Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Why is it that for the last two or three centuries the educated have been generally wrong and the uneducated relatively right? It seems to me that the cultivated class has been actually more practically and pertinaciously mischievous than the ignorant whom they attempted to instruct. The ignorant would actually have been better off without them. They have been examples not only of the blind leading the blind, but of the blind leading the merely short-sighted. What the educated man has generally done was to ram down everybody's throat some premature and priggish theory which he himself afterwards discovered to be wrong; so wrong that he himself generally recoiled from it and went staggering to the opposite extreme. Meanwhile, the ignorant man reacted differently, as soon as the theory had been rammed down his throat, by practically demonstrating that it made him sick. Such a reaction is purely instinctive, but it indicates a condition of health.
-August 9, 1924, Illustrated London News

No comments:

Post a Comment