Politics & Power Quote by James Bovard

Docility is Bovard's real antagonist here, not lying itself. The line is built like a trap: it starts as a social diagnosis ("People are so docile right now") and then swivels into a bitterly plausible definition of "good government" that no one would endorse out loud. That move matters. It mimics the way civic language gets laundered in real time: the public doesn't suddenly love deception; they accept a story about necessity, expertise, and protection, until the boundary between governance and manipulation feels like a technicality.

Bovard's subtext is that modern politics survives on a moral accounting trick. Lies get sorted not by their effect on democratic consent but by the claimed intention behind them. "For our own good" is the key phrase - a paternalistic permission slip that turns citizens into dependents and officials into caretakers. Once you accept that frame, you can be managed indefinitely, because every contradiction can be filed under the "public good". It's less an argument about ethics than about power: who gets to decide what "good" requires, and who has to live with the consequences.

The cynicism is pointed. He isn't saying all politicians lie equally; he's mocking the comforting fiction that we can reliably distinguish noble deceit from corrupt deceit from inside the system that benefits either way. The context is a post-crisis political culture (wars, surveillance, public health emergencies) where "trust the experts" can become "don't ask", and where the public's fatigue becomes the state's greatest asset.