Wit & Attitude Quote by John Updike

Leadership, Updike suggests, isn’t a merit badge; it’s a psychological event. The line pivots on a wicked pairing: “madness or goodness.” Either you’re delusional enough to believe you can shoulder a nation’s grief, or you’re morally compelled to try. Both motives imply an abnormal willingness to absorb blame, anxiety, and the public’s endless dissatisfaction. In a culture that treats leadership as ambition plus résumé, Updike reframes it as a kind of volunteer suffering - closer to martyrdom than management.

The subtext is quietly corrosive. “Volunteers to take upon himself the woe of the people” turns power into a transfer of pain: the leader becomes a container for collective fear and resentment. That’s why the second sentence lands like a shrug with teeth. “Few men so foolish” isn’t just anti-heroic; it’s diagnostic. The scarcity of leaders isn’t because talent is rare, but because the job description is absurd if you truly understand it. Anyone rational, Updike implies, should refuse.

Contextually, this reads like late-20th-century American skepticism: post-assassination politics, post-Watergate cynicism, the growing sense that public life is a machine that grinds down even decent people. “Erratic quality” is the kicker - not “decline,” not “corruption,” but unpredictability. If leadership is mostly undertaken by the unusually driven, unusually virtuous, or unusually unhinged, then the world’s political mood swings start to look less like anomalies and more like a structural feature.