Great faith = great equanimity, great love for the natural unfolding of fate. It’s a quintessentially religious attitude: faith in the eternal, in the beyond, in historical logic or evolution, as if it’s God, with the result that you accept the world as it is. Stalinism? Hitlerism? Pol Pot? The oppression of minorities? The real is rational! Progress works in mysterious ways! Everything is determined, everything is necessary! Inevitable, like logic itself! Quietism, conservatism, is the logical conclusion of this attitude of amor fati. “One truth is clear,” as Pope writes in his Essay on Man “whatever is, is right.” But we all know that this Leibnizian, Hegelian-and Spinozistic-doctrine is not only ethically dubious but downright dangerous: it can be used to justify any sort of injustice. Or, this is the best of all possible worlds. The real is the rational, and the rational is the real. It amounts to the claim that everyone gets his just deserts. Or, since I’m not offended by anything, at least it’s morally and logically problematic. If you think about it, the idea of karma is rather offensive. This book implies that the world is just. The world is more or less just? What a joke. If people find these ideas remotely plausible, it’s because they’re ignorant of the millions, billions, of people who yearn passionately for their dreams but have no chance of achieving them. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’ It’s the fucking American capitalist ideology spiritualized. If you don’t realize your dreams, it’s your own damn fault. Requires no penetration beneath appearances-is in fact the appearance itself. It’s the sort of ideological, individualistic thinking that reconciles people to the social order. The author, Paulo Coelho, isn’t a profound thinker his philosophy is the superficial religious one. I won’t deny that the writing is good-though there’s no characterization, of course it’s a simple allegory-but I will deny that the book deserves its fame. No wonder the book is so popular: it’s self-help in the form of a novel. Cheap New Age “wisdom.” There are no coincidences, everything is meaningful, everyone is special, the universe is teleological, we are all part of the One, each person is the center of the universe, blah blah. If you love yourself you can accomplish anything. Life has meaning, and God cares about you. It’s your mission on earth.” In short, try to achieve your dreams. You just have to read the omens that he left for you.” “There is a force that wants you to realize your Personal Legend.” “Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it’s because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. “To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation.” “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” “God has prepared a path for everyone to follow. Reading The Alchemist, the novel that has sold tens of millions of copies.
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