When we refuse to admit the interchangeable character of ideas, blood flows…firm resolves draw the dagger; fiery eyes presage slaughter. No wavering mind, infected with Hamletism, was ever pernicious: the principle of evil lies in the will’s tension, in the incapacity for quietism1, in the Promethean megalomania of a race that bursts with ideals, that explodes with its convictions, and that, in return for having forsaken doubt and sloth ―vices nobler than all its virtues― has taken the path to perdition, into history, that indecent alloy of banality and apocalypse… Here certitudes abound: suppress them, best of all suppress their consequences, and you recover paradise. What is the Fall but the pursuit of a truth and the assurance you have found it, the passion for a dogma, domicile within a dogma? The result is fanaticism ―fundamental defect which gives man the craving for effectiveness, for prophecy, for terror― a lyrical leprosy by which he contaminates souls, subdues them, crushes or exalts them…[…] A human being possessed by a belief and not eager to pass it on to others is a phenomenon alien to the earth, where our mania for salvation makes life unbreathable. 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…

It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say ‘we’ with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke ‘others’ and regard himself as their interpreter ―for me to consider him my enemy.