"A sublime faith in human imbecility has seldom led those who cherish it astray"
About this Quote
The line sparkles with dry irony: the people who assume that humans will blunder, misread, and muddle through are rarely disappointed. Calling this stance a "sublime faith" flips religious language on its head. Instead of trusting in providence or progress, it trusts in fallibility. The joke works because it is often true. From speculative bubbles to disastrous wars, from fads to bureaucratic snafus, history offers a long ledger where folly outperforms wisdom as a predictor of outcomes.
Henry Havelock Ellis (often cited as Henry Ellis), a British psychologist and social reformer, wrote many aphorisms that probe human nature with unsentimental clarity. Writing amid the late Victorian and early modern faith in scientific and social progress, he kept a cool eye on our persistent irrationality. "Imbecility" here does not only mean stupidity; it points to the whole suite of cognitive biases, short-term temptations, herd instincts, and self-deceptions that trip us up even when we are intelligent and well intentioned. Expecting those forces to operate is a kind of realism.
The remark has a double edge. On one side, it warns against naive utopianism and credulous trust in leaders, institutions, or markets as if they were rational machines. On the other, it suggests a principle of design: assume error. Good engineering plans for user mistakes; constitutional checks and balances assume ambition and weakness; safety protocols anticipate lapses in attention. A sober estimate of human limits can be profoundly humane because it builds protections around our predictable missteps.
Yet there is a risk in cultivating too much faith in imbecility. Pushed into blanket cynicism, it can excuse complacency, sneer at education, or turn skepticism into fatalism. Ellis’s barb lands best when it acts as a corrective, not a creed: distrust glib promises, look for the ordinary mechanisms of error, and then use that knowledge to make reforms that are robust to the very flaws that make reform necessary.
Henry Havelock Ellis (often cited as Henry Ellis), a British psychologist and social reformer, wrote many aphorisms that probe human nature with unsentimental clarity. Writing amid the late Victorian and early modern faith in scientific and social progress, he kept a cool eye on our persistent irrationality. "Imbecility" here does not only mean stupidity; it points to the whole suite of cognitive biases, short-term temptations, herd instincts, and self-deceptions that trip us up even when we are intelligent and well intentioned. Expecting those forces to operate is a kind of realism.
The remark has a double edge. On one side, it warns against naive utopianism and credulous trust in leaders, institutions, or markets as if they were rational machines. On the other, it suggests a principle of design: assume error. Good engineering plans for user mistakes; constitutional checks and balances assume ambition and weakness; safety protocols anticipate lapses in attention. A sober estimate of human limits can be profoundly humane because it builds protections around our predictable missteps.
Yet there is a risk in cultivating too much faith in imbecility. Pushed into blanket cynicism, it can excuse complacency, sneer at education, or turn skepticism into fatalism. Ellis’s barb lands best when it acts as a corrective, not a creed: distrust glib promises, look for the ordinary mechanisms of error, and then use that knowledge to make reforms that are robust to the very flaws that make reform necessary.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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