"Man is imperfect. The reality he creates is always endangered by man"
About this Quote
Progress, in Duerrenmatt's universe, is a booby-trapped gift from its own inventor. "Man is imperfect" lands like a flat, cold diagnosis, but the second line turns it into a thriller: whatever we build is not merely fragile, it is threatened by the builder. The elegance is in the circularity. Reality is not a stable backdrop; it is a human fabrication, and the same flaws that make creation necessary - greed, fear, vanity, pride - make collapse inevitable.
Duerrenmatt wrote out of a 20th century that treated rational planning like a secular religion and then watched it produce world wars, bureaucratic cruelty, and technologies that outpaced ethics. His plays and novels repeatedly stage systems that look airtight until one selfish choice, one accident, one compromised official reveals the rot. The line isn't asking for cynicism as a mood; it's describing a structural problem: human institutions inherit human limitations. A law, a court, a state, even a shared narrative can be brilliantly designed and still be one bad actor away from catastrophe.
The subtext is almost theological, but without comfort. There is no fall from grace because there was never a state of grace to begin with. What saves the quote from sounding like a generic knock on humanity is its emphasis on endangerment: the threat isn't nature or fate. It's us, sabotaging our own inventions in real time.
Duerrenmatt wrote out of a 20th century that treated rational planning like a secular religion and then watched it produce world wars, bureaucratic cruelty, and technologies that outpaced ethics. His plays and novels repeatedly stage systems that look airtight until one selfish choice, one accident, one compromised official reveals the rot. The line isn't asking for cynicism as a mood; it's describing a structural problem: human institutions inherit human limitations. A law, a court, a state, even a shared narrative can be brilliantly designed and still be one bad actor away from catastrophe.
The subtext is almost theological, but without comfort. There is no fall from grace because there was never a state of grace to begin with. What saves the quote from sounding like a generic knock on humanity is its emphasis on endangerment: the threat isn't nature or fate. It's us, sabotaging our own inventions in real time.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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