Life & Wisdom Quote by Jared Diamond

The joke lands because it’s structured like a civics lesson and ends as a confession. Diamond starts with the calm, almost antiseptic cadence of an explainer: two-year federal cycles, four-year presidential terms. It’s the voice of a patient public intellectual laying out the mechanics of democracy. Then the punchline flips the premise: elections aren’t framed as accountability but as an obstacle to a certain kind of “progress” - the kind that means tearing down environmental safeguards before voters can interfere.

The intent is less about partisan dunking than about exposing a mismatch between timelines. Environmental protection is slow, cumulative, bureaucratic by design: statutes, regulations, court defenses, agency capacity, scientific review. The dismantling project he alludes to also requires time, but it thrives on speed and distraction - slipping changes through while attention is elsewhere, exhausting institutions with constant churn, betting that the public’s memory won’t outlast the news cycle.

Subtextually, Diamond is pointing at how modern governance can be gamed. You don’t need to “win the argument” against environmental law; you just need enough uninterrupted runway to hollow out enforcement, appoint friendly administrators and judges, and reframe regulation as red tape. The line assumes a political reality where elections are frequent but not necessarily decisive, and where structural sabotage can be more durable than electoral swings.

Context matters: Diamond’s work is steeped in long-term thinking about societal collapse and ecological limits. Here he compresses that worldview into a single bleak irony: the planet’s timelines are geological; our politics runs on quarterly outrage and four-year resets.