Perhaps the most craven attitude of all is the one expressed by the injunction
“don’t be certain.” As stated explicitly by many intellectuals, it is the
suggestion that if nobody is certain of anything, if nobody holds any firm
convictions, if everybody is willing to give in to everybody else, no dictator
will rise among us and we will escape the destruction sweeping the rest of the
world. This is the secret voice of the Witch Doctor confessing that he sees a
dictator, an Attila, as a man of confident strength and uncompromising
conviction. Nothing but a psycho-epistemological panic can blind such
intellectuals to the fact that a dictator, like any thug, runs from the first
sign of confident resistance; that he can rise only in a society of precisely
such uncertain, compliant, shaking compromisers as they advocate, a society
that invites a thug to take over; and that the task of resisting an Attila can
be accomplished only by men of intransigent conviction and moral certainty.