Justice & Law Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Cioran’s line turns the history of “truth” into a grim little career arc: first it’s an outlaw, then it’s a bureaucrat. The joke is bleak, but it lands because it names a familiar pattern in modern life: ideas that start as scandalous challenges to power often mature into systems that need power to defend them. “Truths” here aren’t metaphysical certainties; they’re social claims that gain traction by upsetting order, then survive by becoming order.

The police aren’t just literal cops. They’re the shorthand for enforcement: law, institutions, norms, the whole apparatus that decides what counts as acceptable reality. A new truth begins as deviance - it “conflicts” with the police because it breaks the script. Think of the avant-garde, political dissidents, early labor movements, queer liberation, even scientific heresies when they collide with gatekeepers. But once the insurgent idea wins, it inherits a problem: it must stabilize itself against rivals, skeptics, and the next wave of insurgents. So it calls the police, sometimes in the name of protecting progress.

Cioran’s specific intent is less to defend rebellion than to poison our faith in moral happy endings. He’s mocking the self-congratulating story that history bends toward enlightenment. The subtext is a warning to anyone intoxicated by being “right”: today’s emancipators can become tomorrow’s hall monitors, and certainty has a built-in appetite for coercion. In Cioran’s worldview, truth isn’t a beacon; it’s a regime change.