Life & Wisdom Quote by Friedrich Durrenmatt

Durrenmatt doesn’t offer a comforting slogan here; he lays a trap. The line reads like an uplifting appeal to unity, but in his dramatic universe - where systems fail, good intentions ricochet, and justice arrives as farce - it’s closer to an indictment. If all of humanity is required to solve humanity’s problems, then the bar is impossibly high. The subtext is that partial solutions, private virtue, and heroic individuals are structurally inadequate when the machinery producing the crisis is collective.

That tension is very Durrenmatt: he distrusted neat moral arithmetic. In plays like The Physicists, knowledge meant to help the world becomes a liability the world can’t safely hold; in The Visit, an entire town discovers how quickly “community” can unify around cruelty when money enters the room. So “all of humanity” isn’t sentimental togetherness. It’s the terrifying observation that responsibility is diffused so widely that it becomes easy to evade - until the consequences land on everyone.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of WWII, nuclear escalation, and Cold War realpolitik, Durrenmatt watched modern catastrophe become bureaucratic, international, and outsourced. The quote pushes against the fantasy that a small committee of experts, a moral elite, or a single nation can patch over what global networks - capital, technology, propaganda, arms - continually generate.

The intent is bracing: if the problems are collective, the solution must be collective too. But the sting is that humanity is rarely capable of acting as a coherent “all.” The line works because it sounds like hope while quietly describing a deadlock.