Politics & Power Quote by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti doesn’t just distrust ideology; he treats it as a kind of mental vandalism. Calling ideologies “idiotic” is less name-calling than a deliberate rupture with polite philosophy. He’s trying to shock the reader out of the reflex that says: pick a side, adopt a system, join a camp. The line works because it refuses the usual loophole - the comforting idea that surely some ideology (mine) is the enlightened exception. He drags religion and politics into the same indictment, collapsing the hierarchy that lets spiritual people sneer at partisans, and partisans sneer at believers.

The subtext is classic Krishnamurti: the real prison isn’t the doctrine itself but the mind’s addiction to categories. “Conceptual thinking” and “the conceptual word” aren’t attacked because language is bad; they’re attacked because words become substitutes for perception. Once you name a thing - nation, class, faith, even “truth” - you can start defending the label rather than encountering reality. That defense requires an “other,” and division becomes structurally inevitable.

Context matters: Krishnamurti emerged from (and rejected) the early 20th-century spiritual-industrial complex that wanted him as a messiah, then lived through the century’s grand ideological catastrophes - fascism, Stalinism, partition, total war. His impatience reads like someone watching abstractions rack up bodies. He’s pushing a radical ethical wager: if division is manufactured by concepts, then freedom begins not with better ideas, but with seeing how the mind clings to ideas in the first place.