If you are convinced that you have enemies in the world and that they hate you and that they are coming after you, you will eventually convince the world to hate you and come after you. And indeed, you will have enemies in the world. They will hate you for your paranoia and your defensiveness and the way you always lock your doors and the way you constantly plan revenge for some outrage that has yet to happen. Christ said, turn the other cheek. No wonder they crucified him. He didn’t even do them the comfort of striking back at them. He offered them the quintessential liberality of: they don’t know what they’re doing. I say kiss the other cheek, because that covers just about everyone: they don’t know what they are doing.
We claim that our virtue is offended by some action by some inadequate human being out there, somewhere, but the real offense is that we thought anyone should take our virtues seriously or that anyone would think that we actually believe in them for their own sake. Nothing is more external to the soul than virtue, for it is precisely the only thing protecting your soul from the uncomfortable insinuation of others’ mortalities. We would rather die than have them kill us. We would rather kill than have anybody think we were killers.
If it is a conceit to pretend to be smarter than anyone else, it is an even bigger conceit to believe that intelligence is something to be ashamed of. Who do we prefer to kill: those who refuse to bow to our insights, or those who confront us with undeniable evidence of our inadequacies?