"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left"
About this Quote
Borges isn’t predicting apocalypse so much as diagnosing habituation: the slow, almost administrative way a society learns to tolerate what would once have been intolerable. The verb choice matters. “Resign himself” isn’t rage or even surrender in a dramatic sense; it’s the tired, daily lowering of the moral bar. Abominations arrive not as singular shocks but as a routine, a schedule. The horror is procedural.
The line lands with Borges’s characteristic austerity: no grand metaphors, just a bleak ledger of what’s left when civility gets ground down. “Soon” adds a nasty acceleration, implying that moral erosion, once started, doesn’t move at a human pace. It compounds. One concession makes the next easier, until the collective imagination can’t picture alternatives.
“Only bandits and soldiers will be left” is the punch of irony and cynicism. Bandits and soldiers look like opposites - outlaw and law, chaos and order - but Borges collapses them into a single future ecosystem: power reduced to predation or sanctioned violence. It’s a warning about how states can start to resemble the criminals they claim to suppress, and how criminality can borrow the aesthetics of authority. The subtext is less “humans are bad” than “systems teach people to accept the bad as normal,” and once normal is redefined, brutality becomes the only durable profession.
Contextually, Borges wrote in a century fluent in uniforms and disappearances, propaganda and bureaucratic cruelty. The quote carries the unease of someone watching modernity perfect the machinery that makes abominations feel ordinary.
The line lands with Borges’s characteristic austerity: no grand metaphors, just a bleak ledger of what’s left when civility gets ground down. “Soon” adds a nasty acceleration, implying that moral erosion, once started, doesn’t move at a human pace. It compounds. One concession makes the next easier, until the collective imagination can’t picture alternatives.
“Only bandits and soldiers will be left” is the punch of irony and cynicism. Bandits and soldiers look like opposites - outlaw and law, chaos and order - but Borges collapses them into a single future ecosystem: power reduced to predation or sanctioned violence. It’s a warning about how states can start to resemble the criminals they claim to suppress, and how criminality can borrow the aesthetics of authority. The subtext is less “humans are bad” than “systems teach people to accept the bad as normal,” and once normal is redefined, brutality becomes the only durable profession.
Contextually, Borges wrote in a century fluent in uniforms and disappearances, propaganda and bureaucratic cruelty. The quote carries the unease of someone watching modernity perfect the machinery that makes abominations feel ordinary.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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