Life & Wisdom Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs detonates the moral comfort blanket with a line that sounds like libertarian self-help and lands closer to a dare. “The only possible ethic” isn’t a proposal so much as a claim that the traditional apparatus of ethics - duty, virtue, social approval - has already collapsed under modernity’s pressures: addiction, control systems, mass media, policing of bodies. If you can’t trust the institutions telling you what “good” is, then morality becomes less a code than a survival technique.

The trick is in “possible.” He’s not saying desire is noble; he’s saying it’s the only thing left that’s verifiable. For a writer obsessed with manipulation - language as virus, power as a kind of invisible administration - wanting becomes an act of epistemology: the one signal you can still read without someone else’s hand on the dial. It’s also a provocation to hypocrisy. Most moralizing, Burroughs implies, is just desire wearing a uniform: what people “should” do conveniently matches what someone wants them to do.

But the sentence is no warm permission slip. Burroughs knew firsthand that “what one wants” can be ugly, compulsive, self-annihilating. That’s the subtextual menace: if you make desire your ethic, you inherit responsibility for the damage desire does. The line works because it refuses to launder freedom into innocence. It’s a bleak kind of honesty - an ethic stripped down to motive, with nowhere to hide behind rules that were always somebody else’s.