The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 11

11
Wherever the beauty in the lie is its truthfulness, its preachers will cultivate cynics.  These ugly ones indulge the power to shock from under the cloak of integrity. The herd circles and tightens in defense.  The lie becomes stronger, and strength is beautiful.
The sheep do their part.  Weakness comes with the grip of its own insecurity.  They grip their answer with greater strength when it exists to do away with the question that atomizes them into the real.  Too frightened to investigate ... ignorance is a weakness so immovable it refutes itself in behavior as a kind of strength after all.  Reality steps upon the resilient presumptions of man, and error rises up with the human power to deny it. 

The cynic does his part.  He presents the rude truth.  The flock circles and tightens in defense.  The lie actually becomes stronger in proportion to its insecure relation to its own source.  And strength among one’s own is always seductive.  What is now immovably fixed in the mind is its own beautiful truth.




A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism



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