Life & Wisdom Quote by Vance Packard

Packard’s jab lands because it isn’t really about computers; it’s about the kind of society that wants to think like them. “Incomprehensible” is a deliberately cold word for a hot human idea: redemption. The line turns Christian theology into a stress test for modern rationality, and it fails on purpose. A computer can flag an error, log it, even “correct” it. What it can’t do is absorb a moral narrative where guilt is not merely a defect but a story that can be rewritten through confession, mercy, and a second chance that isn’t earned in any cleanly measurable way.

The intent reads as cultural criticism in the key Packard made famous: warning that technological systems and the institutions that adopt their logic (marketing, bureaucracy, management) start treating people as predictable bundles of inputs and outputs. Redemption, in that frame, is a bug. It violates the tidy, punitive arithmetic of permanent records, credit scores, dossiers, and reputational drag. It’s not just forgiveness; it’s transformation without a clear algorithm.

The subtext is a shot at techno-utopianism and behaviorism: if you believe humans are fully knowable, fully optimizable, you’ll also believe failure is final, or at least permanently indexed. Christianity’s inconvenient claim is that a person can be more than their data trail. Packard is asking whether a culture that prizes computation is quietly unlearning that older, messier faith in people changing - not by upgrade, but by grace.