Politics & Power Quote by Joseph Conrad

Friendship, Conrad suggests, is less a gentle meeting of minds than a recruitment drive run on conviction. The line works because it flips a comforting liberal premise: that open-mindedness attracts, while prejudice repels. In Conrad's view of political and literary life, the opposite often holds. People gather around intensity, not nuance. The "passion of his prejudices" is a brutal phrase: prejudice isn't just a flaw here, it's a fuel source. It generates heat, identity, tribe. Then comes the kicker, "consistent narrowness of his outlook", which treats consistency - usually a virtue - as the thing that makes narrowness socially useful. If you are reliably limited, others can reliably rely on you.

The subtext is an accusation aimed at culture-makers as much as politicians. Conrad is pointing at the machinery of belonging: factions cohere around shared dislikes, clean narratives, and predictable enemies. A writer with a complicated, shifting perspective may be admired, but the one who draws hard borders wins disciples. It's an early diagnosis of what we'd now call audience capture: the rewards go to those who keep delivering the same worldview with maximal emotional charge.

Context matters. Conrad wrote in an era of mass politics, rising nationalism, and a literary marketplace increasingly shaped by public opinion. As an outsider by birth and accent, he understood how groups enforce loyalty tests. The sentence is almost a field note from someone watching salons, newspapers, and parliaments operate on the same principle: certainty sells, and the cost is intellectual breadth.