"We are the world"
About this Quote
A compact sentence that collapses the distance between spectator and stage: we do not stand before a world; we compose it. The line disallows the comfort of blaming institutions, fate, or abstract forces. Whatever we call the world is the sum of our choices, compromises, fears, and inventions. That insistence on complicity runs through Durrenmatt’s work, where catastrophe is rarely an act of God and almost always the product of human logic pushed to its end.
The Visit dramatizes this logic with terrible clarity. A whole town, poor and resentful, convinces itself that murder can be moral if it restores prosperity. No single citizen is the villain; the community’s consensus becomes the machinery of guilt. We are the world, the play suggests, when private rationalizations harden into public order. The Physicists adds a cold-war dimension: knowledge cannot be quarantined from responsibility. Scientists who imagine they serve only truth discover that their discoveries serve power. If their equations change geopolitics, they change the world, and therefore they are the world that results.
Durrenmatt wrote in a postwar, nuclear-shadowed Europe that had learned how ordinary people, following plausible rules, could produce monstrous outcomes. He distrusted tragic heroics and favored grotesque comedy because it shows systems at work, not isolated souls. The phrase carries that irony: the inclusive we promises solidarity while also indicting everyone. It affirms agency and removes alibis. To say we are the world is to admit that the very structures that seem to constrain us are our own constructions, which means they can be altered but also that their harms are our own doing.
There is also a warning about perception. The world appears as we frame it, and the frames we choose rise from our interests and fears. Narratives become institutions, assumptions become laws. Durrenmatt’s art exposes that process and leaves us with an uncomfortable mandate: stop pretending the world happens to us and start owning the world we continually make.
The Visit dramatizes this logic with terrible clarity. A whole town, poor and resentful, convinces itself that murder can be moral if it restores prosperity. No single citizen is the villain; the community’s consensus becomes the machinery of guilt. We are the world, the play suggests, when private rationalizations harden into public order. The Physicists adds a cold-war dimension: knowledge cannot be quarantined from responsibility. Scientists who imagine they serve only truth discover that their discoveries serve power. If their equations change geopolitics, they change the world, and therefore they are the world that results.
Durrenmatt wrote in a postwar, nuclear-shadowed Europe that had learned how ordinary people, following plausible rules, could produce monstrous outcomes. He distrusted tragic heroics and favored grotesque comedy because it shows systems at work, not isolated souls. The phrase carries that irony: the inclusive we promises solidarity while also indicting everyone. It affirms agency and removes alibis. To say we are the world is to admit that the very structures that seem to constrain us are our own constructions, which means they can be altered but also that their harms are our own doing.
There is also a warning about perception. The world appears as we frame it, and the frames we choose rise from our interests and fears. Narratives become institutions, assumptions become laws. Durrenmatt’s art exposes that process and leaves us with an uncomfortable mandate: stop pretending the world happens to us and start owning the world we continually make.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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