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.
Blind submission in women is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in women as in man.
The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God's will ours.
The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
When the state intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.
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