Certainty closes the minds of those possessing the Truth from
on High. These darlings of the gods may even feel sorry for those
benighted Unfortunates with the temerity of disagreeing with them
and try to persuade them to see reason to save them from
themselves.
As the blood-stained pages of history amply attest,
dogmatists may try to convert, persecute, torture, or even burn
their victims at the stake for their own good. Dogmatic
certainty can be a very dangerous thing and turn the powerful of
this world into monsters about a difference of opinion.
It is an odd quirk of fate that some dogmatists will try to
convert unbelievers not to convince them but
rather themselves, since converts strengthen the
dogmatists faith in themselves.
Some who adopt such sinister measures of persuasion like burning
at the stake may even be prompted not by certainty, but an inner
doubt so alarming that they must silence it by projecting it onto
their victims to find inner peace to rid the world of these
heretics and their own doubts.
Such persecution, torture, and murder have always been the
stock-in-trade of dogmatists in dealing with dissent, and
especially when they are also demagogues who ascend to power to
impose their will on their people, so that dissent becomes
treason.
Democracies, on the other hand, know that dissent isnt
treason, but the lifeblood of democracies. A government which
oppresses a democratic people is no longer morally legitimate
because it has lost the consent of the governed and rules only by
force, at times with a fig leaf of legitimacy called the Divine
Right of Kings.
Let us consider such a dogmatist-as-tyrant as the very
embodiment of this closed-minded certainty:
He is not someone of humility who realizes his own past errors,
with the confident expectation that he will doubtless err again;
nor someone who modestly affirms his perception of truth and
refuses to call it Divine Revelation.
Nor someone who is aware that when several answers are possible,
his alone need not be true and allows himself to be counseled by
seasoned advisors about which answer is best.
Nor is he someone who realizes that various factors may
predispose him to think as he doeshis upbringing, temperament, age,
race, social class, religion, nationality, profession, or an
uncontrollable lust for power.
Nor someone who realizes that these conditioning factors may be
not merely influencing him, but doing his thinking for him, and so
he adopts a healthy live-and-let-live attitude toward those who
disagree with him.
No, he is none of these, but the Omniscient One, who through
some mysterious dispensation has been vouchsafed from above the
divine prerogative to know what is right and wrong, true and false,
wise and foolish for all men and all women in all times and places.
Nay, he is the Enlightened One Himself who, sitting enthrone...