"That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness"
About this Quote
Porchia flips a familiar moral reflex: the part of us that won’t be house-trained is usually treated as the dangerous part. He insists it might be the opposite. “Domesticated” does a lot of work here. It’s not just about civilization versus savagery; it’s about usefulness, compliance, and the quiet coercions of social life. To domesticate is to make predictable, to file down the sharp edges until a person fits cleanly into family, church, workplace, nation. Porchia’s provocation is that goodness may be exactly what resists that sanding.
The subtext is an argument with moral bookkeeping. “Evil” is convenient for institutions because it can be named, punished, and managed. “Goodness,” in Porchia’s framing, is less manageable: it’s the unbiddable impulse to tell the truth when lying would be smoother, to refuse cruelty even when cruelty is rewarded, to protect the vulnerable even when the crowd wants a spectacle. That kind of goodness is socially disruptive; it makes enemies; it doesn’t always look polite.
Context matters. Porchia, an immigrant worker-poet writing aphorisms that feel like compressed prayers, lived in a century that got very good at domesticating humans at scale: mass politics, mass war, mass persuasion. In that landscape, “domestication” isn’t a neutral upgrade; it can mean indoctrination, assimilation, the grooming of conscience into obedience. The line’s quiet radicalism is its wager that what refuses to be tamed in us isn’t necessarily appetite or violence, but the stubborn, inconvenient core that won’t sign away its integrity.
The subtext is an argument with moral bookkeeping. “Evil” is convenient for institutions because it can be named, punished, and managed. “Goodness,” in Porchia’s framing, is less manageable: it’s the unbiddable impulse to tell the truth when lying would be smoother, to refuse cruelty even when cruelty is rewarded, to protect the vulnerable even when the crowd wants a spectacle. That kind of goodness is socially disruptive; it makes enemies; it doesn’t always look polite.
Context matters. Porchia, an immigrant worker-poet writing aphorisms that feel like compressed prayers, lived in a century that got very good at domesticating humans at scale: mass politics, mass war, mass persuasion. In that landscape, “domestication” isn’t a neutral upgrade; it can mean indoctrination, assimilation, the grooming of conscience into obedience. The line’s quiet radicalism is its wager that what refuses to be tamed in us isn’t necessarily appetite or violence, but the stubborn, inconvenient core that won’t sign away its integrity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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