Justice & Law Quote by Edward Dahlberg

Dahlberg doesn’t flatter the reader with the usual modern fantasy that people are basically reasonable, merely “misinformed.” He starts from a darker, almost comic premise: sanity is the brief exception, not the norm, and death doesn’t reliably sober us up. The line has the sting of an aphorism that wants to be taken as diagnosis, not metaphor. “Mad” isn’t just clinical; it’s moral and social. He’s pointing at the everyday irrationality we normalize because admitting it would collapse the stories we tell about progress, democracy, and personal agency.

The engine here is inversion. We like to imagine justice as the product of clear thinking, education, deliberation. Dahlberg flips it: “Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.” Justice, in this view, isn’t the calm verdict of balanced minds; it’s the compensatory ritual of a species that can’t stop lurching between self-deception and violence. The subtext is that what we call “reason” often arrives late, drafted as a legal brief to justify impulses already spent.

Context matters: Dahlberg wrote in the long shadow of the World Wars and the ideological fever of the 20th century, when mass movements proved how quickly “wits” can be organized into catastrophe. His cynicism isn’t fashionable nihilism; it’s a refusal to romanticize human behavior. The baffling acts of people become legible once you assume disorder is baseline. That’s not an excuse. It’s a warning: institutions of justice exist because we are unstable, not because we are enlightened.