Politics & Power Quote by Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins lands the punchline like a man slipping a whoopee cushion under modern rationality. “Disbelief in magic” isn’t just skepticism about wands and tarot decks; it’s the broader refusal of mystery, coincidence, eros, weird joy - the unruly parts of life that don’t fit spreadsheets. And Robbins’s provocation is that this refusal doesn’t make you more clear-eyed. It just reroutes your hunger for enchantment into institutions that are far less enchanting, and far more dangerous to treat as sacred.

The phrase “force a poor soul” carries the real sneer. The “poor soul” is the dutiful citizen-consumer, convinced they’ve outgrown superstition while quietly practicing a new one: faith in bureaucracy’s benevolence and commerce’s logic. Government and business become the replacement gods - omnipresent, opaque, demanding rituals (forms, metrics, quarterly results), offering a thin promise of salvation (security, growth) that always recedes. Robbins isn’t arguing for literal magic so much as for the psychological necessity of wonder and the cost of misplacing it.

Context matters: Robbins comes out of postwar American abundance and its hangover - the era when corporate life, advertising, and technocratic governance claimed they could manage the human condition. His countercultural fiction treats imagination as an insurgent force. The line works because it flips the smug hierarchy: the “rational” person isn’t liberated from belief; they’ve simply chosen a more socially acceptable fantasy, one that can write laws, move money, and call itself reality.