Politics & Power Quote by Dave Davies

Davies is doing something rare for a rock lifer: refusing nostalgia and pinning the rot on a very current engine. By pairing religion and politics, he’s not making a grand theological argument so much as identifying a shared business model: both institutions promise meaning, then monetize access to it, then police the terms. “Money based” and “controlling” aren’t abstractions here; they’re the familiar rhythm of modern life, where everything from belief to citizenship gets packaged, sold, and managed.

The line works because it frames corruption as a system and a temptation. Davies doesn’t let humans off the hook with “they did this to us”; he implicates the audience in the craving for dominance. That staccato escalation - “we want one thing and then we want more and then we want more” - is pop-song repetition turned moral diagnosis. It mirrors addiction: incremental, self-justifying, and hard to notice until you’re owned by it.

Context matters. Coming from a musician shaped by the postwar British scene, Davies is speaking from inside a culture that watched old authorities (church, empire, party politics) lose credibility, then watched new authorities (markets, media, celebrity) fill the vacuum. The subtext is less “abolish religion” than “beware the moment faith turns into management.” It’s an argument for humility as a civic and spiritual technology: the only antidote to the human urge to turn every shared ideal into a private empire.