Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Shea

“You are attached to what you attack” lands like a Zen koan with a switchblade in it: the thing you’re swinging at is already wrapped around your wrist. Robert Shea, best known for co-writing Illuminatus! and for his countercultural suspicion of official stories, compresses a whole psychology of obsession into seven words. The barb is that hostility is rarely clean. Attack is attention with adrenaline in it, a kind of intimacy you don’t admit to yourself.

The intent feels diagnostic, not conciliatory. Shea isn’t urging polite tolerance; he’s pointing out how crusades feed on what they claim to purge. The loudest moral outrage can be a form of dependence: the identity you build against something still takes its shape from that enemy. Subtext: your “principles” might be a mask for a craving - for certainty, for conflict, for a stable villain that keeps your own contradictions off the stand. In Shea’s universe, the righteous are often just conspiracy theorists with better lighting.

It also works rhetorically because it flips the power dynamic. The attacker imagines agency; Shea recasts them as tethered, reactive, controlled by the target. That inversion stings because it threatens the self-image of independence that fuels most attacks.

Contextually, it fits a 20th-century landscape where ideology became lifestyle and politics became personality. Whether it’s culture wars, religious polemics, or artistic feuds, Shea’s line predicts the modern loop: outrage becomes a habit, a community, even a brand. The enemy isn’t merely opposed - it’s required.