Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago draws a brutal moral map of civic behavior, and he does it with the impatience of someone who’s watched “apathy” get romanticized as neutrality. Abstention, in his framing, isn’t a complicated philosophical stance; it’s leisure. The beach line is a needle: it punctures the self-soothing story that not voting is somehow cleaner than choosing among compromised options. He’s not describing a statistical category, he’s assigning social meaning - and shame is part of the toolset.

Then he pivots to the blank vote as a different creature: not disengagement but dissent. The subtext is that modern democracies train citizens to express politics only through pre-approved channels (parties, platforms, candidates), and a blank ballot is a way to show up while refusing the menu. It’s protest that still pays the entry fee. That distinction matters because it preserves legitimacy: you accept the ritual of elections while indicting the available choices.

Context sharpens the bite. Saramago wasn’t a neutral commentator; he was a Communist Party member and a novelist preoccupied with systems that launder power through procedure. In his book Seeing, an epidemic of blank votes sends the state into paranoid meltdown. This quote reads like the thesis statement for that fiction: institutions can tolerate cynicism or laziness, but they panic at organized noncompliance that stays inside the rules.

The genius here is rhetorical triage. He offers citizens two mirrors: one unflattering, one demanding. If you’re going to reject the options, he implies, do it publicly, deliberately, and in a way that forces the system to notice.