Leadership Quote by Francis Atterbury

Absurdity is Atterbury's lie detector: the more grotesque the conclusion, the more suspicious the premise that birthed it. Coming from an early-18th-century politician and churchman, the line carries the hard-earned impatience of an era drowning in pamphlet wars, factional paranoia, and theological hair-splitting. This is not armchair logic-chopping; it's a survival tool for public life, where bad assumptions metastasize into policies, persecutions, and propaganda.

The sentence works because it flips the usual pecking order. Instead of treating absurd outcomes as merely embarrassing side effects, Atterbury frames them as evidence - not that someone's reasoning slipped, but that the starting point is rotten. It's a rebuke to systems that demand loyalty to a premise even when reality starts screaming. In politics, especially, there's a temptation to "save" the foundational story by patching over the consequences. Atterbury refuses the patch. If your worldview requires increasingly elaborate nonsense to stay intact, the problem isn't the world; it's your worldview.

The subtext is sharper: extremity isn't just a rhetorical flourish, it's a diagnostic. Push a claim to its limits and watch what it produces. When the results look like farce, you don't negotiate with the farce; you interrogate the first assumption everyone agreed not to question. That's a quietly radical move for a man of institutions, because it licenses doubt where institutions often forbid it.