Wit & Attitude Quote by Marguerite Young

Young is warning you that politics is, at base, a contest over perception. Hallucination and illusion aren’t just private psychological events in her framing; they’re social technologies. The line pivots on “understand”: not experience, not fear, but recognize the mechanisms by which reality gets edited. Once you can name the tricks - projection, wish-fulfillment, crowd contagion, the comforting narrative that turns complexity into destiny - the automatic impulse to submit to “a leader” starts to look less like loyalty and more like self-hypnosis.

Her choice of “blindly” is surgical. Leadership isn’t condemned outright; unexamined following is. The quote sets a diagnostic standard for power: before you hand someone your trust, you assess their grasp on reality. “Sane or insane” reads literal, but it’s also a moral-epistemic test: is this person anchored in evidence, limits, and consequence, or intoxicated by grandiosity, paranoia, and the thrill of certainty? Young’s sting is that charisma often mimics clarity; the most persuasive figures can be the least stable, and instability can be contagious.

“Over the abyss” supplies the stakes. This isn’t salon skepticism; it’s a cliff-edge moment where collective delusion has real casualties. Coming from a 20th-century American novelist who lived through mass propaganda, war, and the cult-of-personality century, the subtext is bleakly practical: the safeguard against authoritarian spellcraft isn’t cynicism. It’s perceptual literacy.