"Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions"
About this Quote
A common language isn’t just vocabulary; it’s an agreement about reality. Brecht’s line lands like a warning disguised as a sociological truism: when a society fractures into “warring factions,” the first casualty isn’t civility, it’s meaning itself. Words become weapons, signals, passwords. Communication stops being a bridge and becomes a border checkpoint.
The specific intent is political and theatrical at once. Brecht, a Marxist poet and dramatist writing through Weimar chaos, fascism’s rise, exile, and the Cold War’s early tremors, understood that mass politics doesn’t only fight over resources and power. It fights over the story: who counts as “the people,” what “freedom” means, what “order” justifies. If factions are truly at war, they can’t share a “system” because systems require trust and shared reference points. Propaganda thrives on this: not merely persuading you, but making your opponent’s words sound like noise.
The subtext is colder than it first appears. Brecht isn’t pining for national harmony; he’s diagnosing how class conflict and ideological struggle reorganize speech itself. In his epic theater, spectators are meant to notice the machinery of persuasion rather than melt into empathy. This quote performs the same alienation effect: it defamiliarizes everyday misunderstanding as something structural, produced by conflict, not by personal failure.
Read today, it’s less a lament than a metric. If public debate feels like parallel monologues, Brecht suggests the problem isn’t tone. It’s that we’re already living inside factions that treat language as territory to be seized.
The specific intent is political and theatrical at once. Brecht, a Marxist poet and dramatist writing through Weimar chaos, fascism’s rise, exile, and the Cold War’s early tremors, understood that mass politics doesn’t only fight over resources and power. It fights over the story: who counts as “the people,” what “freedom” means, what “order” justifies. If factions are truly at war, they can’t share a “system” because systems require trust and shared reference points. Propaganda thrives on this: not merely persuading you, but making your opponent’s words sound like noise.
The subtext is colder than it first appears. Brecht isn’t pining for national harmony; he’s diagnosing how class conflict and ideological struggle reorganize speech itself. In his epic theater, spectators are meant to notice the machinery of persuasion rather than melt into empathy. This quote performs the same alienation effect: it defamiliarizes everyday misunderstanding as something structural, produced by conflict, not by personal failure.
Read today, it’s less a lament than a metric. If public debate feels like parallel monologues, Brecht suggests the problem isn’t tone. It’s that we’re already living inside factions that treat language as territory to be seized.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|
More Quotes by Bertolt
Add to List
