Time & Perspective Quote by John Locke

Progress, Locke suggests, is less a thunderclap of genius than the slow violence of repetition. A path is not willed into existence by proclamation; it’s worn into the ground by bodies doing the same thing, again and again, until the landscape itself starts cooperating. That’s a deceptively plain image for a philosopher obsessed with how order emerges: in politics, in knowledge, in property, in habit.

The intent is quietly polemical. Locke is arguing against the glamour of the singular act and in favor of the accumulative one. The subtext reads like a theory of legitimacy: what becomes “the way” is often just what enough people have done long enough that it hardens into common sense. That’s how customs become rules without anyone voting on them; it’s also how institutions acquire authority by looking inevitable. Once the path exists, newcomers feel it as guidance, even coercion. Deviating becomes harder, not because it’s immoral, but because it’s inefficient.

Context matters here. Locke writes in the wake of civil war and revolution, when England is renegotiating who gets to govern and why. His liberalism leans on consent, but consent in practice is messy: it’s built out of repeated choices that create expectations, and expectations that start masquerading as nature. The image also nods to his empiricism. Knowledge begins as footfalls: experience, iteration, the mind learning grooves.

It works because it’s democratic and unsettling at once. Anyone can make a path; everyone can get trapped by one.