Voltaire and Fools

Voltaire was one of history’s great thinkers, with many insightful quotes attributed to him. From those few below you can see that he had his common-sense hat on firmly. He captures in very few words a vital aspect of daily life that deserves our attention. We are in constant conflict with each other, often quite negative. Much of this conflict arises because we have a deep emotional need for certainty, to be right, a frequent topic of mine, and part of all four quotes. And it is also because we have raised self-deception to a fine art. We often believe, for example, that we are quite objective and have little or no need for certainty, views incomplete at best and wrong at worst.

To a greater or lesser degree, the quotes share the common theme of self-understanding and self-improvement. They express the hurdles we have created for ourselves, in part through the need for emotional certainty, a condition completely at odds with the way a constructive society can work. It also undermines healthy interpersonal conflict, ensuring only frustration and disrespectful action. And it just as easily compromises quality thinking and beneficial discourse. And perhaps the biggest problem of all---those afflicted by such adverse emotional and cognitive conditions live in near complete denial.

"It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere"

 The "chains" represent emotional capture. Because we are all snared to some degree, usually be different things, we are all fools to some degree. We are not unintelligent, but foolish in allowing the chains to exist and even grow. A chain is any position, view, value, belief, etc., held in an emotional death grip, one of complete certainty, and which generally leads to behavior detrimental to others. Reason and common sense have no place in this construct. Objectivity is compromised, often in the extreme. We live a challenged life, constantly wondering why we have so much trouble with people we disagree with, whose views we often find repugnant. Even those we care for can be the recipients of this unfortunate behavior. But we assure ourselves, as only those practiced at fooling themselves can, that it is all the others' fault.

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd"

The world is in constant flux. Movement and change are inescapable, and are increasing in American society and elsewhere, leading us to try to find certainty somewhere, anywhere. We seek to reduce the fear arising from society's mounting upsets to stability, a significant one being more people who disagree with us or who do so more virulently. Past support systems that once offered a degree of stability are weak or non-existent. So, we may react to this instability by seeking, sometimes in desperation, for something solid to believe in, to hold us together. Lacking anything substantive in the way of real stability, we imagine that certainty will provide us emotional support, which it fails utterly to do. But it does ensure that any person or view threatening our fragile and near useless structure of solidity will be punished severely. 

"Prejudices are what fools use for reason"

We often unwittingly allow our prejudices to consume us. Having no idea of their existence, we self-righteously think we have none, a view held with certainty. But we have lots of them, which nearly always lead to bad outcomes for others who dislike the prejudicial messages we are sending. We like seeing ourselves as rational, our thinking and discourse untainted by the unpleasantness of prejudices. Acknowledging damaging and disrespectful prejudices upsets this vision, and must be denied or destroyed. This allows us to wander "happily" and blindly in an artificial world of our own creation, one in which true reason and common sense are absent. For prejudicial pyrotechnics, just ask a political partisan of one party about the moral condition of the other party, and then duck. Either party will do because the emotional construct of partisans of any stripe unites them more than they know, or would ever admit. 

"Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes"

Like prejudices, which we assuredly do not have, we are loaded with opinions, freely acknowledged and shared with abandon. Fine enough. The problem is not having opinions, which are seen by balanced folks as tentative. The problem is the emotional capture causing us to see them as Truth, not having a wisp of the tentative about them. They are not subject to honest and courageous critique, and are propounded with certainty. Validation? Evidence? Openness? Why do I need those when I KNOW my opinions are correct. As I was informed when an undergraduate at Berkeley many decades ago, "Whatever you feel is good." You feel your opinion is correct? So it is. A fool's errand. 

Chains, certainty, prejudices, and opinions may be the modern incarnation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Driven at root by fear, these produce little more than unhealthy conflict and damage to everyone around, including ourselves. They exist for us at some level because that is what we want. Some folks imagine that their undesirable behavior is justified because they are righteously indignant or angry about something. This justification allows them to act with little restraint, taking no responsibility for the bad outcomes of their actions. The emotional capture by the four "horsemen" makes us among the most dangerous fools.