Politics & Power Quote by John Hersey

Hersey’s line lands like a moral indictment dressed as policy critique: the real scandal isn’t just what a nation does, but what it trains itself to see. “Failure of national vision” targets the imagination before it targets the budget. He’s arguing that a country can be prosperous, technologically dazzling, even outwardly secure, and still be blind in the only way that counts: blind to human beings as ends rather than instruments.

The phrasing is deliberately industrial. Children become “weapons,” talents become “materials,” and the state (or its adjacent institutions) becomes a kind of refinery: you “mine, assay, and fabricate.” Each verb evokes extraction and quality control, turning education, childhood, and vocation into a supply chain. That’s the subtext: the moment you talk about people in the language of production, you’ve already made the ethical decision. The sentence implicates not only militarism but also the softer, more socially acceptable cousin of militarism: a market logic that treats giftedness as raw ore to be converted into returns.

Context matters. Hersey wrote with the long shadow of World War II and the atomic age, when national security and scientific talent were fused into a single civic religion. He reported on catastrophe (“Hiroshima”) with an almost clinical restraint that made the horror harder to evade. Here, that same restraint sharpens into warning: when defense and profit become the default justification for shaping young lives, a nation doesn’t just miseducate its children. It misrecognizes them.