Politics & Power Quote by Fiona Shaw

There’s a bite in Shaw’s phrasing: “endlessly sanitizing” makes emotional life sound like a hospital corridor, scrubbed down for liability. She’s taking aim at a culture that treats messiness as a PR problem. Not just therapy-speak, but the wider etiquette of public feeling: brands doing “empathy,” institutions issuing polished statements, individuals curating pain into something palatable enough to post. The verb “sanitizing” suggests sterility, but also deodorizing, as if the goal is to remove the smell of conflict so nobody has to sit with it.

The subtext is that this isn’t compassion; it’s risk management. When feelings are edited into safe, pre-approved shapes, what disappears is the information they carry: anger that names a wound, grief that marks loss, shame that signals a violated boundary. Shaw implies that suppression doesn’t neutralize emotion, it redirects it. The energy has to go somewhere, and it often ends up as a vague, simmering resentment that’s easily weaponized.

“Feed a disgruntled nation” lands with political weight without naming a party or policy. Disgruntlement isn’t ideology; it’s mood, atmosphere, a low-grade sense of being managed and unheard. Shaw’s actorly instinct matters here: she understands performance. A nation watching its leaders, media, and even neighbors perform “clean” feeling starts to suspect the whole thing is fake. Cynicism follows, then backlash. The line warns that emotional hygiene, sold as progress, can become kindling for populist anger when people sense their real feelings have been quarantined rather than addressed.