"He's suffering from Politicians' Logic. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do it"
About this Quote
Antony Jay skewers a familiar public ritual: the performance of urgency masquerading as reasoning. "Politicians' Logic" isn’t a diagnosis of stupidity so much as a critique of incentives. In politics, the intolerable thing isn’t being wrong; it’s being seen as passive. So the syllogism becomes a kind of stage direction: a crisis must have an action, any action will do, therefore pick the nearest available lever and pull hard.
The line works because it mimics the cheap formalism of logic while exposing its absence. The middle term, "this is something", is devastatingly vague. It captures how policy can be chosen for its optics, its speed, its headline-friendliness, rather than its fit. Jay’s joke is that the conclusion feels airtight only because the premises are engineered for momentum, not truth. It’s not reasoning; it’s a bureaucratic magic trick that turns activity into legitimacy.
Jay wrote as a sharp-eyed chronicler of institutions (and as a satirist of managerial culture), and the context matters: late-20th-century democracies were becoming more media-saturated, more risk-averse, more addicted to announcing "measures". The public punishes delay, the press demands "a response", opposition parties smell weakness, and civil servants supply ready-made interventions. The subtext is grim: once action becomes the currency, restraint reads as failure, and careful diagnosis becomes politically unaffordable. Jay isn’t arguing for doing nothing; he’s warning how easily "doing something" becomes a substitute for thinking.
The line works because it mimics the cheap formalism of logic while exposing its absence. The middle term, "this is something", is devastatingly vague. It captures how policy can be chosen for its optics, its speed, its headline-friendliness, rather than its fit. Jay’s joke is that the conclusion feels airtight only because the premises are engineered for momentum, not truth. It’s not reasoning; it’s a bureaucratic magic trick that turns activity into legitimacy.
Jay wrote as a sharp-eyed chronicler of institutions (and as a satirist of managerial culture), and the context matters: late-20th-century democracies were becoming more media-saturated, more risk-averse, more addicted to announcing "measures". The public punishes delay, the press demands "a response", opposition parties smell weakness, and civil servants supply ready-made interventions. The subtext is grim: once action becomes the currency, restraint reads as failure, and careful diagnosis becomes politically unaffordable. Jay isn’t arguing for doing nothing; he’s warning how easily "doing something" becomes a substitute for thinking.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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