Politics & Power Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Mayhew doesn’t plead; he indicts. Calling mass submission “stupid tameness” is less sermon than civic slap, a deliberate humiliation meant to make obedience feel not pious but pathetic. The line’s power comes from its moral inversion: the truly “unaccountable folly” isn’t rebellion against authority, it’s the collective choice to keep absorbing harm from a single “unreasonable, ambitious and cruel man.” He frames tyranny as a kind of public self-harm - and by doing so, he reallocates responsibility. The tyrant is guilty, yes, but the nation that tolerates him becomes complicit in its own misery.

The diction is strategic. “Whole nations” versus “one” compresses the power imbalance into something absurd: how can the many be captive to the solitary unless they consent, through fear, habit, or a mistaken theology of obedience? And “wanton and riot” turns political domination into vulgar pleasure, as if despotism is not merely policy but indulgence - a man treating people’s suffering like entertainment. That image is meant to curdle any lingering respect for “great” rulers.

As an 18th-century New England clergyman, Mayhew is working inside a charged context: the growing colonial argument that resistance to a tyrannical monarch isn’t sinful, it’s principled. The subtext is a permission slip, stamped with religious authority: if a ruler breaks the moral contract, refusing to resist isn’t loyalty. It’s cowardice dressed up as virtue.