Politics & Power Quote by Jose Rizal

The sting here is that Rizal flips a familiar colonial complaint into an indictment of the governed as well as the governors. Yes, the state is ignorant of its people, he concedes, but the more damning ignorance runs the other way: a population so disengaged it becomes "an inert mass". It is a devastating metaphor because it strips the public of romantic heroism. "Mass" suggests weight without agency, a body that can be moved, shaped, or crushed, not a citizenry that moves history.

Rizal is writing as a reformist intellectual in late Spanish colonial Philippines, when "government" often meant distant bureaucrats, clerical power, and racialized hierarchy. His point isn't to absolve officials; he allows for "useless" and even "evil" ones. The pivot is strategic. By granting the obvious, he earns room to argue something harder: even "good" officials are structurally doomed when the public does not participate. That move targets the comfortable moral binary (bad rulers, good people) and replaces it with a systems diagnosis: apathy is a form of complicity, and administration without civic pressure becomes theater.

The subtext is a warning to the ilustrado class and to ordinary Filipinos alike: national dignity isn't a sentiment, it's a practice. Rizal is asking readers to stop treating politics as weather. In a colony where open participation was risky and often denied, the line also carries a bitter edge: if the population is inert, it may be because power has trained it to be. Either way, he insists, reform requires a public that refuses to stay still.