Politics & Power Quote by Jacques Delors

Delors drops the pleasantries and goes straight for the cultural wiring: the U.S., in his telling, runs less on informal reciprocity than on contracts, incentives, and personal lanes. The line lands because it’s framed as “fundamentally,” a word economists use when they want to strip away the charming anecdotes and talk about baseline behavior. He isn’t accusing Americans of being cruel; he’s diagnosing an operating system. In a high-mobility, high-trust-in-markets society, you don’t need your neighbor’s favors as much as you need a working credit score, a functioning service sector, and clear rules for transactions. Help becomes something you outsource, pay for, or formalize.

The subtext is European, and specifically Delors-ian: a social-democratic suspicion that when a society treats mutual aid as optional, it quietly reshapes what citizens think they owe one another. “Don’t go out of their way” is the sting. It suggests not hostility but a default to convenience, efficiency, and self-management - virtues that look like freedoms until the safety net frays and suddenly “independence” means isolation.

Context matters: Delors spent his career defending a model in which solidarity isn’t a private virtue but a public design choice, embedded in welfare states and labor protections. So the remark doubles as a critique of American individualism and a warning about what happens when civic life is left to personal generosity. If favors are rare, politics becomes the only place to demand them - and the stakes of government, inevitably, turn brutal.