Daily Inspiration Quote by John Grierson

There is something almost brazen in the way Grierson frames state “total planning” as an “absolute good” - not a contingent tool for hard times, not a regrettable wartime expedient, but a moral upgrade. The phrasing matters: “personal view” signals modesty while smuggling in a sweeping prescription, and “absolute” is a philosophical word doing political work. He’s not arguing policy; he’s staking out an ethic.

The quick sidestep from Marx is the tell. Grierson knows the charge coming - that a filmmaker praising total planning is flirting with communist orthodoxy. So he preemptively reroutes the lineage to Fichte and Hegel, thinkers associated with nationalism, the ethical state, and history as a rational process. That move isn’t just intellectual name-dropping; it’s reputational laundering. He’s trying to make planning sound less like party doctrine and more like European high seriousness: the state as the arena where freedom is realized, not crushed.

Context sharpens the intent. Grierson helped invent the British documentary as a civic instrument - films designed to teach citizens how modern life works and why collective institutions deserve trust. In the interwar and wartime planning debates, documentary wasn’t “content”; it was infrastructure for consent. The subtext is that mass society needs coordination, and coordination needs a story people can inhabit. By grounding his politics in idealism rather than materialism, he gives that story a nobler face: planning as destiny, not bureaucracy.