Politics & Power Quote by Anais Nin

Nin takes a scalpel to the kind of belonging that asks you to stop thinking. The sting is in “blindly”: she isn’t indicting religion, politics, or aesthetics as such, but the moment they become prepackaged identities you can slip on like a uniform. “Adopt” sounds domestic, even tender, yet she pairs it with “automatons,” a hard mechanical word that turns comfort into captivity. That tonal whiplash is the point. Systems promise meaning; Nin warns they also offer anesthesia.

Her list is strategic. Putting “literary dogma” beside religion and politics collapses the hierarchy of seriousness. It’s a reminder that the same impulse drives the zealot, the partisan, and the art-world gatekeeper: the hunger to outsource uncertainty to a doctrine. Nin wrote from inside the modernist century’s ideological crossfire, when grand narratives (fascism, communism, psychoanalytic schools, even avant-garde movements) recruited total loyalty. As a diarist and novelist obsessed with interior life, she treats the self as a living instrument; any ideology that demands fixed conclusions is, to her, a form of spiritual taxidermy.

The subtext is a defense of experience over allegiance. “We cease to grow” reframes growth as an ethical obligation, not a self-help slogan. Growth requires friction: doubt, contradiction, revision. Blind adoption removes that friction by turning the mind into a machine that repeats approved phrases. Nin isn’t asking for cynicism; she’s asking for permeability. Keep your beliefs, she implies, but keep your nerve endings too.