Friday, April 18, 2014

Insurrection in the kingdom of intellect

The cowardly mind doesn’t want to get in trouble for having insurrectionary thoughts, but the courageous mind knows it can get away with insurrectionary thoughts as long as it never becomes involved in insurrectionary deeds. We imagine that the present social order must be rational, that we must conform our thoughts to its principles. If the present social order is capitalist, my thoughts must be capitalist, if socialist, socialist, if Christian, Christian, etc. But once we get outside purely theoretical disciplines like mathematics, there is no way to avoid the confrontation between the truth that’s convenient for my rulers and the truth I discover. A cowardly intellect, when it begins to get close to a boundary where further logical thought will lead away from peaceful intellectual coexistence with rulers, immediately backs down. To the cowardly mind, rulers, whether monarchs or majorities, must always be right. Even if the values rulers commend are contradictory, there's no reason to question them. My ruler was rational enough to build the most tanks, the coward reasons, I must be rational enough to fear them

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