22.5.25

Genealogy of fanaticism

 

Look around you: everywhere, specters preaching: each institution translates a mission; city halls have their absolute, even as the temples - officialdom, with its rules - a metaphysics designed for monkeys… Everyone trying to remedy everyone’s life: even beggars, even the incurable aspire to it: the sidewalks and hospitals of the world overflow with reformers. The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society - an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited among the martyrs not quite beheaded.

Emil Cioran
1911 - 1995