Politics & Power Quote by Conor Cruise O'Brien

“Human nature” is one of politics’ favorite cheat codes: a phrase that smuggles in a claim of universality while quietly naming a tribe. O’Brien punctures that rhetorical inflation. By insisting that “human nature doesn’t include all human beings,” he’s calling out the way intellectuals and leaders use the category to launder their own priorities into inevitabilities. If you can frame your program as an extension of “human nature,” dissenters aren’t just wrong; they’re unnatural.

The barb lands harder because he’s not making a sentimental plea for pluralism. He’s pointing to a blunt sociological fact that political culture often refuses to admit: many people are indifferent to the grand engines of meaning-making - politics, religion, “virtually anything.” That last phrase is doing a lot of work. It’s deliberately excessive, suggesting not just apathy toward institutions but a distance from the very idea that life must be organized around public causes. In a world where parties and churches compete to recruit every citizen into a moral drama, O’Brien reminds you some citizens never audition.

Context matters: O’Brien moved between nationalism and its critique, between belief and disillusion, in a 20th-century Ireland where politics and religion routinely claimed total jurisdiction over identity. His intent isn’t to romanticize disengagement; it’s to warn against politics that presumes total participation and interprets nonalignment as hostility. The subtext: any theory of society that can’t account for the indifferent will end up coercive, because it has to force them to matter.