Aging & Wisdom Quote by John Le Carre

There is a deliciously le Carre-ish weariness baked into that phrase "looser forms" - a compliment that lands like a shrug. He is not cheering for democracy as a spotless ideal; he is backing it as a system with slack in the joints, room for error, and crucially, room to breathe. The subtext is a veteran of closed worlds - intelligence services, secrecy cultures, ideological absolutism - admitting that the mess is the point.

"I don't know whether it's age or maturity" is a practiced feint: self-deprecation that lowers the reader's guard while asserting hard-won authority. Age suggests biological drift toward caution; maturity implies moral clarity earned through experience. He refuses to pin it down because the real claim is bigger: people who have lived near power tend to stop fetishizing purity. They start preferring structures that can absorb bad actors without becoming bad actors.

The key provocation is "at any price". Coming from a novelist famous for exposing Western hypocrisy, this is not naive boosterism. It's an alarm. In the post-Cold War, post-9/11 era especially, Western democracies tried to buy security with tighter controls: surveillance, exceptionalism, executive secrecy. Le Carre is flipping the usual bargain. Pay the price in inefficiency, dissent, even occasional embarrassment - because the alternative is the clean, "efficient" state he spent a career portraying as morally radioactive.

The intent is almost parental: stop mistaking discipline for virtue. Choose the system that tolerates untidiness, because it is the only one that leaves space for conscience.