Time & Perspective Quote by Eugene Forsey

There is a quietly subversive comfort in calling ignorance a mercy. Forsey, a politician who spent his life inside the machinery of constitutional crisis and national argument, frames uncertainty not as a defect to be conquered but as a psychological safeguard built into the human condition. The line works because it flips a modern reflex: we treat prediction as virtue (polls, forecasts, risk models), yet Forsey insists that complete knowledge would crush us. Not because the future is always tragic, but because certainty would drain life of its only workable fuel: manageable anxiety.

The invocation of God is doing double duty. On its face, it’s pious language, a nod to providence. Underneath, it’s a rhetorical move that gives moral weight to a deeply pragmatic claim: people can endure hardship and ambiguity; they cannot live inside an unblinking ledger of what’s coming. Hiddenness becomes a form of governance, almost constitutional in spirit: a limit placed on human access for human stability. Coming from a politician, it’s also a subtle critique of the fantasy that leaders can or should know everything. The future, like public opinion, is partly unknowable; pretending otherwise invites cruelty, hubris, or both.

“Forsey’s unbearable” isn’t melodrama. It’s an argument about scale: the mind can carry today, maybe tomorrow, but not an entire life preloaded with every grief and failure. Hope requires blind spots. So does courage.