Daily Inspiration Quote by Wole Soyinka

The line opens like a courtroom cross-examination: "See" pulls the listener close, then Soyinka needles the ritual of "pious statements" that pretend the argument is already settled. That adjective does double work. It mocks moral posturing from leaders and institutions who denounce authoritarianism in theory while continuing to reward it in practice. The jab is aimed less at obvious dictators than at the industrialized world's self-image: modern, rational, post-strongman. Soyinka insists that story is comforting fiction.

"Strong man syndrome" is a surgical phrase. By calling it a syndrome, he frames the strongman not as an exceptional monster but as a recurring pathology with recognizable symptoms: public craving for order, elite impatience with messy democracy, media fascination with forceful personalities, the myth that one decisive figure can bypass institutions and "get things done". The real target is the fallacy beneath it: the belief that strength is personal rather than structural, that history is moved by lone will instead of accountable systems.

Context matters because Soyinka comes out of postcolonial Nigeria, where coups and military rulers repeatedly sold themselves as necessary correctives to civilian chaos. His warning, though, refuses to stay "over there". By indicting "much of the industrialized world", he flips the usual hierarchy of political maturity. The subtext is accusatory: the North lectures the South about democracy while importing the same authoritarian appetite under better lighting - through technocracy, emergency powers, security politics, and the romance of the decisive leader. Soyinka's dramatist instinct shows in the staging: hypocrisy as performance, the strongman as a role audiences keep casting.