Today's Warm and Fuzzy Thought

"I've often thought what a pleasant place the world would be if there were no great enthusiasts. How nice to have lived in the eighteenth century where, in a certain society at least, one could consider almost any problem without having continually to make reference to a doctrine. But there's nothing to be done about it. Free inquiry is unfashionable. Faith is in the order of the day: Freud, Marx, Stalin, Jesus... every man can now wear a complete suit of doctrinaire armor..." Getting rather drunk, he continued to denounce the new dark age until he had said all that he felt, pronounced very clearly his hatred of systems and programs, of all selfless leaders, and, far worse, of those vacuous professional followers who scurry like terrified sheep from pillar to post, from Communism to Catholicism, moaning softly, ecstatically, like rutting sheep in the spring, kept always in line by a sharp-toothed dog whose brutal presence is more than compensated for by the divine, aloof yet watchful presence of some good shepherd with his crook. -- Gore Vidal, The Judgment of Paris 1952