“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”

William Butler Yeats’s diagnosis of an age in which the principled lack conviction while the worst act with passionate intensity serves as a frame for the book’s account of belief under conditions of violence and political disillusionment. Its force lies in the contrast: the problem is not simply that destructive commitments are powerful, but that those who might resist them struggle to sustain the symbolic forms of belief that make collective life possible.

A diagnosis of passive violence

The expression appears in a discussion of violence that takes two apparently opposed forms: violent outbursts can express a deeper passivity, while withdrawal into inactivity can itself become a radical gesture. Yeats’s lines sharpen this paradox into a diagnosis of the twentieth century. The ceremony of innocence is overwhelmed, and conviction is distributed perversely: those who might offer resistance falter, while destructive movements gather force and certainty.

The book does not treat this as a simple division between good people and bad people. Its concern is the loss of a shared capacity to believe. The contrast names a political imbalance: restraint and tolerance can become anemic when they cannot sustain a consequential commitment, while fanaticism draws intensity from convictions that have returned in a distorted form.

Innocence as a symbolic performance

To explain the phrase’s “ceremony of innocence,” the discussion turns to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. The wife described there is not simply naive about her husband’s fidelity: she knows of his love for Countess Olenska, yet politely ignores it and stages belief in his fidelity. Innocence, in this account, is an enacted social convention, not a lack of information. People can know what is happening and still maintain the ritual that allows a relationship or social order to continue.

A Marx Brothers scene makes the same structure comic. When Groucho Marx is caught lying, he challenges his audience to choose between their eyes and his words. The absurdity exposes a serious point: a symbolic role or mandate can carry authority beyond the personal reality of the person who occupies it. A judge may be a corrupt or weak individual, yet the office speaks through the judge as the Law. To dismiss the institution as nothing but the flawed person who represents it is to miss how symbolic authority organizes reality.

The same minimum of idealization supports ordinary coexistence. People behave as though they do not know the unidealized facts about their neighbors. Such disavowal is not presented merely as a private mistake; it is part of the symbolic accommodation through which people live together.

Belief, knowledge, and the political contrast

The expression also frames the difference between a fragile but active belief and a certainty that treats its claims as direct knowledge. The book invokes Anne Frank’s belief in humanity’s fundamental goodness amid the horrors perpetrated against Jews during the Second World War. It also recalls American Communists who persisted in their belief in Communism and support for the Soviet Union despite the regime’s appalling reality. In both cases, the text locates the force of belief in the gap between a commitment and the evidence that appears to refute it: belief is not a conclusion derived from positive knowledge but a decision that cannot be secured by a chain of reasons.

That gap gives the expression its contemporary political edge. The best, in Yeats’s formulation, can no longer sustain symbolic innocence or full participation in shared ritual; the worst find intensity in racist, religious, or sexist fanaticism. The book connects this contrast to tolerant but anemic liberals and passionate fundamentalists, while resisting the easy assumption that the latter simply possess stronger faith.

Its account instead argues that fundamentalism converts what has been foreclosed from symbolic belief into an apparent certainty in the Real: the fundamentalist does not believe, but knows directly. Liberal skepticism and fundamentalism therefore share a loss of belief in the proper sense. One mocks religious claims as if they were empirical assertions; the other accepts them as such. Neither makes room for the decision that installs an authentic belief without empirical proof. The expression thus names not only an imbalance of political conviction, but a crisis in the very form of belief.