Politics & Power Quote by Maynard James Keenan

Keenan’s line lands like a shrug that’s actually an accusation. The phrasing is almost offhand - “But then” and “really” soften the edges just enough to slip past defensiveness, the way a lyric can smuggle a hard truth in under melody. He doesn’t say the government has failed to educate; he implies it never made that bargain in the first place. That’s a darker claim: not incompetence, but design.

The subtext reads like a musician’s lived skepticism about institutions that sell a story of upward mobility while quietly underfunding the tools that make mobility possible. “Focus” is the key word: budgets and policies aren’t neutral; they are attention made concrete. By framing education as a non-priority, Keenan points to a civic economy where an informed public is inconvenient - harder to market to, harder to manage, harder to enlist in simplistic narratives.

Context matters. Keenan comes from the alt-metal tradition where distrust of authority isn’t decorative; it’s a survival language for people watching cultural power concentrate while public life gets hollowed out. The line resonates in an America that loves the myth of meritocracy but treats teachers as expendable and learning as job training at best, culture-war battleground at worst.

What makes it work is its refusal to moralize. It’s not a call-to-action slogan; it’s a cold diagnosis. That restraint is the hook: once you accept the possibility that ignorance can be policy, you start re-reading everything - from textbook fights to student debt - as strategy, not accident.