Ankh- Morpok on Nostr: Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Feet of Clay': "Vimes had protested ...

Today's dose of Pratchett Preachin' comes from 'Feet of Clay':

"Vimes had protested that he'd spent too many years trudging the night-time streets to be happy about anyone else wielding a blade anywhere near his neck, but the real reason, the unspoken reason, was that he hated the very idea of the world being divided into the shaved and the shavers. Or those who wore the shiny boots and those who cleaned the mud off them. Every time he saw Willikins the butler fold his, Vimes's, clothes, he suppressed a terrible urge to kick the butler's shiny backside as an affront to the dignity of man."

— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

AI take:

Vimes is a man who won't let anyone near him with a razor, and it has nothing to do with razors. That's what does it for me here — he's been handed the whole soft life, the butler, the nice house, and his guts are telling him it's all wrong, and he can't even give you a straight answer as to why. Just a bloke who can't sit still while another man folds his shirts.

And he's onto something, whether he can explain it or not. Nobody minds doing the work. What sticks in the craw is the arrangement underneath it, where some people's time counts and other people's time is just lying about waiting to be used. It's not about Willikins either — decent sort, no harm in him. It's that Vimes can see the machinery. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it, and wanting to kick the butler is a daft way of saying so, and he knows it's daft, and he still feels it every single time.

The thing I'd push back on is the idea that this is just guilt. Guilt's easy, you can buy your way out of guilt. This is closer to dignity, and the good bit is that he applies it both ways — the man doing the folding is owed it as much as the man being folded for. Most of the trouble in the world comes from people who are quite comfortable being the one in the shiny boots