"Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire"
About this Quote
Belief, La Fontaine implies, is less a searchlight than a mood ring. We don’t “weigh evidence” so much as we recruit it, especially when a story flatters what we want or steadies what scares us. The line is a small, elegant indictment of human reasoning: fear and desire are not distractions from thinking; they are engines that manufacture conviction on demand.
As a 17th-century poet and fabulist, La Fontaine is writing from inside a world of courts, churches, and rumor economies where information travels by whisper, pamphlet, and performance. His fables often expose how easily animals (read: people) mistake appetite for truth, turning private impulses into public certainty. The phrasing is almost cruelly balanced: “fear or desire” covers both ends of the emotional spectrum, suggesting that the same mental shortcut powers paranoia and wishful thinking. If you want it badly enough, you’ll call it “common sense.” If you dread it deeply enough, you’ll call it “obvious.”
The specific intent isn’t to scold individuals for gullibility; it’s to map a social mechanism. Rulers, preachers, and grifters don’t need airtight arguments when they can press on anxieties and hopes already circulating in the crowd. The subtext is political: control the emotional weather, and you can set the forecast of belief.
It still lands because it’s not a take on “ignorance.” It’s a diagnosis of motivated credulity: we believe easily not despite our feelings, but because our feelings are doing the believing first.
As a 17th-century poet and fabulist, La Fontaine is writing from inside a world of courts, churches, and rumor economies where information travels by whisper, pamphlet, and performance. His fables often expose how easily animals (read: people) mistake appetite for truth, turning private impulses into public certainty. The phrasing is almost cruelly balanced: “fear or desire” covers both ends of the emotional spectrum, suggesting that the same mental shortcut powers paranoia and wishful thinking. If you want it badly enough, you’ll call it “common sense.” If you dread it deeply enough, you’ll call it “obvious.”
The specific intent isn’t to scold individuals for gullibility; it’s to map a social mechanism. Rulers, preachers, and grifters don’t need airtight arguments when they can press on anxieties and hopes already circulating in the crowd. The subtext is political: control the emotional weather, and you can set the forecast of belief.
It still lands because it’s not a take on “ignorance.” It’s a diagnosis of motivated credulity: we believe easily not despite our feelings, but because our feelings are doing the believing first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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