"It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil"
About this Quote
Cooper’s line reads like a moral law smuggled into a nature documentary: the more power something has to heal, build, or bind people together, the more catastrophic it becomes when it’s bent off-course. The phrasing matters. “Governing principle of nature” isn’t casual; it gives the claim an icy inevitability, as if corruption isn’t merely a personal failing but a predictable physics of human institutions. He’s not warning that good things can go bad in a vague, fortune-cookie way. He’s ranking danger by capacity: the highest engines of benefit are also the most efficient engines of harm.
The subtext is a critique of “agency” itself: not just individual will, but systems that act through people, like law, religion, patriotism, markets, even language. Cooper, writing in the early American republic, had front-row seats to a young nation’s favorite paradox: ideals of liberty and virtue paired with dispossession, slavery, and speculative greed. His fiction often stages that tension on the frontier, where “civilization” arrives carrying both order and predation.
What makes the sentence work is its refusal to let anyone off the hook by blaming “bad people.” Perverting an agency implies redirecting a tool that was designed - or at least justified - as moral. That’s a sharper accusation: evil isn’t always an alien force; it’s frequently virtue’s infrastructure with the sign flipped. It’s also a warning about reformers and institutions alike: the bigger the promised good, the more vigilance required, because the downside isn’t symmetrical - it’s amplified.
The subtext is a critique of “agency” itself: not just individual will, but systems that act through people, like law, religion, patriotism, markets, even language. Cooper, writing in the early American republic, had front-row seats to a young nation’s favorite paradox: ideals of liberty and virtue paired with dispossession, slavery, and speculative greed. His fiction often stages that tension on the frontier, where “civilization” arrives carrying both order and predation.
What makes the sentence work is its refusal to let anyone off the hook by blaming “bad people.” Perverting an agency implies redirecting a tool that was designed - or at least justified - as moral. That’s a sharper accusation: evil isn’t always an alien force; it’s frequently virtue’s infrastructure with the sign flipped. It’s also a warning about reformers and institutions alike: the bigger the promised good, the more vigilance required, because the downside isn’t symmetrical - it’s amplified.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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