"Democracy is an abuse of statistics"
About this Quote
Borges turns a one-line provocation into a trapdoor under modern certainty. Calling democracy "an abuse of statistics" isn’t a cranky dismissal of voting so much as a surgical jab at the fantasy that counting can substitute for thinking. Statistics, in his phrasing, aren’t neutral tools; they’re the alibi. Democracy becomes a ritual where legitimacy is manufactured by arithmetic, as if a majority were a proof and not just a headcount.
The sting is in the word "abuse". It suggests not simple misuse but a structural violence: reducing messy moral questions to quantifiable preferences, compressing conscience into a tally. Borges, a poet obsessed with labyrinths, mirrors, and the limits of knowledge, is suspicious of any system that pretends complexity can be resolved by procedure. In that sense, the line reads less like political theory than metaphysics with teeth: a warning about how modernity confuses measurement with truth.
Context matters. Borges lived through Argentina’s coups, Peronism, and mass politics’ talent for spectacle and coercion. He saw crowds made, not merely gathered; opinion shaped, not merely expressed. So the subtext isn’t elitist sneering at "the people" so much as skepticism toward the machinery that translates people into numbers and then calls the result "the will."
It works because it’s compact and unfair in the way good aphorisms are: it forces you to defend democracy on grounds deeper than winning the count. If democracy is more than statistics, the quote dares you to name what else it is.
The sting is in the word "abuse". It suggests not simple misuse but a structural violence: reducing messy moral questions to quantifiable preferences, compressing conscience into a tally. Borges, a poet obsessed with labyrinths, mirrors, and the limits of knowledge, is suspicious of any system that pretends complexity can be resolved by procedure. In that sense, the line reads less like political theory than metaphysics with teeth: a warning about how modernity confuses measurement with truth.
Context matters. Borges lived through Argentina’s coups, Peronism, and mass politics’ talent for spectacle and coercion. He saw crowds made, not merely gathered; opinion shaped, not merely expressed. So the subtext isn’t elitist sneering at "the people" so much as skepticism toward the machinery that translates people into numbers and then calls the result "the will."
It works because it’s compact and unfair in the way good aphorisms are: it forces you to defend democracy on grounds deeper than winning the count. If democracy is more than statistics, the quote dares you to name what else it is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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