The greatest danger of excesses of excessive irrationality – Orlando, the murder of Jo Cox, a possible Brexit, presidential candidate Trump – is that they divert the attention of the supposedly rational person from themselves. If someone steps into the abyss with the words ‘I think this is fine’, you are quickly inclined to think that you have your own mental affairs in order: ‘What an idiot!’
‘… because there was no room for him in the inn’ tells the Christmas story. We can also understand it this way: unless we know our own inner self first of all a stable, a mess, a mess, our efforts to make reason prevail will be most like a rearrangement of the Titanic’s deck chairs.
The more ridiculous another’s behavior, the more urgent the invitation to know at least as much idiocy within ourselves. Complacency produces no insight. Anyone who thinks they know how things work and should be done, will not light up. While more and more unreasonable people think they have to turn against or defend themselves against ‘dangers from outside’, this seems to me to be above all a pointer to the denied dangers of to become aware of one’s own inner self.
‘Know yourself? If I knew myself I would run fast,” said Goethe. Precisely. That’s what I meant.
