Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Valery

Politics, Valery implies, doesn’t merely govern; it distracts. The sting of the line comes from its inversion of civic idealism: instead of politics being the public’s instrument, it becomes an instrument used on the public. “Art” is the tell. He’s not describing a clumsy conspiracy but a refined craft, a practiced technique of diversion - spectacle, procedure, moral panic, patriotic theater - anything that keeps people orbiting the state’s agenda rather than their own lives.

The phrase “their own business” does double duty. On one level it means the practical: work, family, local problems, the tangible levers of everyday autonomy. On another, it hints at a more philosophical claim: that individuals have a right to self-direction, and that politics, when swollen beyond necessity, colonizes attention itself. Valery’s poet’s ear makes the sentence feel almost urbane, even polite, which sharpens its cynicism; he’s diagnosing domination as social choreography, not brute force.

Context matters. Valery wrote in a France repeatedly rocked by ideological fever, mass politics, and the creeping bureaucracies of the early twentieth century - conditions that taught intellectuals how easily “the public interest” can become a permission slip for intrusion. His skepticism also carries the interwar ambiance: the sense that modern states, armed with propaganda and administrative reach, could mobilize citizens into obsession while quietly narrowing the space for private judgment.

It’s not an argument against politics so much as a warning about its most successful form: the kind that persuades you your life is someone else’s project.