Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Rutger Bregman

Quote by Rutger Bregman

“Belief in humankind's sinful nature also provides a tidy explanation for the existence of evil. When confronted with hatred or selfishness, you can tell yourself, 'Oh, well, that's just human nature.' But if you believe that people are essentially good, you have to question why evil exists at all. It implies that engagement and resistance are worthwhile, and it imposes an obligation to act.”

Quote by Rutger Bregman

Book:Humankind: A Hopeful History
Create image

Work

Humankind: A Hopeful History

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Rutger Bregman

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Rutger Bregman. more

You May Also Like

“To speak evil' is to speak this fateful, paradoxical situation that is the reversible concatenation of good and evil. That is to say that the irresistible pursuit of good, the movement of Integral Reality - for this is what good is: it is the movement towards integrality, towards an integral order of the world - is immoral. The eschatological perspective of a better world is in itself immoral. For the reason that our technical mastery of the world, our technical approach to good, having become an automatic and irresistible mechanism, none of this is any longer of the order of morality or of any kind of finality. Nor is to speak and read evil the same thing as vulgar nihilism, the nihilism of a denunciation of all values, that of the prophets of doom. To denounce the reality contract or the reality 'conspiracy' is not at all nihilistic. It is not in any sense to deny an obvious fact, in the style of 'All is sign, nothing is real - nothing is true, everything is simulacrum' - an absurd proposition since it is also a realist one! It is one thing to note the vanishing of the real into the Virtual, another to deny it so as to pass beyond the real and the Virtual. It is one thing to reject morality in the name of a vulgar immoralism, another to do so, like Nietzsche so as to pass beyond good and evil. To be 'nihilistic' is to deny things at their greatest degree of intensity, not in their lowest versions. Now, existence and self-evidence have always been the lowest forms. If there is nihilism, then, it is not a nihilism of value, but a nihilism of form. It is to speak the world in its radicality, in its dual, reversible form, and this has never meant banking on catastrophe, any more than on violence. No finality, either positive or negative, is ever the last word in the story. And the Apocalypse itself is a facile solution.”

EvilNihilismImmoralityEschatologyVirtualReality PrincipleApocalypticism
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image

“Το να σκοτώνεις στο όνομα του Θεού ή στο όνομα του μέλλοντος είναι το ίδιο. Όταν η αιτία είναι κάποια ιδεολογία, η ενσυναίσθηση και η συμπόνεια εξαφανίζονται. Σκοτώνουμε ψυχρά, δίχως να επηρεάζεται η συνείδηση, σαν το αδικαιολόγητο έγκλημα ενός ψυχοπαθούς.”

WarEvilCrime
Book:Jo confesso
Create image

“It is a truly superb allegory, this story of the Golden Temple: the allegory of evil's revenge, of destruction as the only way out from beauty and the excess of beauty. But not just beauty. Evil can also befall intelligence. Intelligence protects us from nothing - not even from stupidity. Being intelligent is not enough, then, to prevent one from being stupid, and sometimes intelligence even lives in stupidity's shade, and vice versa. Not only does intelligence not mark the end of stupidity, there is no other way out from excess of intelligence but stupidity. In keeping with an implacable reversibility, stupidity lies in wait for it, as its shadow, as its double. Only thought, only lucidity, which stands as much opposed to intelligence as to stupidity, can escape this trial of strength. But there is no rule, no more for good than for evil: they chase each other endlessly around the Moebius strip. Given the hellish production of collective intelligence, we shall have to reckon in the future with an ever-higher rate of artificial stupidity.”

EvilIntelligenceStupidityRevengePop CultureLucidityMishima
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image