Daily Inspiration Quote by Ian Hacking

The line lands like a cool slap: if mass death is the metric, the fetish for high-tech weaponry is irrational. Ian Hacking, a philosopher best known for dissecting how categories and “kinds” get made real through institutions, is doing something similar here with violence. He strips away the aura around certain tools of harm and points to a blunt, ugly fact: lethality is cheap, mundane, and available at the farm supply store.

The specific intent reads as corrective. Hacking isn’t offering a how-to; he’s puncturing the moral theatre that often surrounds debates about weapons, terror, and state security. By invoking “agricultural fertiliser,” he drags the conversation out of the sleek world of engineering and into the prosaic economy of everyday materials. It’s a reminder that the means of destruction don’t always arrive stamped with villainy. Sometimes they’re infrastructure.

The subtext is cynical about our explanations. We like to believe atrocities happen because a uniquely evil object exists, or because a particular technology crossed a threshold. Hacking suggests the opposite: if someone’s “intent on killing,” they’ll route around obstacles. So policy arguments that hinge on a single instrument can become comforting stories we tell ourselves - narratives that locate danger in a gadget rather than in motives, networks, and grievances.

Context matters: late-20th and early-21st century public life repeatedly learned (and re-learned) that improvised explosives could rival or exceed headline-making weapons. Hacking’s sentence uses that knowledge to expose a harder question: if the materials are banal, the real battleground is social and political, not merely technical.