Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

Saul’s line is less a warning label than a design brief: democracy is not self-sustaining, and capitalism is not self-limiting. The sly move is in that phrase “allowed to run free,” which treats markets not as neutral weather but as a force that must be governed. Saul’s intent isn’t to denounce capitalism as such; it’s to puncture the civics-class fantasy that free enterprise naturally harmonizes with popular rule. Left on autopilot, he suggests, capital will do what it’s built to do: concentrate power, buy access, and convert public goods into private advantage. “Corrupt and undermine” isn’t moral melodrama so much as an institutional diagnosis.

The subtext is a rebuke to late-20th-century triumphalism, when deregulation and globalization were sold as if they were synonymous with freedom. Saul is pointing at the familiar mechanisms: lobbying as an industry, campaign finance as a market, media ecosystems shaped by advertising incentives, public services outsourced until citizens become customers. Democracy, in this framework, is an annoyance: it’s messy, slow, and redistributive. Capital prefers predictability, weak constraints, and policy that treats inequality as “efficient.”

Then comes the kicker: “not a natural state.” Saul smuggles in a bracingly anti-romantic view of politics. Democracy is artificial in the best sense: a constructed habit, continuously maintained against the default settings of hierarchy, apathy, and oligarchy. The context is Saul’s broader critique of “managerial” governance and technocratic elites - systems that claim competence while quietly shrinking the space where ordinary people can actually decide. The line works because it refuses comfort: neither market outcomes nor democratic rights are guaranteed; both are choices, and only one can be left unattended without consequence.