Leadership Quote by Alex Campbell

Progress, Campbell suggests, can be a kind of national sedative: pleasant, padded, and quietly corrosive. The phrase "so-called progress of the affluent society" is doing the heavy lifting here. It doesn’t reject prosperity outright; it questions the moral accounting that treats higher GDP as a proxy for a good life. By calling it "so-called", Campbell punctures the postwar assumption - popular in North American politics by the 1960s and 70s - that consumption equals fulfillment. The target isn’t wealth; it’s the complacency wealth can buy.

His most Canadian move is the careful calibration: "most Canadians", "to a greater or lesser extent". That hedging reads as politeness, but it’s also strategy. A politician can’t accuse voters of spiritual emptiness without softening the blow. He frames the diagnosis as a shared, half-admitted recognition, less a scolding than a gentle insistence that people already feel the mismatch between material comfort and inner traction.

The subtext is a critique of modern life’s trade-offs: community thins, purpose becomes private, time gets eaten by work and status maintenance. "Essential ingredients" stays vague on purpose - faith, civic belonging, family stability, meaningful work, cultural rootedness - because naming them would polarize. Vagueness keeps the coalition intact while letting listeners project their own missing pieces.

Contextually, this sits in the era when Western democracies were discovering that the welfare state and mass prosperity didn’t automatically produce cohesion or contentment. Campbell is positioning politics as responsible not just for distributing goods, but for defending the harder-to-measure conditions of meaning.