How tenaciously children and adolescents cling to the values, beliefs, abstractions, and generalizations that they learn depends on how disturbed they are at the time the learning occurs. The amount of displaced anger, grief, sexuality, or joy being suppressed at that time has a big effect on both what they learn and how they learn. In any given cul-ture, the brainwashed ones who fit in best (lawyers and teachers) assume much of the leadership. As a culture burns out or fails to renew itself through change, its educational and political leaders are often the least creative members— the ones who cling hysterically to old methods simply because they once worked. The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture.
In Yeats‘ phrase, „The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.“ Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of „shoulds“ is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination.
Brad Blanton, Radical Honesty, Seite 31