Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
Boswell’s Johnson, 1783. 1
Translated.—Whom the Lord wishes to ruin, he first deprives of reason; or, “When God will punish, he will first take away the understanding.”
Geo. Herbert.—Jacula Prudentum.
I came across the above phrase while reading a Story " Macintosh" by Somerset Maugham..
Sometimes I tend to believe that God created social media as an interim step in that process of destruction ..
Step one ..It occurs to the Divine will that a fellow should be finished.
Subsequent steps that follow are:-
He enters the mind of the victim and makes him join a social media group
The victim starts to post sensible --or apparently sensible--things
He gets Likes
Then him imagination runs dry
But he is intoxicated by the initial Likes..
and also starts to delude himself that he is a genius.. Socrates and Shakespeare, Marx and Shankara bundled into one..
He starts to blabber and tilts towards dogmatism and narcissism..
He starts fighting, throwing tantrums
He reaps the fruits of his insane posts in befitting abundance
He starts throwing stones, first pebbles, then boulders, and then huge chunks of rocks at others,
Receives Tit for tat
Sow wind and reap whirlwind
And the fellow is finished off even at a greater pace than the Father in the Heaven expected.