Wit & Attitude Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is picking a fight with the Enlightenment story we still live on: that more thinking, sharper analysis, better models will eventually get us out of the mess. The provocation lands because he’s not dismissing thought as useless; he’s diagnosing it as self-reinforcing. Thought isn’t just a tool we deploy on the world. It quietly becomes the lens that manufactures the world we then scramble to “fix” - often by doubling down on the same habits that produced the crisis.

The line “part of our tradition” is doing heavy work. Bohm is calling out a cultural reflex in modern science and liberal society: treat every conflict as a technical problem, isolate variables, optimize. That tradition has paid enormous dividends, but it also smuggles in a belief that fragmentation is natural - mind versus body, observer versus observed, nation versus nation. In Bohm’s wider work on wholeness and the “implicate order,” those splits aren’t neutral descriptions; they’re active distortions. When you carve reality into competing parts, you generate the very tensions you then interpret as external “trouble.”

His phrasing anticipates the knee-jerk rebuttal (“such a statement is crazy”), which is a subtle critique of intellectual pride: the mind defending itself by insisting it must be the cure. Bohm’s deeper intent is almost therapeutic. He’s suggesting that many social and personal crises are not problems to be solved inside the same mental framework, but patterns to be noticed - especially the automatic, conditioned nature of thought. The subtext: if the instrument is warping the measurement, more measurement won’t save you. Only a different relationship to thinking might.