Creativity Quote by John Berger

Berger is yanking a favorite human alibi out from under us: the lazy claim that brutality is just “natural.” The line is framed like an ethical correction, but its real target is rhetorical. When people want permission to harden themselves, they reach for nature-as-excuse: predators, storms, “survival of the fittest.” Berger insists that this is a category error dressed up as realism. Nature contains violence, yes, but not evil - because evil requires a moral imagination, a choice to treat another being as disposable while knowing better.

The subtext is aimed at the stories modern societies tell to make domination feel inevitable. Calling cruelty “natural” does two things at once: it launders human agency and it turns history into biology. If exploitation is simply the way the world works, then no one is responsible, and nothing can be changed. Berger, the artist-critic who spent his life dissecting how we look and what looking does, is saying: watch the metaphors. The moment we read the forest as a courtroom drama with villains, we’re smuggling our politics into the landscape and pretending it came back as a verdict.

Context matters: Berger writes in the long aftershock of the 20th century, when industrialized mass violence demanded new justifications. His sentence is a warning label on those justifications. Don’t blame the wolf for the way humans build slaughterhouses. Don’t cite “nature” to anesthetize conscience. The cruelty is ours; nature is only being made to play defense.