Heller was a prophet
I’m always amazed and humbled every time I come across a piece of writing that so perfectly and succinctly predicted the future. It proves to me there is clairvoyance in art. Heller wrote this in the late 1950’s. It was published in 1961.
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
Joseph Heller, Catch-22