Aging & Wisdom Quote by Alva Myrdal

“Barbarism” lands here less as a history-book label than as an alarm bell aimed at polite society. Myrdal, a diplomat who spent years watching the Cold War turn governance into a permanent security briefing, is attacking the comfortingly narrow idea that militarism is just about budgets, uniforms, or foreign policy. Her real target is the seepage: when a state organizes itself around war-readiness, it doesn’t merely stockpile weapons, it rewires norms.

The line “not only… but also” is doing heavy work. Militarized is the obvious charge - armies expand, doctrines harden, deterrence becomes a civic religion. Brutalized is the deeper indictment: everyday life absorbs the logic of force. Public language gets coarser, dissent gets treated as disloyalty, and moral imagination shrinks to what is “necessary” for security. She’s suggesting barbarism can wear a tailored suit: it arrives through procedure, technocracy, and the bureaucratic calm with which violence is planned.

Context matters. Myrdal was a leading voice on disarmament and later a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, speaking from within institutions that claimed to manage conflict rationally. That vantage makes the sentence bite. It’s not a pacifist outside scolding the system; it’s a professional insider warning that the system’s default settings are deforming the civilization it claims to protect.

The intent, then, is preventative: to name the cultural cost early, before brutality becomes background noise - before “defense” becomes a moral exemption slip for everything else.