Nature & Animals Quote by Erwin Schrodinger

State-building, Schrodinger suggests, is less a triumph of intelligence than a dare to biology. The line lands like a warning from a physicist who spent his career studying how order holds against entropy: you can’t scale cooperation without paying for it in self-restraint. His “animal” is us, stripped of romantic exceptionalism. The phrasing refuses the comforting idea that politics is a refined add-on to human nature; it’s a high-wire act performed by a creature still powered by appetite, status-seeking, and fear.

The intent is bracingly functional. “Egoism” isn’t a moral insult so much as a destabilizing force, like heat in a closed system. If individuals keep maximizing private gain inside a shared structure, the structure becomes a machine for converting common goods into personal loot until it breaks. Schrodinger’s choice of “greatly restricting” is the hard part: he’s not talking about minor etiquette or good vibes. He’s pointing toward robust constraints - norms, laws, internalized ethics, and institutional design that makes selfish behavior costly and cooperation rewarding.

Context matters. Mid-20th century Europe had just watched advanced states mobilize mass violence, then rebuild under the pressure of ideological competition. Scientists like Schrodinger were thinking in systems: feedback loops, stability, failure modes. The subtext reads almost cybernetic: without negative feedback (limits on ego), complex social order doesn’t merely get uglier; it becomes nonviable. Civilization isn’t the opposite of animal nature. It’s the cage and the contract that keep the animal alive long enough to call itself a citizen.