"A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate"
About this Quote
Better the enemy we can imagine than the one pounding at the door. Cioran distills a political and psychological truth: remoteness softens danger and turns it into an organizing myth, while immediacy strips us of illusions and demands action. A distant foe can be narrated, measured, even exploited; an enemy at the gate exposes weakness, forces hard choices, and risks collapse. The language evokes siege warfare, but the insight reaches well beyond fortifications.
Cioran, a master of aphorism steeped in the ruins and disillusionments of 20th-century Europe, often probed how societies preserve themselves through fictions. A remote antagonist is a gift to rulers and citizens alike. It provides a rallying point, stokes cohesion, and postpones domestic reckonings. Leaders can convert far-off threats into spectacles and slogans, managing fear while avoiding reforms. The closer danger, by contrast, makes distraction impossible: it insists on competence, compromise, and the painful redistribution of resources.
The preference also reveals a familiar habit of mind. Distance permits abstraction and tidy moral narratives; proximity breeds nuance and guilt. We can be heroic from afar, righteous about conflicts on other continents, while balking at conflicts with coworkers, neighbors, or kin. The enemy at the gate implicates us: our neglect, our failures of foresight, our complicity in decay. No wonder the faraway adversary seems preferable.
Cioran is not endorsing cowardice so much as unveiling a mechanism of decay he chronicled elsewhere: the tendency of civilizations to sustain themselves on manageable fears while evading intimate rot. In the digital age, the pattern intensifies. We doomscroll distant crises, perform solidarity, and postpone the stubborn work of mending institutions and relationships close at hand.
The line, spare and fatalistic, carries a challenge. Measure a person or a polity by which enemies they choose to confront. It is easier to fear the horizon; it is braver and more necessary to face what stands at the threshold.
Cioran, a master of aphorism steeped in the ruins and disillusionments of 20th-century Europe, often probed how societies preserve themselves through fictions. A remote antagonist is a gift to rulers and citizens alike. It provides a rallying point, stokes cohesion, and postpones domestic reckonings. Leaders can convert far-off threats into spectacles and slogans, managing fear while avoiding reforms. The closer danger, by contrast, makes distraction impossible: it insists on competence, compromise, and the painful redistribution of resources.
The preference also reveals a familiar habit of mind. Distance permits abstraction and tidy moral narratives; proximity breeds nuance and guilt. We can be heroic from afar, righteous about conflicts on other continents, while balking at conflicts with coworkers, neighbors, or kin. The enemy at the gate implicates us: our neglect, our failures of foresight, our complicity in decay. No wonder the faraway adversary seems preferable.
Cioran is not endorsing cowardice so much as unveiling a mechanism of decay he chronicled elsewhere: the tendency of civilizations to sustain themselves on manageable fears while evading intimate rot. In the digital age, the pattern intensifies. We doomscroll distant crises, perform solidarity, and postpone the stubborn work of mending institutions and relationships close at hand.
The line, spare and fatalistic, carries a challenge. Measure a person or a polity by which enemies they choose to confront. It is easier to fear the horizon; it is braver and more necessary to face what stands at the threshold.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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