"In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear"
About this Quote
A governing system that performs its real work in the shadows while basking in the glare of “transparency” is not just hypocritical; it’s structurally modern. Breytenbach’s line is built on a delicious contradiction: opacity that thrives inside a “chattering spotlight.” The phrase “chattering” matters. It conjures a media ecosystem of endless talk, panels, pressers, and procedural noise - a democracy-as-content machine. The spotlight isn’t absent; it’s weaponized. Visibility becomes camouflage.
Breytenbach, writing from the long hangover of apartheid-era secrecy and the disillusionments that followed, understands how regimes evolve. They don’t always need crude censorship. They can offer disclosure as performance: dashboards, commissions, parliamentary theater, “public consultations” engineered to exhaust rather than enlighten. “Ostensible transparency” is the key tell - transparency as an aesthetic, not an ethic. You’re invited to watch, but not to know.
The sentence pivots sharply at the end: “even though the ultimate objective is clear.” That’s the sting. While processes are intentionally unreadable, outcomes are legible: the consolidation of power, protection of elites, management of dissent, extraction of resources, the quiet disciplining of citizens into spectators. Breytenbach’s intent isn’t merely to accuse governments of lying; it’s to describe a system where truth is buried under procedural spectacle, and where the citizen’s attention is guided away from mechanisms and toward narratives.
It works because it names a contemporary feeling: that we are drowning in information while starving for comprehension - and that this is not a bug, but the design.
Breytenbach, writing from the long hangover of apartheid-era secrecy and the disillusionments that followed, understands how regimes evolve. They don’t always need crude censorship. They can offer disclosure as performance: dashboards, commissions, parliamentary theater, “public consultations” engineered to exhaust rather than enlighten. “Ostensible transparency” is the key tell - transparency as an aesthetic, not an ethic. You’re invited to watch, but not to know.
The sentence pivots sharply at the end: “even though the ultimate objective is clear.” That’s the sting. While processes are intentionally unreadable, outcomes are legible: the consolidation of power, protection of elites, management of dissent, extraction of resources, the quiet disciplining of citizens into spectators. Breytenbach’s intent isn’t merely to accuse governments of lying; it’s to describe a system where truth is buried under procedural spectacle, and where the citizen’s attention is guided away from mechanisms and toward narratives.
It works because it names a contemporary feeling: that we are drowning in information while starving for comprehension - and that this is not a bug, but the design.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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