Daily Inspiration Quote by Georg Henrik von Wright

Opacity is power, and von Wright is diagnosing a modern coup that doesn’t need tanks. The line turns on a quiet horror: decisions that “substantially affect” ordinary lives are still being made, but the chain of responsibility has dissolved into fog. His phrasing stacks uncertainties - where, by whom, how - to show that the problem isn’t a single bad actor so much as a system engineered to make authorship illegible.

As a philosopher working in the shadow of World War II and the Cold War, von Wright understood that “society” can become a machine whose outputs are rationalized while its operators vanish. The subtext is not nostalgia for some golden age of civic clarity; it’s a warning about a new kind of unfreedom. When causality becomes untraceable, consent becomes theatrical. Elections remain, committees meet, press releases drop, but the lived experience is of being managed by distant processes: bureaucracies, expert panels, corporate supply chains, technocratic institutions. Accountability turns into a scavenger hunt.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to dramatize. “Less and less transparent” is incremental, almost clinical, the language of a trend line rather than a crisis. That’s the point: the takeover is gradual, normalized, wrapped in complexity. Von Wright is pressing a philosophical question with political teeth: if no one can say who decided, can anyone meaningfully contest? In that gap, distrust metastasizes, and the public sphere becomes easy prey for cynicism, conspiracy, and the convenient lie that at least someone is in control.