Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is describing a very modern form of self-sabotage: the mind’s insistence on keeping its favorite story even after reality sends the invoice. As a physicist who spent his career arguing that fragmentation is an illusion we cling to, he’s less interested in scolding “irrational people” than in naming a mechanism. Thought, in his framing, isn’t a neutral tool; it’s a self-protective system with momentum. It generates patterns, then defends them, then tries to negotiate with the consequences it produced, as if it could enjoy the benefits of a worldview without paying its costs.

“Sustained incoherence” lands because it’s clinical and damning at once. “Incoherence” isn’t mere confusion; it’s a mismatch between model and world. “Sustained” adds the sharper accusation: this mismatch is maintained deliberately, through a kind of cognitive lobbying. The subtext is that the mind can become a bureaucracy whose chief job is reputational management - keeping the original assumptions in power while cosmetically addressing outcomes.

Context matters: Bohm wrote and spoke widely about dialogue, collective thinking, and how societies lock into destructive loops. Read this way, the line is also political. Institutions (and media ecosystems) often “struggle against the results” - inequality, polarization, ecological blowback - while refusing to reconsider the deeper premises that generate them. Bohm’s point is not that consequences are unfortunate accidents, but that they’re feedback. When we treat feedback as an enemy instead of information, we get a durable, high-functioning irrationality: a system that can explain everything except its own role in making the mess.