Life & Wisdom Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt’s jab lands because it flatters no one: either you mythologize the state or you demystify it, and both positions come with consequences. The first group “has no critical acumen” and treats the state like a sacred creature - invisible, eternal, owed obedience. That’s not just naïveté; it’s a political technology. If the state feels mythical, its violence feels like fate, its bureaucracy like nature, its failures like bad weather.

Then comes the colder formulation: the state as “rational fiction.” Durrenmatt isn’t dismissing it as a lie; he’s naming it as a collective story we agree to act as if it’s real because it solves practical problems. Money is a rational fiction. Borders are a rational fiction. Law is a rational fiction. They function precisely because we stop noticing how invented they are. The line “created by man” drags the state back down to human scale, where it becomes criticizable, revisable, and, crucially, blameworthy.

The subtext is aimed at modern Europe’s nervous mid-century aftermath, when states had recently proven they could industrialize both welfare and horror. A Swiss dramatist watching authoritarian mythmaking on one side and technocratic managerialism on the other, Durrenmatt insists on a third posture: lucid participation. Coexistence requires coordination, but coordination without skepticism curdles into worship. His intent is less to weaken the state than to deny it the alibi of inevitability.