"Getting rid of a delusion makes us wiser than getting hold of a truth"
About this Quote
The line lands like a small act of sabotage against our favorite self-flatteries: it’s not the truth that upgrades you, it’s the humiliating moment you realize you’ve been fooling yourself. Borne isn’t praising ignorance or playing cute with relativism. He’s pointing to the psychology of belief. New “truths” can be collected like souvenirs, neatly filed without changing how a person thinks. A delusion, by contrast, is a load-bearing structure. Remove it and the whole mental house has to be rebuilt.
That’s why the sentence is engineered as a reversal. “Getting hold of a truth” sounds active, heroic, acquisitive - the Enlightenment fantasy of knowledge as property. Borne undercuts that with “getting rid,” a phrase that implies discomfort, loss, even withdrawal. Wisdom here isn’t a trophy; it’s an aftereffect of subtraction. The subtext is moral as much as intellectual: delusions are often convenient, socially reinforced, tied to ego, class, nation, or ideology. Dropping one costs status and certainty. The reward is a sharper relation to reality.
Context matters. Borne wrote as a German-Jewish journalist and polemicist in a Europe rattled by censorship and reaction after the Napoleonic era. In that climate, “truth” could be risky speech, but “delusion” was also the propaganda and self-deception that made repression feel normal. His intent reads as both personal counsel and political critique: progress doesn’t come from discovering one more fact; it comes from puncturing the stories that keep people compliant.
That’s why the sentence is engineered as a reversal. “Getting hold of a truth” sounds active, heroic, acquisitive - the Enlightenment fantasy of knowledge as property. Borne undercuts that with “getting rid,” a phrase that implies discomfort, loss, even withdrawal. Wisdom here isn’t a trophy; it’s an aftereffect of subtraction. The subtext is moral as much as intellectual: delusions are often convenient, socially reinforced, tied to ego, class, nation, or ideology. Dropping one costs status and certainty. The reward is a sharper relation to reality.
Context matters. Borne wrote as a German-Jewish journalist and polemicist in a Europe rattled by censorship and reaction after the Napoleonic era. In that climate, “truth” could be risky speech, but “delusion” was also the propaganda and self-deception that made repression feel normal. His intent reads as both personal counsel and political critique: progress doesn’t come from discovering one more fact; it comes from puncturing the stories that keep people compliant.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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