Life & Wisdom Quote by Jared Diamond

Power, Diamond reminds us, is unevenly distributed - but accountability is not the same as blame. The line opens with a cool, almost anthropological observation: some actors simply have more leverage. That concession matters because it disarms the easy rebuttal to any “people power” argument: yes, elites, institutions, and chokepoints exist. Then he pivots to the real provocation. When he assigns “ultimate responsibility” to the public, he strips the phrase of its usual moral charge. He’s not sermonizing about civic virtue or guilt; he’s making a causal claim about where pressure actually originates.

The subtext is strategic, even a little impatient with purity politics. Diamond is telling readers: stop treating responsibility as a badge and start treating it as a lever. “Ultimate” here doesn’t mean most culpable; it means last instance, the final force that can’t be appealed beyond. In democracies it’s votes, attention, and legitimacy; in non-democracies it’s consent, compliance, and the mass costs of repression. Either way, public behavior is the terrain on which powerful people operate.

Contextually, this sounds like Diamond the systems-thinker - the author who connects environment, institutions, and incentives. He’s wary of narratives that locate change in a single heroic leader or a single villain. By separating moral judgment from practical efficacy, he reframes politics as feedback loops: elites respond when publics make inaction expensive. The unsettling implication is that spectatorship is itself a form of participation, and the most realistic engine of change is collective, not righteous.