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The Narrow Man

ROBERT OTTO

I am dogma, conceit, self-pride, indifference-all rolled into one
being, one blind monster. I regard all innovations and science as a
crime before God. I use the Bible and twist the Scriptures to fit my
own purposes. Those who stand up before me, I mark with the curse
of radical. To defy me is to defy the world and all its dictatorial
obligations.

I am proud of my record and have right to boast. It was I who
burned the heretics, persecuted the scientists, and laughed at the
explorers. My will would have drowned Columbus in his own ocean,
muted Luther by his own words, and burned Priestly with his own
chemicals. It is only when man tries to think without bias that I have
fear, but often I can use his reliance on reason to reach my own ends. I
can blind him by his own logical reasoning until he declares religion a
myth and God an irrational if not a non-existent Being. This over-
rational man is my favorite; like me he scorns accepted values-com-
passion, benevolence, justice, faith. In every sense he has become a
narrow man.

I am a stereotype, and proud of it! I exist within no one soul, yet
there is a little of me in everyone. I have lived with kings and paupers,
philosophers and idiots. I can make one seem like the other as easily
as I can make wrong into right. The prejudiced philosopher is indeed
the perfect idiot and I have proven it many times. I have allowed him
to produce racial theories, schemes of government, and social practices
that have plagued the world long after his death.

The twentieth century man, creature of the scientific method and
of mechanization, sometimes believes that I am dead, that I perished
with the signing of the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. He is
convinced that scientists, ministers, and teachers are no longer mocked
and that true progress is unhampered by my actions. Man's com-
placency makes it easier for me to exist, to spread hate, prejudice, and
intolerance throughout the modern world. I pass through the world
unnoticed, as free as I was in the Middle Ages.

My epitaph has not yet been written, nor is it likely to be soon.
By the grace of human fraility, I will survive to plague mankind.

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