Pampered or Note (was: CHAPDISC: PS/SS 1, The Boy Who Lived

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

No: HPFGUIDX 187781

My other two posts appeared and this one didn't so I'm sending it again. I hope it doesn't appear twice now.

Pippin wrote in <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/187759>:

<< While his family struggled with wayward Aberforth and impaired Ariana, Dumbledore was left free to rack up up every prize of note that Hogwarts offered, and correspond with the most noted wizards of the day. Then, having reached adulthood, he was going to take a year long trip around the world and pursue a brilliant career. Would anyone but a pampered prince think like that? >>

The obituaries, Doge, and Aunt Muriel gave me the impression that taking a year long trip around the world was a relatively normal thing for a young wizard to do after Hogwarts. I suppose that travel is less expensive for wizards than for muggles and the largest cost of the Grander Tour was the foregone employment income. That makes it much like those modern young people (I was one once) who expect to go to university instead of having to start supporting themselves straight out of high school. Yes, a sense of entitlement not shared by the people who enlist in the military as the only way they know to earn money for college, but it seems to me a much lower sense of entitlemenet than being 'a pampered prince'. [If one were to say that modern students who expect to go on to college after high school are spoi]ed, what would one say of modern students who take it for granted they will go on to high school after eighth grade? I understand that was a not quite common a hundred years ago, and downright unusual fifty years before that.]

That being brilliant at school leads a  person to expect a brilliant career strikes me as fairly normal. A sense of entitlement that rapidly gets beaten out of many but not all people. It reminds me of my mother recalling my father telling her that while a graduate student at Columbia University, he looked at the students in a freshman chem class and reflected that every one of those boys had graduated at the top of his high school, and none of them yet realised that he himself was likely to be merely average here. 

To the extent that this sense of entitlement was the result of pampering, then having won high marks and every award given at Hogwarts was being pampered by Hogwarts, who probably thought that it was recognizing achievement rather than pampering. And having corresponded with established renowned scholars while still a schoolboy was being pampered by those scholars, who probably thought they were encouraging, maybe mentoring, a young talent, rather than pampering.

<< He was planning to reverse the course of natural death and lead the WW in a revolution all so he could get out from having to care for his family. That's quite a sense of entitlement, don't you 
think? >>

I don't at all agree with you that he was planning to rule the world ALL SO he could get out from caring for his family. He could have gone on his Grander Tour if only he had allowed Aberforth to drop out of Hogwarts and care for Ariana, as Aberforth wanted to do. It's not as if Aberforth needed NEWTs to run a dirty tavern and raise goats. (It seems odd to me that Rowling constructed an incident in which dropping out of school was the RIGHT thing to do and the adult authority was dead wrong to compel the minor to stay in school, when that is absolutely contrary to real-life contemporary values.)


It seems to me that if young Albus really had the sense of entitlement attributed to young James and Sirius, he wouldn't have been prevented from that course merely by not wanting people to gossip about how selfish and irresponsible he was being. I'm sure he could have come up with some other scheme to make it look like he was being nobly self-sacrificing by doing that he really wanted rather  than by striving to become co-Emperor of the world.

I believe the only connection between him being tied down by his family and  him joining Grindelwald's plan was that he might have been too busy to listen to Grindelwald if he hadn't been tied down by his family. But if he had met and listened to Grindelwald while on his Grander Tour instead of in Godric's Hollow, he would have joined Grindelwald anyway (thus hurting Doge's feelings).

Because Grindelwald was brilliant and had intellectually exciting ideas and was very persuasive as well as handsome and charming, and Albus was intellectually intoxicated by these ideas -- I can vaguely recall having had similar experiences in my long ago youth. When I was much younger than young Albus and read about Lemuria, or about how telepathy works. When I was his age and learned that all of chemistry is because electron orbitals are defined and there can be no more than two electrons per orbital.

And the other factor (I can relate to this one, too) is his awareness that the world is out of joint and his desire to put it right. He had observed muggles being much given to violence and bullying, by what they did to Ariana, the Franco-Prussian War, the conditions of factory workers. He had observed wizards of low ability having position and power because of their pure blood, and wizards of ability (not as great as his own, of course) being trapped in poverty. If only he was in charge, he would identify the bullies and put spells on them so that they felt themselves whatever they did to another person, he would use magic to increase the general prosperity and prevent natural disasters, he would see to it that people were rewarded only for merit...