Politics & Power Quote by Dag Hammarskjold

Hammarskjold slips a quiet provocation into what sounds like reassurance: “Everything will be all right” comes with a deadline, and it’s not set by diplomats or treaties, but by public imagination. The United Nations, he implies, isn’t failing because it’s inherently flawed; it’s failing because people treat it like modern art they don’t “get” - a “weird Picasso abstraction” hanging in someone else’s museum. That jab is doing real work. Picasso stands in for elite culture: admired, distrusted, and often used as shorthand for something deliberately obscure. Hammarskjold is naming the emotional posture that kills collective projects: suspicion mixed with spectatorhood.

The pivot to “a drawing they made themselves” reassigns authorship. A drawing is imperfect, human-scale, obviously made by hands. It invites ownership rather than awe. The subtext is almost democratic in its demand: legitimacy can’t be outsourced upward. If the UN feels distant, it’s because citizens let it become distant, allowing national leaders to use it as a scapegoat when convenient and ignore it when costly.

Context sharpens the stakes. As Secretary-General in the early Cold War, Hammarskjold operated inside a system designed to prevent World War III while constantly being used as a stage for superpower rivalry. His line is both defense and warning: international institutions don’t collapse only from external pressure; they rot when the public decides they’re someone else’s experiment. The irony is that “everything will be all right” depends on people accepting that “all right” is something they have to draw, revise, and keep claiming.