Fichte also declares expressly and literally that, with the rising social scale, a constantly increasing moral deterioration is found, and that “inferiority of character increases in proportion to the higher social class.”

The final reason of these propositions Fichte has nevertheless not developed.  He gives as the reason of this corruption the selfishness of the upper classes; but then the question must immediately arise whether selfishness is not also to be found in the lower classes, or why less in these classes.  Now it must immediately appear as a strong contradiction that less selfishness should prevail in the lower classes than in the upper, who have in large measure the advantage of them in the well-recognized moral elements, culture and education.

The real reason, and the explanation of this contradiction, which appears at first so strong, is the following: 

For a long time, as we have seen, the development of nations, the tendency of history, has been toward a constantly extending abolition of the privileges which guarantee to the higher classes their position as higher and ruling classes.  The wish for perpetuation of these, or personal interest, brings therefore every member of the upper classes who has not once for all, by a wide outlook upon his whole personal existence, raised himself above such considerations (and you will understand, Gentlemen, that these can form only very unusual exceptions) into a position which is from principle hostile to the progress of the people, to the extension of education and science, to the advance of culture, to all tendencies and victories of historical life.

This opposition of the personal interest of the upper classes to the progress of culture in the nation produces the great and inevitable immorality of the upper classes.  It is a life whose daily requirements you only need picture to yourselves in order to feel the deep decline of character to which it must lead.  To be obliged daily to take an attitude of opposition to everything great and good, to bewail its success, to rejoice at its failures, to check its further progress, to make futile or to curse the progress which has already been made, is like a continual existence in the enemy’s country; and this enemy is the moral fellowship of the whole country in which you live, for which all true morality urges support.  It is a continual existence, I say, in an enemy’s country.  This enemy is your own people, who must be looked upon and treated as an enemy, and this hostility must, at least in the long run, be craftily concealed and more or less artfully veiled.

From this arises the necessity either of doing what is against the voice of your own conscience, or of stifling this voice from the force of custom in order not to be annoyed by it, or, finally, of never knowing this voice, never knowing anything better or having anything better than the religion of your own advantage.