Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Justice is the clean suit everyone claims to wear; arbitrariness is the stained undershirt Burroughs suspects is underneath. "Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary" reads like advice, but it lands as a threat and a diagnosis. Burroughs isn’t celebrating randomness so much as exposing what passes for fairness when systems are stressed, corrupted, or simply uninterested in you as a person.

The line works because it weaponizes a false choice. "Be just" is the civic ideal, the rule-of-law fantasy. "If you can't" is the cold shrug of institutions that always have reasons: not enough time, not enough information, not enough sympathy. Then comes the twist: don’t pretend. If justice is impossible, at least be openly arbitrary. That’s Burroughs’ cynicism: hypocrisy is worse than caprice because hypocrisy demands your consent. Arbitrary power doesn’t ask you to believe; it just acts.

Context matters. Burroughs wrote from a vantage point of courts, police, addiction, and bureaucracy - places where "discretion" is a polite synonym for uneven enforcement. The quote echoes his broader suspicion that control systems thrive on ambiguity: rules exist, but the rules are selectively applied, and that selectivity becomes the real law. His dark logic implies a perverse ethical minimum: transparency, even in unfairness, is preferable to the moral theater of "justice" used to launder prejudice and force.

It’s a line that anticipates contemporary debates about policing, algorithms, and administrative power: when neutrality is a costume, arbitrariness is at least honest about who gets hurt.