Mitchell

“When the citizens of a dominant culture come to believe that the end is near for their way of life, they search for scapegoats—especially if they suspect that they themselves have been the agents of their own cultural decline. Unwilling to look in a mirror, unable to confront their own habits and tastes, these citizens choose to believe that the world they knew has been ripped away from them by stealth and subterfuge. The most insecure and frightened among them will also reach what they think is an obvious conclusion: that democracy, and especially liberal democracy, was the instrument of their culture’s destruction, and so to find salvation and assure their own survival, they must therefore reject democracy.”
― Thomas M. Nichols, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy

“If things happen to us because of pure chance, we have little hope of comprehending, predicting, and controlling our fate. Believing that someone somewhere is in control—even if they don’t have your best interests at heart—is preferable to thinking that the course of your life is dictated by nothing more than chance.”
― Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories

“These values are rooted in a simple moral idea about human capacity—a moral idea about the source of meaning in the individual imagination. This just means that people make up their values, that they aren’t handed down from the past or from on high. This humanist ideal is what intersects and animates liberalism with moral energy. The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.”
― Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism

“If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality.

That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.”
― Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth