Politics & Power Quote by John Naisbitt

America sells itself as a land of limitless options, but Naisbitt pokes at the exhausting underside of that mythology: choice can be a solvent. His line reframes commitment not as a quaint virtue or a scarcity, but as a suppressed demand. People, he implies, are not allergic to responsibility; theyre starved for the conditions that make responsibility feel sane.

The sly move is the phrase "best kept secrets". It borrows the language of marketing and insider advantage, turning an emotional diagnosis into a contrarian trend report. Thats classic Naisbitt: the futurist-business sensibility that treats social longing as a signal the market and institutions keep misreading. Commitment becomes a kind of unmet consumer need, not because relationships are products, but because modern life is increasingly organized around frictionless exits - at-will work, disposable communities, infinite apps, perpetual upgrades. The subtext is that weve built systems that monetize non-attachment while insisting, rhetorically, that individuals are to blame for feeling unmoored.

His caveat does the real work: "if they only had the freedom and environment". Freedom here isnt libertarian isolation; its the practical freedom to risk staying - stable jobs, predictable schedules, affordable housing, social norms that reward continuity instead of constant optimization. "Environment" hints at design: commitments dont flourish by moralizing at people, they flourish when institutions lower the cost of investing in others.

Read in context of late-20th-century corporate and cultural churn, its a critique disguised as optimism: the appetite for devotion exists. The question is who benefits from keeping it hungry.