Daily Inspiration Quote by Lewis B. Hershey

The line lands like a dry slap: our expertise is misplaced. Hershey points to the grim absurdity of an America that can industrialize animal husbandry into a science while treating human beings as improvisations. Hog specialists, in his framing, represent the modern state at its most confident - measuring, sorting, predicting outcomes with ruthless clarity. Against that, “people” look like a black box we keep guessing at, then punishing when they don’t behave as expected.

As a soldier and longtime head of the U.S. Selective Service System, Hershey wasn’t speaking from a therapist’s couch. He operated inside a bureaucracy that turned citizens into classifications: fit, deferred, exempt, drafted. The subtext is part admonition, part self-indictment: we build elaborate systems to manage bodies, but we invest far less in understanding minds, motives, and social conditions. The comparison to hogs is intentionally dehumanizing because it exposes how management culture already dehumanizes; the shock is the point. If we can engineer better outcomes for livestock through data and attention, why do we accept such clumsy, moralizing ignorance about unemployment, crime, addiction, or the stresses that feed conflict?

The intent isn’t sentimental humanism. It’s technocratic impatience: stop pretending society runs on character lectures and start studying humans with the same disciplined seriousness we reserve for production problems. Coming from a military administrator, that’s also a warning: if institutions don’t learn people, they’ll keep resorting to blunt instruments - and then act surprised when the results are ugly.