As we discern a fine line between crank and genius, so also (and unfortunately) we must acknowledge an equally graded trajectory from crank to demagogue. When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the thin line between creativity and manipulation in politics, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking.
Stephen Jay Gould's quote warns about the dangers of blindly following individuals who may appear to be visionary or genius-like but can actually lead to harmful demagoguery. He suggests that without the tools of judgment and critical analysis, people are susceptible to manipulation, as they tend to follow their hopes rather than engage in thoughtful consideration of ideas and leaders.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of critical thinking in politics, this quote can emphasize the need for discernment.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Religion is the opiate of the people.
Could I anticipate the enmity of those for whom I encountered such opposition? If they had been willing, I should have gained the victory. But the head faints when it is abandoned by the other members. If they had been wise they would have seen that in attacking me they were attacking their own privileges and serving princes to their own servitude.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God - that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
Sitting is the gateway of truth to total liberation.
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