Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

Progress, in Bajer’s telling, arrives wearing a uniform. The line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that inventions are born “neutral” and only later corrupted. He’s arguing the opposite: power is opportunistic by design, and war is the fastest institution to recognize what a new tool can do.

The example of ballooning is pointed. Hot-air and gas balloons were 19th-century marvels, marketed as spectacle and scientific triumph. Yet their military utility was obvious almost immediately: reconnaissance, surveillance, signaling. In a single image, Bajer compresses a whole pattern of modernity: wonder becomes instrument, curiosity becomes advantage, and the horizon of human possibility gets measured in tactical terms. It’s not anti-technology so much as anti-innocence.

The subtext is a critique of the state’s claim on innovation. “Immediately takes possession” casts warfare as a kind of squatter: not merely adopting an idea but annexing it, redirecting its meaning. Bajer, writing from a Europe defined by arms races and industrial acceleration, is diagnosing a feedback loop that would soon harden into the logic of the 20th century: research justified by security, security justified by rivals’ research.

The sentence also contains a bitter irony: the very thing that looks like uplift - getting humans into the sky - becomes a better way to see targets. Bajer isn’t forecasting dystopia; he’s naming the habit that makes it feel inevitable.