DH Lawrence, Satire, the Social Being

Satire exists for the very purpose of killing the social being, showing him what an inferior he is and, with all his parade of social honesty, how subtly and corruptly debased. Dishonest to life, dishonest to the living universe on which he is parasitic as a louse. By ridiculing the social being, the satirist helps the true individual, the real human being, to rise to his feet again and go on with the battle. For it is always a battle and always will be.

Though I should perhaps go back in artistic chronological time to an earlier point in the essay John Galsworthy to Lawrence's idea of the social being. This relates to a recent piece on The Public Arena which is described thus: "Where vast numbers of existentially unreal people vainly endeavour through sheer weight of numbers to create one real collective entity."

What do we mean by a social being as distinct from a human being? Why can't we admit them as human beings? Why do we feel so instinctively that they are inferiors?
It is because they have lost caste as human beings, have sunk to the level of the social being, that peculiar creature that takes the place in our civilization of the slave in old civilizations...The fatal change today is the collapse from the psychology of the free human individual into the psychology of the social being, just as the fatal change in the past was a collapse from the freeman's psyche to the psyche of the slave.

Lawrence says of the true individual, who has not poured his life into a false dead form that he "has at his core a certain innocence or naïveté which defies all analysis, and which you cannot bargain with, you can only deal with it in good faith from your own corresponding innocence or naïveté."
The social being is contrarily a being of compromise, unreal, cut off from the universe. As Dostoevsky says in The Brothers Karamazov: "It sometimes happens that it is precisely (the odd man) who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some flooding wind."

And so back to the satire that seeks to kill this social being. Not the individual in whom this artificiality resides, but the artificiality itself. The chances of outright success are probably pretty slim here, so even in the absence of serious hopes of absolute success, the user of the tool might as well amuse himself and for his own health pour what would otherwise become self-harming contempt into these forms of ridicule. Satire can be double-edged though, is a corrosive, and excessive immersion in the world of the social unreality works to ruin the innocence of the satirist himself; it becoming an unseemly tool of perpetual revenge poisoning the avenger.
As Nietzsche writes: "Why did you live so long in the swamp that you became a frog and a toad yourself." And the danger for the noble man is not "that he may become a good man- but that he may become an impudent one, a derider, a destroyer."