Tao Te Ching
Fanaticism
Mythology’s Cyclops represents the one-eyed view of true-believing fanaticism, of fixation on one point of view while ignoring the larger reality. As the Yin-Yang symbol of Taoism portrays, every situation, experience, and person has a positive and a negative, a multiplicity of factors, influences, and qualities. Santayana’s definition of fanaticism as "redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim” led to the character Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. Perhaps the appeal of the Wile E. Coyote image rises from the similarity of his motivation and results to so much of what we see in our personal, political, religious, and economic environments.
Fanaticism, however, may also have an evolutionary imperative, a subtle but important value. Birds sing the same songs over and over, generation to generation. As a force of evolutionary conservatism most animals have a narrow range of sounds narrowly repeated again and again. Humans feel independent and unique yet like most animal species, think and repeat the same thoughts and beliefs as their parents, their ancestors, and name this their cultures. Evolutionary change makers however say something new and as a consequence must face antipathy and often persecution from the herd committed to the status quo, against change, and afraid of any new notes.
This inherited culture becomes both a building block enabling us to see farther, innovate beyond, and further evolve as well as a conceptual chain that prevents us from going beyond. Wanting approval and appreciation easily becomes a strong chain in the herd instinct dynamic, something noticeably diminished in the lives of history-changing innovators. Studying and learning from different cultures, from different historical biographies, and from different wisdom traditions help break these golden chains that ensnare us to the words over the sense, to delusion over reality, to an insipid life in the herd instead of the creative awakening of open mind.
Quotes (87)
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”
“Whoever praises his own religion, due to excessive devotion, and condemns others with the thought 'Let me glorify my own religion,' only harms his own religion. Therefore contact (between religions) is good. One should listen to and respect the doctrines professed by others.”
“Seeing that the living are soft and the dead are hard, we can infer that those whose virtue is hard and those whose actions are forceful die before their time, while those who are soft and weak are able to preserver their lives.”
“Superstition discounts reason and builds an absolute monarchy in our minds making wise men follow fools.”
“Tell me if there have been peoples other than the Christians and the Jews in whom zeal and religion wretchedly transformed into fanaticism, have inspired so many horrible cruelties…. Yes, the Mohammedans… As for the other nations there has not been one right from the existence of the world which has ever made a purely religious war.”
“Atheism and fanaticism are two monsters which may tear society to pieces; but the atheist preserves his reason which checks his propensity to mischief while the fanatic is under the influence of a madness which is constantly urging him on”
“Atheism and fanaticism are two monsters which may tear society to pieces; but the atheist preserves his reason which checks his propensity to mischief while the fanatic is under the influence of a madness which is constantly urging him on”
“In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by Faith,but by the lack of it.”
“With most people, disbelief in a thing is founded on a blind belief in some other thing.”
“The more narrow-minded a system is the more it will please worldly-wise people.”
“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.”
“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion; against the tendency of society to impose its own... rules of conduct on those who dissent from them”
“Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. Prophecies of all sorts are rife on such occasions, and are readily believed.”
“But when a man's religion becomes really fanatic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of our an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him.”
“What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it and even his bad grammar is sublime.”
“Friends are a costly luxury, and when one invests one's capital in a mission in life, one cannot afford to have friends.”
“Man is a Religious Animal, the only Religious Animal... He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.”
“Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd... Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines... there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only... reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.”
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
“If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
“Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.”
“An editor must have a purpose. ... What a legacy for one's conscience to know that one has been instrumental in mowing down the old prejudices that rattle in the wind like weeds.”
“We must eliminate the fanatic devotion to exalted ideals of national egoism and pride”
“He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief in one false principle, is the beginning of all unwisdom.”
“The effects of boredom on a large scale in history is underestimated. It is a main cause of revolutions, nd would soon bring to an end all the static Utopias and farmyard civilization of the Fabians.”
“Religious fanaticism, unlimited competition, and war are the murderers of freedom. Though they win victories, we now know that they end in suicide.”
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
“Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith is foolishness.”
“When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos.”
“The one thing more difficult that following a regimen is not imposing it on others.”
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”
“Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, with a fanatical denial of the existence of autonomous partial-systems… This leads to collective delusions, instigations to war and revolution, in a word, to destructive mass psychoses… this narrowness of consciousness is always the shortest way to the insane asylum.”
“Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
“opposites always balance on the scales – a sign of high culture. One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”
“Puritanism consists in a desire to impose the natural asceticism of age upon the young, and this position is largely founded on the untenable theories of an absolute ethic and an only true theology.”
“The mission of Hafiz was to express to a fanatical religious world that the presence of God is not to be found only in heaven, but also here on earth.”
“Many causes produce war. There are ancient hatreds, turbulent frontiers, the 'legacy of old forgotten, far-off things, and battles long ago.' There are new-born fanaticisms.”
“The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.”
“We do not want any other god than Germany itself. It is essential to have fanatical faith and hope and love in and for Germany.”
“A democracy smugly disdainful of new ideas would be a sick democracy. A democracy chronologically fearful of new ideas would be a dying democracy.”
“The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives.”
“Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.”
“This state of 'no-mind' exists on a knife-edge between the carelessness of the average sensual man and the strained over-eagerness of the zealot for salvation.”
“it would be easier for the president of Palmolive to concede the virtue of Ivory soap than for an Episcopalian bishop to concede the merits in Baptist theology.”
“the world is neither good or bad, it is our attitude toward it that makes it either good or bad. By applying our moral principles to nature, we blind ourselves to things as they are. Instead, we should apply ethical standards only where they belong, namely to ourselves.”
“The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon us 24 hours a day mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves.”
“Most people are not even aware of their need to conform. They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have arrived at their opinion as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as this of the majority.”
“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”
“Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
“The cause of conflict is some fixed or one-sided idea… there is not particular way in true practice. You should find your own way”
“Passion is by no means the fuller life which it seems to be in the dreams of adolescence, but is on the contrary a kind of naked and denuding intensity, verily, a bitter destitution, the impoverishment of a mind being emptied of all diversity, an obsession of the imagination by a single image.”
“I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.”
“Two ideas are psychologically deep-rooted in man: self-protection and self-preservation. For self-protection man has created God, on whom he depends for his own protection, safety and security, just as a child depends on its parent. For self-preservation man has conceived the idea of an immortal Soul or Atman, which will live eternally. In his ignorance, weakness, fear, and desire, man needs these two things to console himself. Hence he clings to them deeply and fanatically.”
“I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril.”
“Truth needs no label: it is neither Buddhist, Christian, Hindu nor Moslem. It is not the monopoly of anybody. Sectarian labels are a hindrance to the independent understanding of Truth, and they produce harmful prejudices in men's minds.”
“Every time we are confronted with a new revolution we take to the opium pipes of our own propaganda (1963).”
“A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination.”
“One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the belief that... there is a final solution.”
“There is no way of thought so experimental, and no philosopher so tentative that his suggestions cannot be frozen into a dogma by self-seeking disciples.”
“It is when we insist most firmly on everyone else being 'reasonable' that we become ourselves, unreasonable.”
“remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!”
“the United States was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic 'race'... However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany, might not see their own situation int the U.S. as much different.”
“that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. They’re not idealists; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.”
“to continue to see a race of people, any race of people as one single personality is an ignorance of gothic proportions, an ignorance so vast, so public, and perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained.”
“Heresies play an essential role by keeping our minds argumentative and alert.”
“Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known, there is nothing more to say... What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.”
“Sectarian views of any kind are a great obstacle, preventing the student's insight and his spontaneously existing dignity from shining through. However, it is useful to see the useful aspects of these systems in order to be able to apply them to the appropriate situations of time and country.”
“if anyone, even the writer, tells you that something only means one thing, they are ALWAYS wrong. Because nothing only means one thing.”
“Trump uses many of the fascist’s tools: a contempt for facts, spreading a pervasive sense of fear and overwhelming crisis, portraying his backers as victims, assigning blame to foreign or alien actors and suggesting only his powerful personality can transcend the crisis. He endorsed the violence done to a dissenter at one of his rallies, and he now floats the idea of making entry to the United States contingent on religion.”
“dreams present the very opposite of a closed, rigid mind... We work with the direct experience that dreaming offers us to challenge our assumptions and expand our perceptions.”
“Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations. Consider the Christian story. It has the flimsiest of foundations. What evidence do we have [and yet] Entire wars have been waged over changing a single word of the story.”
“From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history... What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars... as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and religious discrimination.”
“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists... Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition. It worked... Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another”
“The differences between heresy on the one hand and infidelity, schism, and apostasy on the other suggest that heresy as a Christian concept is necessarily intrasystemic in reference, distinctly doctrinal in orientation an must be an exclusively ecclesiastical determination which on the church has the authority to establish”
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