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Terry Pratchett had something to say about that [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-07-01  

From Guards! Guards! (1989)

A bunch of incompetents no other secret society would touch with a ten-foot Sceptre of Authority. The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret handshake. But incompetents with possibilities, nevertheless. Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He’d take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they’d been given the chance. Give him the ones in which floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and low-grade paranoia.

And:

In fact, he saw it all too clearly. This was the last hurdle. Help their tiny little minds over this, and he held the world in the palm of his hand. Their stupefyingly unintelligent self-interest hadn’t let him down so far, surely it couldn’t fail him now . . . [snip] The air of mean-minded resentfulness thickened noticeably.

Last, but not the end (still in the beginning of the book, in fact):

That was the trouble with wizards, they had to make everything look difficult. All you really needed was willpower. And the Brethren had a lot of that. Small-minded and vitriolic willpower, yes, lousy with malignity maybe, but still powerful enough in its way . . .

You’ll probably be unsurprised to know the Brethren are conned by their leader (the “he” in the quotes above) into summoning dragons.

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