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Falser Words Were Never Spoken
BRONXVILLE, N.Y. -- In a coffee shop not long ago, I saw a mug with an inscription from Henry David Thoreau: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”
At least it said the words were Thoreau’s. But the attribution seemed a bit suspect. Thoreau, after all, was not known for his liberal use of exclamation points. When I got home, I looked up the passage (it’s from “Walden”): “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Now Thoreau isn’t quite saying that each of us can actually live the life we’ve imagined. He’s saying that if we try, we’ll come closer to it than we might ordinarily think possible. I suppose that the people responsible for the coffee mug would say that they’d merely tweaked the wording of the original a little. But in the tweaking, not only was the syntax lost, but the subtlety as well.
Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like ... a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius, it suggests that your responsibilities begin and end with your own behavior. It’s apolitical, and a little smug.
Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. ... We need not wait to see what others do.”
Here, Gandhi is telling us that personal and social transformation go hand in hand, but there is no suggestion in his words that personal transformation is enough. In fact, for Gandhi, the struggle to bring about a better world involved not only stringent self-denial and rigorous adherence to the philosophy of nonviolence; it also involved a steady awareness that one person, alone, can’t change anything, an awareness that unjust authority can be overturned only by great numbers of people working together with discipline and persistence.
When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.
My favorite example of the fanciful quotation is a passage that’s been floating around the Internet for years. It’s frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, and said to be an excerpt from his 1994 inaugural address.
“Our deepest fear,” the passage goes, “is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. ... As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Picture it: Mr. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others. It’s hard to imagine it without laughing. Of course, it turns out it’s not actually an excerpt from this or any other known address of Mr. Mandela’s. In fact, the words aren’t even his; they belong to a self-help guru, Marianne Williamson.
Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela — it’s easy to see why their words and ideas have been massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is that they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price.
But ours is an era in which it’s believed that we can reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. So we recast the wisdom of the great thinkers in the shape of our illusions. Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all.
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31 Comments so far
Show All"Falser Words Were Never Spoken"
I think I could find many candidates for the bigger falsehoods. How about "Saddam Hussein is threatening the world with his weapons of mass destruction" or "Change you can believe in".
True, but those were uttered by politicians. The danger of these basterdized slogans, attributed to Gandhi, Thoreau, and Mandela is that they lead people to think that these great men meant something very different from what they actually meant, and lead the well-intentioned but essentially ignorant astray in understanding what civil disobedience is based on and who they really were. It's the same as with many's outrage concerning the bland dummy image of MLK that's been brought to the fore by that new memorial.
But "Change you can believe in" and "Yes we can!" are precisely the sort of feel-good slogans that the author denounces. They provide comfort to those who don't have the courage to admit the true nature of the political predicament we're in by filling them with a sense of personal empowerment.
" They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."
At the same time those charged with this "rebranding" of past roles models have also contracted out the security forces necessary to keep the rest of us from getting anywhere near "having it all". One only has to ponder that pink marble monstrosity from China, now installed in one of national parks, or consider the people arrested for "dancing" at the Jefferson Memorial to realize it's all about the marketing and very little to do with the original message of the people portrayed.
"Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."
Our "heroes" are sanitized for our protection much like the rest of our lives inside the propagando-sphere in the US.
For example:
Salvation - especially that espoused by evangelical Christianity - is easy and quick, all one has to do to receive "quick grace" is say that JC is your lord and savior and voila, even though you are a mass murdering war criminal like W you are AOK!!
This even holds for future sins.
What a great, spiritually painless get-out-of-jail-free card for this the reality TV generation, huh?
So is it any wonder why/how the geniuses of earlier times are made into cardboard cutouts of the human beings they once were?
Wars are video games.
Politics is a spectator sport.
Love is pornography.
Education is test scores.
God is cheap and easily manipulated.
"Salvation - especially that espoused by evangelical Christianity - is easy and quick, all one has to do to receive "quick grace" is say that JC is your lord and savior and voila, even though you are a mass murdering war criminal like W you are AOK!!"
Lol, exactly right. That kind of thinking also ignores what Jesus said in the synoptic gospels about the costs of following him. But the evangelicals hate everything but John and Paul, and would probably string James up by his thumbs and beat him to death for what he wrote. When I finally read Matthew, Mark and Luke, it was a far cry from what I'd been hearing from the preachers bleating at the megachurches and on TV. But people like things simple, I guess.
"They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."
and if we don't have it all its our own fault, we are screw ups, and we need to simply "pick ourselves up by our own boot straps"(which by the way is not possible)"
I'm assuming that Brian Morton is uninformed about Marianne Williamson.
For the record: Nelson Mandela gave a speech in which he quoted Williamson's famous passage: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure...," which is why so many think the quote came from him. Nelson Mandela would not have quoted her, had it not resonated with him on a deep level.
Marianne Williamson also wrote "The Healing of America," which caused many previous fans of her self-help books to freak out and denounce it -- because it really does take a fearless moral inventory of what's wrong with this country, and offers some practical (and to some radical and challenging) suggestions regarding how to move towards peace and justice - integrating feminine with masculine approaches.
One of her ideas - which she has been acting upon - was to create and lobby for a cabinet level Department of Peace.
I urge the author to read "The Healing of America," before unfairly lumping her in with the pithy misquoting bumper sticker manufacturers. Her book sits proudly on the same shelf with Eknath Easwaran's "Ghandi The Man," and "Walden" in my library.
I was expecting a Cheney book review.
This is worse, becasue these trite, new-ageish, narcissisitic mis-quotes (typically seen on the bumper of a white-suburbanite-liberal's Prius as the author noted) are so embraced by what passes for the political left in the USA.
The ' trite, new-ageish, narcissisitic mis-quotes (typically seen on the bumper of a white-suburbanite-liberal's Prius as the author noted) are so embraced by what passes for the political left in the USA.' are all too often mass produced by a profit driven division of a major Corporation that is just out to make a buck.
The social conscious of society is just as manipulated by Corporate Consumerist Capitalism as any other faeet of our society.
pjd has a tendency to use divisiveness in his comments. He once told me that I was not as 'working-class' as the steel workers in his neck of the woods because I was simply just a carpenter. Who F'ing does that? Especially, in which world would an anarchist (which he claims to be) try to create MORE divisions amongst the working-class people? The irony is that pjd sits at his cushy gov't desk job all day trying to tell people who is and isn't 'leftist' and working class.
caught between inheriting lies, and reinventing the wheel, we would be better to reinvent...
the lies we have already been taught have proven deadly...
they are so basic as to appear natural, and benign, but are anything but...
the reach to the deepest levels of our existence: the violent defining of boundaries and claiming of regions and things, the resulting manipulations of social groupings, the poisonous aspects of the workings of metals, the emotions and roles and responsibilities of sex and parenting, the propogation of myths and the associated coercion to adopt...
changes in parent-child teaching are critical to breaking the current cycles...schools are an impediment, rather than a help...
frankly, given current economic and ecologic trends, a number of historical figures, much like historical thinking, in general, need not apply...
the figures mentioned in this article, among others, whether accurately quoted or no, are noted for advocating adherence to a non-violable nonviolence...
that advice only goes so far, and not far enough, given violent activites around us...
there's a point where it doesn't matter who said what before...
we need to turn off our electric devices, come out of our private places and prescribed perceptions, open our eyes and look around, and do our own thinking, and speaking, and acting, now...
Don't worry. Pretty soon our culture will have forgotten all about those "troublesome" writers, speakers, and activists from the past, because nobody will have the ability or inclination to read and study them in between the tweeting and retweeting, ipodding and facebooking. And Big Brother (renamed via focus group) will be much more benevolent, because he'll give you choices. Choose your poison, but don't worry. All these issues are just too complicated. I wonder what the Kardashians are up to?
Great article!
And the truest words allegedly spoken?
"I can always hire half of the poor to kill the other half." - Jay Gould (or so they say)
This is a refreshing article.
It is sad and deplorable that presumably well-meaning moderate progressive liberal thinkers and publishers create and promote such simplified, sanitized, dumbed down, pasteurized, homogenized, processed Inspiration products.
They're an unfortunate counterpoint to the lizard-brained bumper-sticker slogans beloved by reactionary wingnuts and yahoos.
Not long ago the slogan "Visualize Whirled Peas" surfaced in a CD comments thread. As Morton was piqued by slogans that didn't sound quite right, I was similarly bothered by this one when it first surfaced.
It aspired to a non-specific "coolness" or hipness or whatever the present equivalent term for this is nowadays-- a seemingly witty, tongue-in-cheek play on "Visualize World Peace", which is itself substance-free banality. But why perpetuate, much less market, such an empty, pseudo-clever dadaism?
I always dreaded the prospect of running across a bumper sticker, poster, T-shirt, or mug featuring this phrase in a comic-book speech balloon coming from a Kokopelli figure.
One of my favorite Mark Twain growls is, "Mush and milk journalism gives me the fan-tods!"
I agree with the author and other commenters saying, in effect, that mush and milk sloganeering gives us the fan-tods.
Well at the risk of going against the flow, I do not agree with the author's contention that the quotes constitute some kind of fraud. I will grant him the quotes reflect shorter popularized versions but is that version that much different in wording or intent from the actual quote? Is “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined” that much different from “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” I don't think so. And as another commenter has mentioned the quote attributed to Nelson Mandela was used by Nelson Mandela in his inaugural address AND he was quoting the work of Marianne Williamson. There is no deception here. Finally if the author thinks all this constitutes "Falser Words Were Never Spoken", he needs to get out more or turn on the television.
I have to agree with sail2sea. I also disagree with this author.
In Gandhi's quote "Be the change you wish to see in this world" is very profound and wise. "Change yourself and you change thousands" is another one along the same line. If you don't change yourself, why should you expect anyone else to? If you don't have peace inside yourself, how can you expect to demand it from the world? Gandhi changed himself -- and look what happened. He conquered the British hold. Don't flush these wise sayings down the toilet because you don't think they are complete enough -- blame yourself for not taking the time to think about them and understand them.
What strikes me about the Thoreau quotation, the Gandhi quotation, and the Mandela quotation is that three world class, politically active thinkers have their actual remarks lifted out of context, then re-circulated in altered form to create a common, significantly altered substance.
Brian Morton concludes their actual words were "massaged into gauzy slogans. They were inspirational figures, dreamers of beautiful dreams. But what goes missing in the slogans is they were also sober, steely men. Each of them knew that thoroughgoing change, whether personal or social, involves humility and sacrifice, and that the effort to change oneself or the world always exacts a price."
Thoreau, Gandhi, and Mandela "Shorn of their complexities, their politics, their grasp of the sheer arduousness of change, they stand before us now. They are shiny from their makeovers, they are fabulous and gorgeous, and they want us to know that we can have it all."
To me, what this transformation is all about is the ascendancy of 1980's culture war materialism. Here were three historic figures who (like Dr. Martin Luther King) symbolized dissent against the violence and injustices of their respective eras, and who advocated the creative use of nonviolent civil disobedience to bring about progressive societal change.
We are thus presented with heroes of the 60's generation, tweaked and air brushed and reinvented to make the superficial, elite celebrity culture that flourished in the Reagan era appear to be an inevitable evolution, the natural order of things. Things like that do not happen by accident.
Bill from Saginaw
Sometimes the "tweaking" is done by the great man.
Abraham Lincoln said that the Civil War (or, at least, the battle of Gettysburg) was fought so that the government "of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
What he left out was the fact that such a government has never existed.
The elections and the government have always been rigged in favor of the wealthy in these United States.
Francis of Assisi did not write "Make me an instrument of your peace..." Nor did he say "Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words" or "Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."
"They want us to know we can have it all..." But the fact is, we can't and we know that is a fact of life. What we do know is that being a citizen of the United States is no longer a road to a better life than your parents had. It's to be part of the most murderous nation on the face of the earth, a nation that is ruining the world for its own financial and political end and a nation where the ordinary person is ignored and downgraded daily. We cannot, in fact, have it all.
I'm getting more and more comfortable with Herman Melville in these times.
"In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. "
or
"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his whole universe for a vast practical joke.
and finally ...
"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. "
I'm kinda late to this party, but many of my thoughts about this article have already been well articulated. So, I'll just add a quotation I like:
"He, O men, is wisest of you all who has learned, like Socrates,
that his wisdom is worth nothing."
--- Plato