A Portrait of Civilized Man (Cioran)

"The interest which civilized man takes in the so-called backward peoples is more than suspect. Since he cannot stand himself any longer, he unloads on them the surplus of evils that crush him; he urges them to taste of his miseries, entreats them to tackle a destiny he can no longer face alone. When he thinks how lucky they are not to have "evolved," he resents them with the resentment of a desperado who has been balked and put to rout. What right have they to stay on the sidelines, outside the process of degradation he himself has endured for so long, from which he cannot extricate himself? Civilization, his product and his folly, seems a punishment inflected on him and he wants to inflict it on others who have so far escaped it. "Come share my calamities; let's be jointly responsible for my hell": this is the meaning of his concern for them, such is the ground of his meddling zeal. Worn by his defects and even more by his "enlightenment," he cannot rest until he has imposed them on people who are happily exempt.
This is the way he acted even at a time when he was not yet "enlightened" nor weary of himself; he surrendered to his own greed, to his thirst for adventure and infamy. The Spaniards, at the height of their power, must have felt as much oppressed by the demands of their faith as by the strictures of the Church. The Conquest was their revenge.
Are you working to convert someone? If you are, it is not to bring about his salvation, but to make him suffer *as you suffer*, so that he will be exposed to the same ordeals and undergo them with the same irritation. Do you watch and pray, torment yourself? Then let the other do the same, let him sigh, howl, thrash about under the same tortures as you. Intolerance is the condition of ravaged minds whose faith derives from a more or less self-inflicted torment which they hope to see generally practiced and institutionalized. Concern for the happiness of others has never been a driving force nor a principle of action; it is fetched up to salve the conscience or to provide a cover of noble excuses: for no matter what action we undertake, the impulse toward it and its completion is almost always shameful. No one can save another, he can save only himself; and he can do it all the better if he disguises as conviction the misery he wants to give away in such abundance. However wondrous it may appear, the urge to proselyte derives none the less from a dubious generosity, worse in effect than patent aggression. Nobody wants to endure such punishment alone, even though it is willingly accepted, nor by himself sustain the yoke he has agreed to wear. The desire for revenge shows beneath the cheerfulness of the missionary and the apostle. People set about converting others not to liberate but to shackle them.
Let somebody be trapped by a conviction and from that moment he will envy you your indecision, your resistance to dogma and slogans, your blissful incapacity to commit yourself. Blushing in secret for belonging to a sect or a party, ashamed of being in possession of a truth and enslaved by it, he resents, not his declared enemies, the prisoners of another truth, he resents you, the Uncommitted, guilty for not chasing after some truth or other. To escape the kind of slavery he has fallen into, perhaps you take refuge in whim or in vagueness? Then he will do everything in his power to stop you, and to keep you in a servitude analogous and, if possible, identical with his. This phenomenon is so universal it goes beyond the province of conviction to include that of fame also."
www.jstor.org/stable/3848222

[@dustash1578]

Should have just uploaded the text with tasteful music. Nonetheless thank you.