Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas Szasz

Szasz’s line is a scalpel aimed at a comforting liberal fantasy: that institutions fail because they’re poorly designed, not because ordinary people willingly animate them. “The system isn’t stupid” grants the machine a kind of cold competence. Bureaucracies, especially in medicine and law, do what they’re built to do: classify, manage risk, enforce norms, protect themselves. If outcomes feel cruel or absurd, Szasz implies that’s not a bug; it’s often functional.

Then comes the provocation: “but the people in it are.” He’s not really arguing that individuals are uniquely dumb. He’s attacking the way smart people become intellectually submissive once they’re inside a role. The “stupidity” is moral and epistemic: surrendering judgment to protocol, deferring responsibility upward, repeating sanctioned language (“patient,” “disorder,” “treatment”) as if naming is the same as knowing. It’s the banality of expertise: people trained to think, choosing not to, because the institution rewards compliance and punishes dissent.

The context matters. Szasz spent his career challenging psychiatry’s authority to label deviance as illness and to justify coercion as care. In that fight, “the system” is the psychiatric-legal apparatus that can hospitalize, medicate, and stigmatize with an aura of scientific inevitability. His jab reframes power: the institution doesn’t need to be a cartoon villain; it just needs enough ordinary professionals willing to confuse policy with ethics. The line works because it refuses the alibi of abstraction. If the machine is competent, responsibility returns to the human beings turning the gears.