No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke, 1756.

The cruder the manner in which power is exercised by those in authority, and the deeper the pattern of deference implanted in the minds of the powerless, the easier it is for the confidence trickster to mimic and manipulate the characteristics of oppression as he exercises the dark arts of fraud and theft. And who better placed to do that than those most familiar with how arbitrary power is exercised? When the confidence trickster’s mischief was perfectly executed in an ethically flawed dispensation it could, like a work of art, expose the underlying fault lines of colonialism by holding a mirror to the economy and society and revealing its many pressure points.

But it seems that this power is not always honest and without pose. (But this again is one of the hardest tests of the creative individual: he must always remain unconscious, unsuspecting of his best virtues, if he would not rob them of their ingeniousness and untouchedness!)

An ignorant person is always doing something, and yet much is left undone.

If you ignore your promise and go on knowingly, you’re consciously betraying your word and not taking care of the other party.