"Perfection spawns doctrines, dictators and totalitarian ideas"
About this Quote
The dream of perfection has a seductive simplicity: remove messiness and ambiguity, install a flawless order, and all conflict disappears. But a world without cracks leaves no room for dissent, nuance, or the slow work of persuasion. From the craving for a perfect society arise rigid doctrines that brook no deviation, leaders who promise to enforce an ideal, and ideologies that justify coercion in the name of purity. Perfection is a demanding god; it tolerates only one answer and punishes questions as disloyalty.
Antonio Tabucchi knew how this logic unfolds in history and in the human psyche. An Italian deeply engaged with Portuguese culture and the memory of Salazar’s regime, he wrote stories where private lives are entangled with public lies, and where ordinary people discover that moral clarity is not a final formula but a fragile stance taken amid uncertainty. Sostiene Pereira traces a timid journalist’s awakening under censorship, showing how the pressure to conform to a single truth erases the self. Tabucchi’s fascination with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms reflects the opposite impulse: a celebration of plurality, masks, and competing voices that resist any totalizing definition. Where authoritarian systems pretend to be whole and seamless, his literature insists on multiplicity.
Calls for perfection often begin as utopias of unity or efficiency: the purified nation, the classless society, the frictionless market, the optimized algorithm. Once installed as absolutes, they narrow vision, compress language, and turn disagreement into pathology. The results are familiar in the catastrophes of the twentieth century and in softer forms today, when metrics and purity tests tempt institutions to trade depth for control.
Tabucchi’s warning is not a counsel of cynicism but of humility. Democratic life thrives on imperfection, on procedures that slow zeal, on compromises that protect differences, on truths tested rather than decreed. Better a flawed, breathing common world than the immaculate silence that perfection so often requires.
Antonio Tabucchi knew how this logic unfolds in history and in the human psyche. An Italian deeply engaged with Portuguese culture and the memory of Salazar’s regime, he wrote stories where private lives are entangled with public lies, and where ordinary people discover that moral clarity is not a final formula but a fragile stance taken amid uncertainty. Sostiene Pereira traces a timid journalist’s awakening under censorship, showing how the pressure to conform to a single truth erases the self. Tabucchi’s fascination with Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms reflects the opposite impulse: a celebration of plurality, masks, and competing voices that resist any totalizing definition. Where authoritarian systems pretend to be whole and seamless, his literature insists on multiplicity.
Calls for perfection often begin as utopias of unity or efficiency: the purified nation, the classless society, the frictionless market, the optimized algorithm. Once installed as absolutes, they narrow vision, compress language, and turn disagreement into pathology. The results are familiar in the catastrophes of the twentieth century and in softer forms today, when metrics and purity tests tempt institutions to trade depth for control.
Tabucchi’s warning is not a counsel of cynicism but of humility. Democratic life thrives on imperfection, on procedures that slow zeal, on compromises that protect differences, on truths tested rather than decreed. Better a flawed, breathing common world than the immaculate silence that perfection so often requires.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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