These recent shootings, of abortionist George Tiller and those two Army recruiters, along with the horrors that the Taliban is inflicting in Pakistan, bring to mind this R. A. Lafferty quote on fanaticism. It’s from And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire
How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it.
Comment by Joe on 6/2 @ 9:52 pm #
It can cross all ideologies, athough it tends to rise during times of uncertainty and turmoil.
Pingback by Quote of the Day: Blinded by the Big Light « ricketyclick on 6/2 @ 10:02 pm #
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Comment by geoffb on 6/2 @ 10:11 pm #
How to create fanatics has been known for a long time. They are a weapon that cannot be put away once unholstered. They leave in their path of destruction words which commemorate their actions, their essence. Thug and assassin are two such.
What word will come to express the essence of the Taliban or Al Queda? Most assuredly it will not be “man made disaster”. That one seems to be a perfect fit to the Obama administration so far.
Comment by JD on 6/2 @ 10:29 pm #
This fits nicely with the abortionist and MSNBC saying that the only difference between pro-lifers and the Taliban is 8000 miles, followed by their calls to outlaw and criminalize the exercise of 1st Amendment Rights.
Has Baracky gotten around to speaking out about the soldier murdered by a Muslim, who was being investigated for ties to terrorism.
Comment by psycho... on 6/3 @ 12:20 am #
I’m having trouble pinning it down, but that “along with” seems to be doing something wrong.
If it’s about political fanaticism, the Lafferty quote describes a mass’s being led to madness, not the Sirhan Sirhan style of ingrown crazy Tiller’s shooter seems to have, and Long’s probably does (if, as I’d bet, he got booted from AQ (or whatever) on their version of Section 8, like that shoe-fire dipshit did).
Individual political fanaticism strong enough to make the fanatic’s own hand a direct instrument of death seems too rare to understand. An exhaustive list of amateur solo political assassins in living memory would be shorter than this comment, and there’d be no warning there, no lesson, nothing but names of a few sorry bastards.
The “higher sanity” of just plain folks mobbed up to destroy whoever by proxy is another thing. Group- and cause-aligned terrorists are ads for it, offers, promises — to lead, to be joined, followed into the light. Terrorists are politicians.
The lone nut seems only to ape politics. Desperately. Like it’s an alien thing he sees bind so many, yet even in it, he’s alone. Maybe he’s giving joining humanity one last fuck-it-all shot. Or something like that.
Or something.
Point — two different things.
Comment by SBP on 6/3 @ 12:37 am #
I still think that the best available analysis of the causes of fanaticism and the psychology of fanatics is this book.
Comment by Jeff Y. on 6/3 @ 1:13 am #
Dang. That was a scary but eloquent quote, Mr. Inspector.
Comment by LTC John on 6/3 @ 6:18 am #
“Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it.”
But the smoke that rises from the now flameless wick still obscures their sigth. So harder must they strain, and more will they do to see the light. Unfortunately, there are some who would tell them how to see the light. The Raelians are a mostly harmless version of this. Less harmless examples abound.
Comment by LTC John on 6/3 @ 6:19 am #
er, “sight”. Off for a cup of java…
Comment by serr8d on 6/3 @ 6:20 am #
Snuffed? Is this a snuff quote?
Comment by Jeffersonian on 6/3 @ 8:37 am #
For anyone who has read CS Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength,” this is apparent. The room where the character Mark was made to spend long hours was precisely the sort of environment made to corrupt one’s idea of the normative in order to bring about the destruction of the normal. It was a physical/aesthetic manifestation of Jeff’s entire thesis about what the Left is doing with language.
Comment by comatus on 6/4 @ 8:15 am #
You probably noticed already that the line strongly evokes the Edwin Markham poem “The Man With the Hoe” (‘Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?’).
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