Aging & Wisdom Quote by Friedrich Schiller

Schiller is taking a scalpel to a culture that has started treating usefulness as a god: not a practical virtue, but a jealous deity demanding sacrifice. The bite is in the sentence’s mock-religious architecture. “Idol,” “service,” “swear allegiance” - these are words of worship and coercion, not calm evaluation. He’s not merely noting that people value efficiency; he’s warning that utility has become an unquestionable moral authority, the standard that polices every other standard.

The subtext is theatrical in the best sense: Schiller stages modern life as a conversion narrative where art, ethics, and imagination are dragged before a tribunal and asked to prove their measurable worth. “All powers” and “all talents” widens the indictment beyond economics into the inner life. If even talent must pledge loyalty to usefulness, then beauty is tolerated only as a tool, intellect only as a productivity hack, character only as a credential. That’s the chilling move: the idol doesn’t ban higher aims, it absorbs them.

Context sharpens the charge. Writing in the late Enlightenment/early modern period, Schiller is watching reason harden into instrumentality: state administration, bourgeois respectability, and emerging market logic begin to reward what can be counted, managed, and deployed. As a dramatist and theorist of aesthetic freedom, he sees what gets lost when art is forced to justify itself in the language of outcomes. The line works because it makes the age’s self-image - rational, progressive, practical - look like a new superstition, just with better bookkeeping.