Politics & Power Quote by W. H. Auden

America, in Auden's telling, isn't just industrious; it's imagination-poor. The sting in his observation comes from how calmly he frames a quiet tragedy: boredom dressed up as virtue. "Work very hard" is the national alibi, the phrase that turns drudgery into moral accomplishment. The twist is that the problem isn't exploitation alone; it's consent. People aren't merely trapped by need, they are trained to treat the absence of alternatives as normal.

The rich man is the sharpest exhibit. Auden punctures the comforting myth that money buys freedom by showing wealth still orbiting the same ritual: the daily commute, the office, the performance of purpose. The line "he can't think of anything else to do" is the real indictment. It's not laziness or lack of taste; it's a culture that narrows the menu of meaningful life until labor becomes the default identity. The office isn't a place so much as a habit, even an anxiety management system: keep moving, keep producing, don't look too closely at the void.

Context matters: Auden, an English poet who moved to the U.S. in 1939, watched American dynamism up close during an era when corporate life and postwar prosperity were hardening into a civic religion. As a poet, he champions attention, interiority, and the difficult work of valuing experience. Here, he implies that capitalism's deepest victory isn't long hours; it's convincing people they wouldn't know what to do with their freedom.