Aging & Wisdom Quote by Walker Percy

Percy’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered with the calm of someone who’s been watching the symptoms for years. The sting isn’t in the word “deranged” so much as in the qualifier “more deranged than usual”: he treats human confusion as a chronic condition, then points out that the modern era has managed to worsen it precisely while congratulating itself on progress. That inversion is the engine of the quote. Scientific and technological “advances” aren’t denied; they’re indicted as insufficient, even distracting, when they become substitutes for self-knowledge.

The intent is less anti-science than anti-complacency. Percy is calling out a culture that can map the genome, transmit images across the planet, and still fumble the basic questions of meaning, purpose, and moral direction. The subtext is existential and sharply Catholic in its suspicion that a purely material account of the person can’t tell you what to do with being a person. We’re fluent in how, illiterate in why.

Context matters: Percy wrote in the postwar American boom, when consumer comfort and managerial expertise were sold as cures for anxiety. He also wrote as a physician-turned-novelist, steeped in the mid-century clash between behavioral science’s confidence and the individual’s lived, messy interiority. “Who he is” isn’t an abstract riddle; it’s a warning about disconnection - from community, from transcendence, from language that can name suffering without turning it into a technical glitch. The quote works because it refuses the era’s favorite story: that better tools automatically produce better lives.