Life & Mortality Quote by Max Lerner

Power is the blunt instrument Lerner wants you to stop mistaking for oxygen. The line turns on a deliberate reversal: we can’t live by power, but we can die without it. That’s not a call to passivity; it’s a warning about what happens when power becomes the organizing principle of a society’s imagination. If power is the currency, everything else gets priced out: tenderness, play, dissent, art, the slow work of persuasion. “Brutal and sterile” is a paired diagnosis. Brutal names the obvious violence of domination; sterile names the quieter consequence, a cultural infertility where nothing genuinely new can be made because creation requires risk, ambiguity, and the freedom to fail.

Lerner, a journalist who spent decades watching American politics harden through war, propaganda, and Cold War managerialism, writes like someone allergic to the romance of “strength.” The subtext is anti-fetish: power can win elections and wars, but it can’t generate meaning. When a culture tries to “live by it,” it starts treating human beings as inputs and obstacles, and it treats institutions as weapons rather than caretakers. That’s how you get efficiency without joy, order without legitimacy, greatness without grace.

The last sentence lands like a moral dare. Lerner concedes vulnerability: you might not survive without power. But survival isn’t the highest value if it requires turning life into a permanent contest of control. He’s arguing for a civilization willing to risk loss rather than become the kind of winner no one would want to be.