Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Lessig

Lessig is pointing at a quiet crisis of modern politics: the problem isn’t ignorance, it’s certainty. In an age where every faction has its own “facts,” activism stops being a battle over information and becomes a battle over the frame that makes certain information feel unquestionable. His provocation lands because it flips the heroic self-image of activism. The hard work isn’t rallying people around a new truth; it’s persuading them that their current truth might be a story they’ve been sold.

The line “wonder again” is doing heavy lifting. It romanticizes skepticism, but also implies we’ve lost a basic civic capacity: curiosity without immediate tribal payoff. Lessig’s subtext is that our public life has hardened into reflex. People don’t deliberate; they defend. They don’t investigate; they perform loyalty. So the activist’s job shifts from persuasion to deprogramming: reopening the space in the mind where alternative interpretations can breathe.

“Sow doubt” is deliberately edgy, borrowing the language of propaganda and corporate disinformation. That’s the point. Lessig is warning that the same psychological lever used to muddy science or undermine elections is also the lever needed to break complacency and expose captured assumptions, especially around institutions that present themselves as neutral while quietly serving power. Coming from an educator and legal reformer known for critiquing corruption and structural incentives, the context is less nihilism than pedagogy: doubt as a civic tool, not a cynical weapon. The ethics hinge on what doubt is for - illumination, not paralysis.