Aging & Wisdom Quote by Wilford O. Cross

Conscience, in Cross's telling, isn't a clean moral compass. It's a storage space. The old attic image is doing the heavy lifting: tucked-away, half-remembered objects you never throw out because they once mattered, or because discarding them would mean admitting you were wrong. By comparing conviction to junk, Cross punctures the flattering story we tell about certainty. Convictions are supposed to be steel. He recasts them as clutter: inert, dusty, and oddly sentimental.

The phrase "sheer conviction" is the sting. It's not conviction tied to evidence, compassion, or lived experience; it's conviction for its own sake, the kind that feels virtuous precisely because it doesn't bend. That "sheer" suggests a stripped-down intensity, like a fabric so thin it becomes see-through. Cross implies that many of the things we label "conscience" are just old positions we collected under pressure - family doctrine, national myths, social scripts - and kept because they gave us a sense of identity.

The subtext is psychological and political: rigid belief doesn't simply guide behavior; it crowds out reflection. An attic can still be useful, but only if you know what's up there and why. Cross isn't arguing for moral emptiness. He's arguing for moral housekeeping: the uncomfortable work of sorting inherited certainties from earned principles. In a culture that often rewards loud certainty over careful judgment, the line lands as a warning: conviction can masquerade as virtue while quietly becoming the debris that blocks ethical growth.