Politics & Power Quote by Maynard James Keenan

Keenan drops this like a half-shrugged warning, the kind that sounds obvious until you notice how rarely we let it land. The phrasing matters: "Just in general" and "hasn't really" are conversational softeners, but they also function as a dare. He’s not offering a footnoted thesis about every regime ever; he’s pointing to a recurring incentive structure. Power prefers predictability, and educated people are famously inconvenient. They ask for receipts, spot contradictions, organize, and refuse simple stories.

The subtext is less "schools are bad" than "knowledge is a control surface". Governments don’t need to ban books to blunt education; they can underfund schools, politicize curricula, drown citizens in noise, or turn learning into credential-chasing instead of critical thought. Keenan’s line also hints at the modern twist: control doesn’t always look like censorship. It can look like algorithms that reward outrage, civics classes that skip the messy parts, or public debate reduced to tribal slogans.

Coming from a musician, it’s also a defense of art as parallel education. Keenan’s career has lived in that space where music isn’t just entertainment but a training ground for skepticism: pay attention, detect manipulation, don’t outsource your mind. The quote isn’t a history lecture; it’s a cultural posture. Treat the promise of "they have your best interests at heart" as something to interrogate, because the easiest population to govern is the one that never learned how to question the terms.