Justice & Law Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer turns public belief into physics: not a marketplace of ideas but a swinging weight that can’t help but overcorrect. The hook is its cold certainty. By invoking “the same law,” he strips opinion of dignity and agency. People don’t thoughtfully revise; they recoil. When conviction rushes “past the centre of gravity,” it doesn’t stop at moderation out of wisdom. It snaps toward the opposite extreme out of momentum, embarrassment, and the need to cleanse yesterday’s certainty with today’s equally loud reversal.

The subtext is a savage diagnosis of modernity before “modernity” became a buzzword: crowds are reactive systems. What looks like progress is often oscillation dressed up as enlightenment. Even the phrase “true point” carries Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Truth exists, but it’s not where the crowd lives. It’s a resting place approached only “after a certain time,” once exhaustion sets in and the drama of being wrong becomes tolerable. The calm center isn’t triumph; it’s fatigue.

Context matters: Schopenhauer wrote against the era’s optimism about reason, history, and the improving public sphere. He distrusted institutions, mass enthusiasm, and philosophical fashion alike. Read today, the pendulum isn’t just about politics; it’s about discourse itself. Outrage cycles, purges, counter-purges, sudden conversions. His metaphor works because it flatters no one: it implies that our most righteous opinions may be less like moral insight than like inertia seeking its next swing.