Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Campbell

Computers don’t just calculate in Joseph Campbell’s line; they judge. By likening them to “Old Testament gods,” he reaches for a cultural image of authority that is absolute, impersonal, and famously unbending. The punch of the comparison is in its moral framing: a machine error isn’t portrayed as technical friction but as a kind of condemnation. You didn’t “almost” do it right; you broke covenant with the syntax, and the penalty is immediate.

The wit works because it collapses two very different regimes of obedience into one emotional experience. Anyone who has watched a program fail over a missing semicolon recognizes the feeling: the rules are total, the feedback is severe, and the system doesn’t care that you meant well. “Lots of rules” isn’t simply about complexity; it’s about the asymmetry between the human desire for intention to count and the machine’s refusal to recognize intention at all. “No mercy” is the key phrase. Mercy is what humans ask for when context should matter. Computers, by design, are context-blind unless someone has painstakingly encoded context in advance.

Campbell’s context matters, too. As a mythologist, he spent his career tracing how societies package fear and order into stories about gods. Dropped into the late-20th-century rise of computing, the quip reads less like technophobia than a mythic diagnosis: we were already building new priesthoods (programmers), new scriptures (manuals), and new rituals (commands) to appease an authority that cannot be persuaded, only satisfied.