Time & Perspective Quote by Malcolm Wilson

The line lands like a gut-punch because it yokes bureaucratic harm to intimate violence. “Cutting up a loved one” is deliberately grotesque: it refuses the polite language politicians usually hide behind when they’re trimming budgets, redrawing boundaries, shuttering institutions, or “restructuring” services. Wilson isn’t arguing policy details; he’s trying to make an audience feel the obscenity of watching something cherished be dismantled in real time.

The sly twist is in the second half: “all the time insisting they’ve got your best interests at heart.” That’s the real target. He’s describing a modern kind of political aggression that arrives wearing a clinician’s smile, a consultant’s powerpoint, a press release full of soothing nouns. The violence isn’t just the cut; it’s the gaslighting. If you object, you’re framed as sentimental, irrational, resistant to “necessary” change. The moral inversion is total: the person with the knife gets to play healer.

“They’re very devious nowadays” reads like generational alarm, but it’s also a shrewd comment on a postwar political culture that learned to professionalize persuasion. Power doesn’t always bully; it explains, manages, and rebrands. Wilson’s intent is to puncture that management-speak and reattach consequences to decisions. By making the metaphor so personal, he drags politics out of abstraction and back into the realm where betrayal is recognizable: not as a disagreement, but as a violation carried out under the cover of care.