"Power is paradoxical"
About this Quote
“Power is paradoxical” lands like a stage direction from Durrenmatt’s theater of moral traps: the moment someone reaches for control, the plot starts slipping out of their hands. Coming from a Swiss dramatist who specialized in grotesque reversals and judicial farces, the line isn’t a tidy aphorism so much as a warning label. Power promises clarity - command, order, consequences you can schedule. Durrenmatt’s work insists the opposite: power multiplies variables. The more authority you hold, the more you become hostage to systems, optics, loyalty tests, and your own need to appear consistent.
The subtext is institutional. In plays like The Visit and The Physicists, “power” isn’t just a strongman’s will; it’s money, public opinion, bureaucracy, and the seductive logic of “necessity.” People in charge don’t simply act; they perform legitimacy. That performance breeds self-entrapment: leaders make compromises to keep power, then use power to justify the compromises. The paradox is that domination creates dependency - on advisers, on threats, on the crowd’s appetite, on the myth of your competence.
Context matters: Durrenmatt wrote in the shadow of World War II and the Cold War, when neutral Switzerland sat uncomfortably adjacent to Europe’s catastrophic proof that rational governance can become mechanized cruelty. His skepticism isn’t nihilism; it’s structural. Power can be used for good, but it rarely stays personal or pure. The minute it becomes effective, it becomes collective, procedural, and finally uncontrollable - a machine that also operates its operator.
The subtext is institutional. In plays like The Visit and The Physicists, “power” isn’t just a strongman’s will; it’s money, public opinion, bureaucracy, and the seductive logic of “necessity.” People in charge don’t simply act; they perform legitimacy. That performance breeds self-entrapment: leaders make compromises to keep power, then use power to justify the compromises. The paradox is that domination creates dependency - on advisers, on threats, on the crowd’s appetite, on the myth of your competence.
Context matters: Durrenmatt wrote in the shadow of World War II and the Cold War, when neutral Switzerland sat uncomfortably adjacent to Europe’s catastrophic proof that rational governance can become mechanized cruelty. His skepticism isn’t nihilism; it’s structural. Power can be used for good, but it rarely stays personal or pure. The minute it becomes effective, it becomes collective, procedural, and finally uncontrollable - a machine that also operates its operator.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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