"So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong"
About this Quote
Earnestness is Bagehot's chosen villain: not cynicism, not corruption, but the morally certain temperament that treats disagreement as an offense demanding correction. The line is built like a trapdoor. He grants believers both "judgment" and "conscience" - the very faculties we trust to restrain cruelty - then shows how faith in a cause can override them anyway. The word "wish" matters: punishment is revealed less as a policy debate than a psychological craving, a way to turn inner conviction into social power.
Bagehot wrote as a Victorian liberal watching modern democracy and mass opinion harden into new orthodoxies. Old religious establishments were weakening, but the impulse to enforce communal belief was not. His point is almost clinical: when people are "earnest", they stop seeing opinions as provisional descriptions of reality and start treating them as moral badges. Once that happens, punishing opinions feels like protecting the good, even when it violates the very ethics the believers claim to uphold.
The subtext is a warning about the stability of intolerance across ideologies. Swap out theology for nationalism, reform movements, or today's algorithm-fed certainties, and the mechanism holds: the righteous don't need to be persuaded that censorship is wise or just; they only need to feel that dissent threatens the moral order. Bagehot's grim insight is that persecution often arrives dressed as integrity. The more sincerely people believe, the more readily they rationalize coercion as responsibility.
Bagehot wrote as a Victorian liberal watching modern democracy and mass opinion harden into new orthodoxies. Old religious establishments were weakening, but the impulse to enforce communal belief was not. His point is almost clinical: when people are "earnest", they stop seeing opinions as provisional descriptions of reality and start treating them as moral badges. Once that happens, punishing opinions feels like protecting the good, even when it violates the very ethics the believers claim to uphold.
The subtext is a warning about the stability of intolerance across ideologies. Swap out theology for nationalism, reform movements, or today's algorithm-fed certainties, and the mechanism holds: the righteous don't need to be persuaded that censorship is wise or just; they only need to feel that dissent threatens the moral order. Bagehot's grim insight is that persecution often arrives dressed as integrity. The more sincerely people believe, the more readily they rationalize coercion as responsibility.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
|---|
More Quotes by Walter
Add to List
