Better Fooled Than Suspicious

iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry:

I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick¹. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

---

1. The reference is from Chapter 5 of Howard’s End and is actually called the “want-of-confidence trick,” but the point is the same. ↩

   “You remember how he would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, ‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.”

Share: Delicious | Facebook