“When we feel like victims, all our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be. Our opponents or simply our neighbors, stop sharing common ground with us and become our enemies. We stop being aggressors and become defenders. The envy, greed, or resentment that motivates us becomes sanctified, because we tell ourselves we’re acting in self defense. . . . The first step for believing passionately is fear. Fear of losing our identity, our life, our status, or our beliefs.”
That’s a speech given by Andreas Corelli in The Angel’s Game (a great novel, and its English translation came out in 2009).
Oh, and he’s the devil. So we probably ought to be wary of what he says.
Reading such passages is a reminder of why politics in the post-literacy era may not be going so well. It would be hard for a high-literacy person—like most of the “founding fathers” were—to have made some of the recent political choices that voters have made.
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