Life & Wisdom Quote by Ezra Pound

A nasty little piece of social psychology dressed up as earthy wisdom: Pound takes prejudice, gives it the sheen of animal intuition, and calls it "sound". The phrasing is doing the laundering. "General loathing" implies a broad, almost democratic consensus; "gang or sect" reduces a targeted group to something suspect and factional; "sound basis" flatters the feeling as rational; "instinct" pulls it out of the realm of argument entirely. If you can brand hatred as instinct, you don’t have to defend it. You just have to feel it.

The subtext is a permission slip. Not merely to dislike an out-group, but to treat that dislike as a form of knowledge - a kind of gut-level epistemology. Pound, an elite modernist who prized hierarchies of taste, often wrote as if culture had predators and prey. Here, "instinct" becomes a shortcut around the messy work of evidence. It also preemptively discredits dissent: if the loathing is "general", anyone who questions it looks naive, sentimental, or complicit.

Context matters because Pound’s biography makes this line read less like an abstract meditation and more like a tell. He wasn’t just a poet with strong opinions; he was a propagandist for Mussolini and a prolific antisemite. In that light, the quote reveals a defensive rhetorical move common to ideological hate: reframe stigma as survival sense. It’s not a thought so much as a reflex trying to become a worldview.