Life & Wisdom Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley’s line flips the standard fear-mongering story about “civilization” on its head. The usual claim is that without social order we’d revert to beasts: snarling, violent, unleashed. He offers a colder, funnier threat: not animality but inertia. “Vegetables” lands as both punchline and diagnosis, an image of passive life that grows but doesn’t choose, exists but doesn’t direct itself. The joke has teeth because it attacks our flattering self-myth. We like to think our deepest layer is fierce and authentic; Cooley suggests the more common baseline is numbness.

The intent is less to praise civilization than to redefine what it actually does. Civilization isn’t just a fence holding back savagery; it’s an engine that generates personhood: language, attention, ambition, taste, and the friction of other people. Strip away those structures and you don’t get primal freedom, you get the couch. The subtext is that the true enemy isn’t violence, it’s drift. A society’s collapse would be tragic not only for its brutality but for its deadened inner life: fewer reasons to speak, to make, to risk being wrong in public.

Cooley, an aphorist with a taste for the dry twist, wrote in a 20th-century atmosphere thick with anxieties about mass culture and conformity. “Vegetables” also hints at the modern dread of being reduced to mere consumption, bodies maintained while minds go slack. It’s a critique of romantic primitivism and a warning about comfort: the opposite of civilization isn’t the jungle. It’s the blank room.