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Card #c873IR // #c873Synthesis

Sancho begins as the grounded man: 'Look, your worship, what we see there are not giants but windmills.' By Part 2 he kneels before the Duchess and delivers a full courtly embassy: 'that knight that you see there, the Knight of the Lions by name, is my master... may it please your highness to give him leave that, with your permission, approbation, and consent, he may come and carry out his wishes.' The Duchess marvels that he delivered it 'with all the formalities such messages require.' The skeptic now speaks fluent delusion.

— In our words · Source: Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra)

[Use when]

You are the skeptic in someone else's strong story, or someone is the skeptic in yours. Watch the language: the moment the skeptic starts using the visionary's vocabulary unironically, the infection has taken.

[Why it matters]

Beliefs are contagious through proximity, not argument. Sancho was never persuaded; he was absorbed. He kept his peasant cunning and simply started running Quixote's operating system on top of it. This is how radicalization actually works: not conversion by evidence, but long exposure to someone else's frame.

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