry the ordinary, quite the reverse: We need the ordinary quite as much as we need the extraordinary. The problem is that, if you start boasting about yourself, you come to believe your own boasts, and when you find, as inevitably you will, that the world fails to treat you as if your boasts were justified, you begin to feel resentful. This is surely one of the reasons why there is so much anger in society, even when, judged by the standards of all previously existing societies, people are extremely fortunate.