Politics & Power Quote by Orson Pratt

Pratt’s sentence is a velvet-gloved absolutism: if the government is authored by an “all-wise, powerful being,” then disagreement isn’t merely politics - it’s a category error. The argument works by front-loading the conclusion into the premise. Define the source as perfect, and every downstream institution inherits that perfection by default. “Must be” does the real coercive labor here; it’s logic posing as inevitability, leaving no room for fallibility, reform, or even good-faith dissent.

The specific intent is apologetic and disciplinary at once. Pratt isn’t just praising divine governance; he’s building a framework in which obedience becomes the rational posture, because divine design is “calculated” for universal welfare. That word matters: it borrows the cool confidence of Enlightenment engineering, suggesting God’s rule is not only sacred but optimized. The subtext is a merger of spiritual authority with administrative competence - revelation as public policy, salvation as social order.

Context sharpens the edge. Pratt, a prominent Latter-day Saint theologian in the 19th century, wrote in an era when new religious movements were publicly contested and internally pressured to consolidate authority. Utopian language about “permanent peace” and “well-being” wasn’t abstract; it was a defense of a community imagining itself as a divinely patterned society amid persecution, migration, and the practical messiness of building institutions on the frontier.

The sentence’s rhetorical seduction is also its tell: by promising universal happiness “of all his subjects,” it preemptively absolves the system of the harms it might produce. If outcomes are guaranteed by a perfect designer, suffering can be rebranded as misunderstanding, disobedience, or necessary refining - anything but evidence against the order itself.