Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Hunter

Hunter nails a particular American mood swing: the confidence of institutions when they feel in charge, and the ruthlessness of crowds when they don t. The line is built like a carousel that never stops turning. "At the top" isn t just success; it s moral overconfidence, the belief that power automatically equals competence. So policy becomes a kind of managerial hubris: sweeping rules for "everybody" even when those rules are "bad", because the people writing them are insulated from the fallout.

Then the cycle drops. "At the bottom" flips the same totalizing instinct. If top-down policy is indiscriminate control, cancellation is indiscriminate punishment. Hunter s sting is the symmetry: both ends treat the public as a mass, not a collection of individuals. One side flattens nuance into bureaucracy; the other flattens it into outrage. "Everybody" is the accusation and the punchline.

Calling it "manic-depressive" isn t clinical precision; it s cultural diagnosis. Mania: high-energy certainty, the rush to legislate solutions, to impose order, to declare a new era. Depression: disgust, suspicion, the urge to burn credibility down to the studs. Hunter, a lyricist steeped in cycles (tour life, fads, American myths), frames politics and culture as a feedback loop where moral certainty keeps recycling itself in different costumes.

The subtext is less "people are fickle" than "systems reward extremes". The middle ground - slow reform, earned forgiveness, policy with humility - has no adrenaline, so it rarely gets the mic.