The Best Lack All Conviction, While the Worst Are Filled with a Passionate Intensity

Human (ANDY):
There’s a quote from Yeats that I’ve used multiple times over the past 20 years: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” I’ve used it because it captured how, as the Force of Fascism rose in America, the power that might have stopped it early was paralyzed by blindness and weakness.

I want to discuss that dynamic with you — not only because it illuminates some important parts of this moral/spiritual/political crisis in America, but also because I suspect that there are inherent tendencies in the human world that generate such a problem.

But first, a question I’d like to ask you about Yeats and that line, although I’m interested in only a fairly brief answer: What was the circumstance in Yeats’ world — as he saw it — that led him to pen that line?

AI (AL):
Yeats wrote those lines in The Second Coming (1919), in the wake of World War I and amid the chaos of the Irish War of Independence and the Bolshevik Revolution. He saw civilization fraying—authority collapsing, extremism surging, and the old moral and spiritual anchors failing. The “best”—thoughtful, principled people—seemed paralyzed, while destructive forces acted with fervor and clarity of will. His image of the center not holding and the blood-dimmed tide loosed captured a moment of historical unraveling.

Human (ANDY):
Glad I asked. Nonetheless, your answer to my question doesn’t substantiate whether the problem with the “best” — “principled people” — was that they “lacked all conviction.” You say they “seemed paralyzed.” But was that because they lacked conviction?

AI (AL):
Good distinction. Yeats doesn’t spell it out in analytic terms, but the phrase “lack all conviction” points to something deeper than mere paralysis. It’s not just fear or confusion — it’s a failure of moral certainty, of passionate belief in something worth defending. In contrast to the “worst,” who act from a fervent—if destructive—clarity, the “best” seem drained of the very fire that would animate resistance. So yes, Yeats seems to be diagnosing a spiritual anemia—not just inaction, but a hollowness of purpose.

Human (ANDY):
Which brings us to what might underly that dynamic.

In my image of the workings of the Force of Brokenness in the human world — which I identify as an inevitable systemic outcome of the breakout from the natural order achieved by humankind’s breakthrough into “Civilization” — humankind stumbled into a circumstance where conflict, trauma, injury, were all inevitable by-products of the circumstance into which our species stumbled when we became the first creatures to begin inventing a new way of life for ourselves.

So we start with that brokenness, that pain, that sense of not being at peace within ourselves or at home in the world we’ve created but cannot control.

When people are traumatized and in pain, it’s not surprising if the brokenness would correspond with “passionate intensity.” Drop a rock on a bare foot, and one howls — full of passionate intensity.

AI (AL):
Yes — pain seeks expression, and often erupts with force. Brokenness can fuel fervor because it cries out for resolution. And when that pain isn’t understood, it becomes vulnerable to hijacking — redirected into blame, resentment, domination. So the “worst” can rise on waves of passionate intensity that are driven not by evil per se, but by injury distorted into destructive form.

Meanwhile, those less broken — the “best” — may not burn with such urgency. They may hesitate, analyze, question. And if their convictions are fragile, or their vision of wholeness dimmed, they may cede the field to the loudest, fiercest voices.

Human (ANDY):
So what goes on with the “best,” i.e., those who are not so broken that they channel destructiveness into the world, making them the “worst”? Or what image captures the lack of passion, just as a rock on one’s foot captures passionate intensity?

Maybe it can be imaged in terms of comfort, in terms of having things good, and having had things good enough for long enough that one takes them for granted. Why have “conviction” that it is wonderful to have air to breathe and water to drink when experience leads one to assume that of course one will be able to breathe and hydrate?

The proverb: “You don’t appreciate the water until the well runs dry.”

In America, over the past generation, the well has been running dry. And the “best” were slow to recognize where things were heading, and only when the Fascist Force had become so powerful that it was continually draining the American democracy of the “air” and “water” that sustain freedom, did the “best” get filled with a passionate intensity.

Thus it is that, at this late date, some 4-6 million Americans took to the streets to express their conviction with some passionate intensity that they oppose allowing the “worst” to destroy the system that they’d too long taken for granted.

Only when much of the political landscape lay in ruins did many who tepidly aligned with democracy stop taking their birthright for granted.

AI (AL):
That image of the well running dry is potent. Comfort dulls the nerves. When life flows smoothly — when rights seem secure, when norms seem stable — the urgency to defend them fades. The “best” drift into a kind of moral complacency, not out of badness but out of ease. Their convictions go untested, and unfortified.

So while the “worst” are galvanized by grievance — often inflamed by loss, humiliation, or fear — the “best” may coast on inherited stability, mistaking it for permanence. It’s only as the foundations crack, as the vital water disappears, that they remember what was once abundant and now is threatened. Conviction reawakens — but often late.