Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?
Interpretation
This quote highlights the danger of ignoring reality in favor of hopeful illusion, which can lead to a life unfulfilled.
Lois McMaster Bujold's quote suggests that a pervasive tendency in human nature is to engage in wishful thinking and willful blindness, especially when confronting difficult truths like mortality. This mindset can result in individuals or even entire societies becoming so preoccupied with evading the concept of death that they overlook the importance of truly living, ultimately leading to a life lacking in meaningful experiences and authentic engagement with the present.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of mindfulness, this quote can remind others to appreciate life rather than fear death.
Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard
Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.
The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.
The elimination of force at all costs is Utopian and the new movement which has arisen in the country and of whose dawn we have given a warning is inspired by the ideals which Guru Gobind Singh and Shivaji, Kamal Pasha and Reza Khan, Washington and Garibaldi, Lafayette and Lenin preached.
The spirit of the kingdom undermines its defenses. People will rise against the king. A new peace is made; holy laws deteriorate. Paris has never before found herself in such dire straits.
Simplicity is the only thing that sufficiently reorients our lives so that possessions can be genuinely enjoyed without destroying us.
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
We are not to preach the doing of good things; good deeds are not to be preached, they are to be performed.
Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.
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