Politics & Power Quote by Enid Nemy

The joke lands because it punctures the UN's favorite self-myth: that an institution built to symbolize equality can be engineered into fairness. Nemy opens with a legend - no corner offices, no obvious thrones - and then calmly reveals the workaround humans always find. If you can't award power through angles and square footage, you do it through light. Bureaucracy doesn't erase hierarchy; it just learns to speak in subtler architectural dialects.

The line about glass is doing double duty. On paper, glass reads as transparency, modernity, openness - the very values the UN likes to project. In practice, glass becomes a measuring stick, literally quantified: five windows versus one. It's petty enough to be funny, but not so petty that it feels implausible. That's Nemy's point. Status isn't only salaries and titles; it's ambient privilege, the everyday cues that tell you where you sit without anyone saying it out loud.

There's also a sly jab at how institutions manage ideals: by turning them into design briefs. The building can be planned to prevent corner-office monarchs, but it can't prevent a window economy. The subtext is that egalitarian symbolism is easy; egalitarian behavior is hard. Nemy, as a journalist, isn't arguing that the UN is uniquely hypocritical. She's showing how power reproduces itself anywhere people share space, and how quickly the moral theater of "rank doesn't matter here" collapses under something as banal as daylight.