Daily Inspiration Quote by John Maynard Keynes

A three-part insult disguised as a definition, Keynes's line lands because it turns the machinery of respectable schooling into a closed loop of failure. "Inculcation" is the tell: not learning, not discovery, but the force-feeding of doctrine. Education becomes less a public good than a ritual, performed to certify status and obedience rather than cultivate understanding.

The brilliance is in the stacked prepositions: into the indifferent by the incompetent. Keynes isn't merely sneering at students for apathy or teachers for mediocrity; he's describing a system optimized for misalignment. The "incomprehensible" isn't just difficult material. It's knowledge presented without motive, connection, or consequence - abstractions detached from lived problems. The "indifferent" aren't naturally incurious; they're reacting rationally to a curriculum that treats them as containers. And the "incompetent" aren't necessarily stupid; they're professionals trained to transmit, not translate - rewarded for coverage, not clarity.

Context matters. Keynes came of age in the height of British institutional confidence, when elite education (especially the kind that fed the civil service and finance) prized polish, tradition, and exam performance. His own work as an economist was a rebellion against inherited orthodoxies that looked elegant on paper and failed in crises. Read that way, the line is also a warning: when institutions confuse authority with comprehension, they manufacture complacency and then call it merit. The cynicism is surgical because it's aimed at the social contract of expertise itself: who gets to speak, who gets credentialed, and how often the credential becomes a substitute for understanding.