People are seduced by their emotional deficiencies,
not by their intelligence: the conmen
Idealists do not know what to do with literature. In truth, they have never known what to do with it. When they confront it, they find themselves in a labyrinth. In every case, they feign before their readers an intelligence they lack, which only appears astonishing to those who, even worse than the idealists themselves, allow themselves to be charmed and fascinated by words that sound appealing simply because they do not understand them. And they fail to understand them because they mean nothing.
The worst thing about an ignorant person is not that they cannot distinguish a circle from a circumference, according to geometry, or an E-sharp from an F-natural, according to the chromatic scale. The worst thing is that they do not allow or tolerate others who are capable of making such distinctions and explaining them.
Literary criticism, especially since the Enlightenment and Romanticism, is oversaturated with people who believe that interpreting literature means writing and publishing "beautiful things" about it—from ectopic quotations of others’ metaphors to self-help phrases that can only flourish in the most basic emotions of a naïve and semantically impoverished third world.
People are seduced by their emotional deficiencies, not by their intelligence. This is well understood by all kinds of sophists, intellectuals, and merchants. And thus, they are led into the labyrinths of the 21st century, ensuring that no one can find their way out.
Individual ignorance leads to collective hypnosis. Because there is something worse than an ignorant person who does not know what literature is: I speak of the impostor who uses literature to deceive potential readers. To exploit literature to swindle others is perhaps as vile as using medicine to deprive a human being of life against their will and knowledge. For to deprive someone of an intelligent life is one of the greatest acts of cruelty and vileness that can occur in this world.
Jesús G. Maestro
