Creativity Quote by John Berger

Berger turns compassion into a kind of contraband: not merely discouraged by the world, but structurally incompatible with it. The line is engineered around a chilling premise - “the natural order” runs on “necessity” - and then a pivot that reclassifies compassion as an act of metaphysical sabotage. It’s a rhetorical trapdoor. If you accept the first claim, the second lands with the force of a dare: to be compassionate is to refuse the alibi of nature.

The subtext is classic Berger: suspicion of whatever passes for “natural” when it conveniently flatters power. “Necessity” is the language of systems that want to be mistaken for weather - markets, borders, hierarchies, the quiet brutality of “that’s just how it is.” By staging compassion as “supernatural,” he’s not flirting with piety so much as stripping the secular world of its moral self-confidence. The term doesn’t elevate compassion into a miracle; it indicts the so-called natural order as something less than fully human.

Context matters because Berger’s art and criticism repeatedly interrogate how seeing is trained: what we’re taught to accept, ignore, normalize. In that light, compassion becomes a counter-vision, a way of looking that interrupts necessity’s smooth narrative. The provocation isn’t that compassion is irrational; it’s that rationality, when married to inevitability, becomes a tool for moral anesthesia. Compassion, for Berger, is the one force that can’t be naturalized without being neutralized. It has to feel excessive, disobedient, even impossible - otherwise it’s just sentiment dressed up as virtue.