"Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time"
About this Quote
Capek weaponizes the language of efficiency to make it sound like a kind of moral revelation: any acceleration is progress, and anything that can’t be optimized is an insult to reason. The line’s comic sting comes from its smug certainty. “Any acceleration” is a deliberately absurd absolute, a caricature of technocratic faith that treats speed as self-justifying. By personifying Nature as clueless about “the modern rate of work,” Capek flips the usual hierarchy: the natural world isn’t a grounding standard anymore; it’s an out-of-date employee who failed to keep up with management.
The sharpest cruelty lands on childhood. Calling it “pure nonsense” and “wasted time” isn’t just provocation; it exposes what happens when industrial logic colonizes human development. Childhood, in this frame, is only valuable insofar as it produces adult output. Play, idleness, learning by error - the very processes that make a person - become “untenable” because they don’t pay dividends fast enough. The repeated “waste of time” reads like a memo from a factory floor, not an observation about life.
Context matters: Capek wrote in an interwar Europe intoxicated by machines and assembly lines, but also increasingly anxious about what mechanization does to labor and democracy. (R.U.R. coined “robot” for a reason.) Addressing “Miss Glory” adds a social bite: the ideology is being pitched as modern sophistication, a glamorous identity, not merely an economic theory. The subtext is bleakly funny: once speed becomes virtue, humanity becomes the inefficiency to be corrected.
The sharpest cruelty lands on childhood. Calling it “pure nonsense” and “wasted time” isn’t just provocation; it exposes what happens when industrial logic colonizes human development. Childhood, in this frame, is only valuable insofar as it produces adult output. Play, idleness, learning by error - the very processes that make a person - become “untenable” because they don’t pay dividends fast enough. The repeated “waste of time” reads like a memo from a factory floor, not an observation about life.
Context matters: Capek wrote in an interwar Europe intoxicated by machines and assembly lines, but also increasingly anxious about what mechanization does to labor and democracy. (R.U.R. coined “robot” for a reason.) Addressing “Miss Glory” adds a social bite: the ideology is being pitched as modern sophistication, a glamorous identity, not merely an economic theory. The subtext is bleakly funny: once speed becomes virtue, humanity becomes the inefficiency to be corrected.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
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