Life & Wisdom Quote by Hermann Broch

Progress, Broch suggests, doesn’t glide forward on rails; it staggers, blacks out, wakes up with bruises, and calls that learning. The line is calibrated to sound almost consoling, but it’s really an indictment: “madness” isn’t a glitch in history, it’s one of its operating systems. By framing irrational eruptions as a recurring phase, Broch strips modernity of its favorite alibi - that our crises are unprecedented exceptions. They’re patterns.

The craft is in the bitterly pragmatic “so as to.” It implies purpose without granting nobility. Madness becomes history’s crude instrument: war, mass politics, ideological fever, aesthetic cults of violence - all the things the early 20th century specialized in - functioning as brutal experiments that clarify the limits of a society’s self-understanding. The sentence isn’t faith in humanity so much as a theory of how humanity is forced to think: reason is not an innate destination, it’s damage control after collective delirium.

Context sharpens the sting. Broch wrote in the shadow of collapsing empires and the rise of totalitarian movements; “madness” is not metaphorical moodiness but organized frenzy with uniforms, slogans, and paperwork. Calling it a route “to reason” risks sounding like forgiveness, yet the subtext resists that: the “advance a bit” is meager, almost sarcastic. Even when we learn, we learn incrementally, and at a price we keep pretending we didn’t agree to pay.