Education Quote by Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard lands the insult with bureaucratic elegance: abjection is what we feel when we’re forced to touch the messy stuff of agency. The line turns civic life into a kind of outsourced labor arrangement. We appoint statesmen so we don’t have to confront the ugliness of wielding power ourselves; we elevate scholars so we don’t have to endure the indignity of learning. The provocation isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-comfort: he’s mocking a culture that wants the prestige of politics and knowledge without the contaminating work.

The subtext is about delegation as self-deception. “Need” implies necessity, but it’s really a preference for insulation. The citizen becomes a consumer of decisions; the student becomes a consumer of expertise. In both cases, responsibility is laundered through institutions that promise cleanliness: politics without moral compromise, understanding without confusion, participation without risk. Calling it “abjection” is key. Learning, like power, should be unsettling because it changes you. Baudrillard suggests we treat that disturbance as shameful, something to be avoided by hiring intermediaries.

Context matters: Baudrillard wrote in the late-20th-century French tradition that watched mass media, technocracy, and credentialed expertise turn reality into spectacle and authority into brand. His target is the modern arrangement where knowledge circulates as credentials and soundbites, and politics as representation in the literal sense: someone else stands in for you. The punchline is dark: we don’t just mistrust institutions; we use them to protect us from ourselves.