THE “TOWER OF BABEL” SYNDROME
Genesis
11:4
Come, let us build ourselves a city,
with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for
ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
Once I remember walking with
a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it
is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too
often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of
somebody, “That man will get by; he believes in himself.”
I said to him, “Shall I tell
you where the men are who believe most in themselves? I know of men who believe
in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know what flames the
fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the
Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”
He said mildly that there
were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in
lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to
know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he
believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were
hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business
experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that
believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a scoundrel. Actors who
can’t act believe in themselves and debtors who won’t pay.”
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton, pgs.22-23.