Politics & Power Quote by Thor Heyerdahl

Heyerdahl is doing something sneakier than preaching peace: he’s trying to disqualify the very grammar of “enemy” by attacking its most convenient prop, the border. As an explorer, his authority doesn’t come from ideology or office but from repeated contact with the world as it is lived and crossed. That’s why he leans on a blunt, almost childlike observation - the line “doesn’t even exist in nature” - to expose how quickly political abstractions harden into moral caricature.

The phrasing is calibrated for discomfort. “Ugly enemy” isn’t descriptive; it’s an x-ray of propaganda. He’s naming the aesthetic dimension of conflict: how nations train citizens to see the other side as not just wrong, but repulsive, a category you can recognize at a glance. Against that, “civilized” becomes a dare. If you claim the title, you don’t get to outsource your ethics to cartography. You have to tolerate complexity and proximity.

Context matters: Heyerdahl’s career was built on contesting inherited assumptions about who met whom, and how cultures travel - famously arguing for improbable connections across oceans. That project implicitly attacks the myth that peoples are naturally sealed into separate, mutually suspicious compartments. The quote’s deeper intent isn’t border abolition so much as moral humility: if your worldview depends on an imaginary line turning strangers into monsters, the problem isn’t the map. It’s the story you need the map to tell.