Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line doesn’t just dunk on capitalism; it stages a psychological autopsy. The target isn’t the market as a neutral mechanism but the moral weather it creates: a world where we stop believing in any leverage except naked incentive and the threat behind it. “Destroyed our belief” is the key verb. Shaw implies a prior era (or at least a prior ideal) in which people could imagine effective power flowing from solidarity, duty, faith, civic virtue, or democratic persuasion. Capitalism, in his telling, doesn’t merely compete with those motives; it corrodes their credibility until they feel like naive props in a rigged play.

The phrase “self interest backed by force” is a compact indictment of how economic logic tends to recruit coercion. Force can be literal (police, prisons, armies protecting property and order) or structural (hunger, debt, the ever-present threat of unemployment). Shaw’s subtext is theatrical: even when society performs moral language, the real engine is coercive bargaining. He’s also skewering the way “realism” gets defined. If the only power we count as “effective” is the kind that pays or punishes, then everything else - compassion, principle, public reason - gets demoted to sentiment.

Context matters: Shaw wrote as a Fabian socialist watching industrial Britain normalize inequality while congratulating itself on progress. His wit is surgical: capitalism’s greatest victory isn’t wealth accumulation; it’s persuading us that cynicism is just common sense.