Daily Inspiration Quote by Allan Bloom

Bloom is warning that the most dangerous bias isn’t the loud, ignorant kind; it’s the one that wears a lab coat. When “reason” hardens into prejudice, it doesn’t just sit beside bias - it becomes its best disguise. The big rhetorical move here is the reversal: reason, normally cast as the antidote to prejudice, is exposed as prejudice’s potential delivery system. That twist lands because it targets a very modern faith: that if we can justify a belief with arguments, data, or a coherent worldview, it must be clean.

The intent is defensive and combative at once. Bloom isn’t merely defending rational inquiry; he’s policing it. He’s saying the mind can weaponize its highest tool. Prejudice backed by “reason” is worse because it recruits the authority of enlightenment language - objectivity, realism, common sense - and turns dissent into irrationality. Once your bias is “reasonable,” you stop experiencing it as a bias at all. It gains institutional power: it can be taught, legislated, normalized, and enforced as maturity.

The subtext fits Bloom’s larger anxieties in The Closing of the American Mind: a culture that congratulates itself on sophistication while sliding into dogma, especially under the banner of relativism or ideologically frozen certainties. He’s pointing at the smugness of the educated class as much as at any particular political camp. The line also carries a moral challenge: reason isn’t a possession but a discipline. If it stops interrogating itself, it stops liberating and starts sentencing.