Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley skewers a whole museum wing of cultural props: figures we invoke to reassure ourselves that order, purity, and wisdom can be embodied in a single, calming person. By shelving “the sage” alongside “the virtuous maiden” and “the enlightened monarch,” he’s not merely calling them old-fashioned; he’s suggesting they function the same way - as stock characters in a repertoire, performed when societies want moral clarity without the mess of real life.

The phrasing does sly work. “Belongs” sounds like a polite cataloging, but it’s really a dismissal. “Obsolete” is the knife: these roles aren’t just rare, they’re incompatible with modern conditions. And “repertory” is key, turning ethics and governance into theater. The sage is not a flesh-and-blood thinker but a costume: serene, above politics, dispensing counsel untouched by self-interest. Cooley’s jab is that we keep longing for this costume even as expertise gets politicized, innocence is recognized as a myth with gendered uses, and power structures make the “enlightened” ruler a fairy tale.

There’s bite in the symmetry: maiden, monarch, sage. Sexual purity, benevolent authority, unimpeachable wisdom - three fantasies that stabilize hierarchies by making them feel natural. If the maiden is virtuous, surveillance becomes protection; if the monarch is enlightened, consent becomes optional; if the sage is above the fray, accountability becomes irrelevant.

Cooley’s intent isn’t to sneer at wisdom itself, but at our craving for simplified archetypes. He’s warning that in modern life, virtue and intelligence are collective, contested, and compromised - and pretending otherwise is just nostalgia dressed as philosophy.