"We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom"
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A whole empire’s worth of self-deception is packed into that slippery “we.” Benet, a poet steeped in American mythmaking and its moral hangovers, turns a single sentence into an autopsy: the subject isn’t just arrogance, it’s the particular American talent for mistaking capacity for clarity. “Power” here is blunt, material, measurable. “Wisdom” is the opposite: slow, earned, and usually inconvenient. The line works because it refuses ornament. It sounds like a confession spoken after the fact, when the damage has already made the lesson obvious.
The pivot word is “because.” Benet is not merely describing a coincidence between strength and smugness; he’s naming the faulty logic that lets power manufacture its own moral alibi. If you can do something, the thinking goes, you must be the kind of person who should. That’s the subtext: authority doesn’t just coerce; it narrates. It tells a story in which dominance is proof of insight, success is proof of virtue, and outcomes retroactively sanctify the means.
Context matters: Benet wrote in the shadow of world war and modern mass politics, when industrial power and national confidence were colliding with their catastrophic limits. The tone isn’t performative guilt; it’s chastened clarity, the kind that arrives when history stops flattering you. Even now, the sentence reads like a warning label for every boardroom, campaign, and superpower: control can expand faster than comprehension, and the gap is where disasters breed.
The pivot word is “because.” Benet is not merely describing a coincidence between strength and smugness; he’s naming the faulty logic that lets power manufacture its own moral alibi. If you can do something, the thinking goes, you must be the kind of person who should. That’s the subtext: authority doesn’t just coerce; it narrates. It tells a story in which dominance is proof of insight, success is proof of virtue, and outcomes retroactively sanctify the means.
Context matters: Benet wrote in the shadow of world war and modern mass politics, when industrial power and national confidence were colliding with their catastrophic limits. The tone isn’t performative guilt; it’s chastened clarity, the kind that arrives when history stops flattering you. Even now, the sentence reads like a warning label for every boardroom, campaign, and superpower: control can expand faster than comprehension, and the gap is where disasters breed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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