Wit & Attitude Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Cioran doesn’t merely distrust society; he treats it like a cosmic accident we’re forced to keep improvising around. Calling society a “disaster” is a deliberately perverse escalation. A disease implies pathology with a diagnosis, maybe even a cure. A disaster is blunter: impersonal, sprawling, and unreformable. You don’t “fix” an earthquake. You survive it, then rebuild on the same fault line because you have nowhere else to go.

The sly brilliance is in the pivot to “stupid miracle.” Cioran refuses both the civic sermon (“society makes us human”) and the revolutionary sermon (“society can be redeemed”). Instead he offers a kind of anti-gratitude: it’s miraculous that life is possible amid the crush of institutions, norms, paperwork, crowds, compromises, and the constant low-grade coercion of belonging, and it’s “stupid” because the miracle doesn’t prove anything noble. It just happens, like a glitch in a broken system. The adjective is a jab at the human tendency to treat mere survival as evidence of meaning.

Context matters: Cioran wrote in the long hangover of Europe’s 20th-century catastrophes, after the grand ideologies had shown their teeth, and after his own youthful flirtations with extremist politics curdled into disgust. That history gives the line its scorched tone: society isn’t the cure for barbarism; it’s often the mechanism that scales it up. The quote works because it offers no exit, only a grimly funny astonishment that we manage to keep breathing inside the wreckage.