"States are like people. They do not question the awful status quo until some dramatic event overturns the conventional and lax way of thinking"
About this Quote
Hanson’s line borrows the most flattering metaphor in politics: the state as a person, with a psyche, habits, and the capacity for denial. It’s a neat move because it turns institutional inertia into something readers recognize instantly as human weakness. “Awful status quo” isn’t just descriptive; it’s moral pressure. The phrase suggests that normalcy is often a kind of quiet complicity, maintained less by tyranny than by “conventional and lax” thinking - a collective refusal to look directly at what’s failing.
The intent is corrective, even scolding. Hanson is arguing that societies rarely reform because they’ve reasoned their way to clarity; they reform because a shock breaks the spell. That shock can be war, economic collapse, a terrorist attack, a pandemic - any event dramatic enough to make yesterday’s assumptions look unserious. The subtext is a critique of complacent elites and comfortable publics: people don’t “question” because questioning costs social capital, destabilizes routines, and forces trade-offs. It’s safer to narrate decay as continuity.
Contextually, this sits inside Hanson’s long-running interest in how crisis reshapes political orders and military cultures, and how civilizations, especially in the West, oscillate between soft drift and hard awakening. There’s also an implied warning: if dramatic events are the only reliable catalyst, then reform is reactive by design. The line dares readers to ask whether their society is capable of deliberate self-correction - or whether it’s waiting, passively, for the kind of upheaval that makes choices for you.
The intent is corrective, even scolding. Hanson is arguing that societies rarely reform because they’ve reasoned their way to clarity; they reform because a shock breaks the spell. That shock can be war, economic collapse, a terrorist attack, a pandemic - any event dramatic enough to make yesterday’s assumptions look unserious. The subtext is a critique of complacent elites and comfortable publics: people don’t “question” because questioning costs social capital, destabilizes routines, and forces trade-offs. It’s safer to narrate decay as continuity.
Contextually, this sits inside Hanson’s long-running interest in how crisis reshapes political orders and military cultures, and how civilizations, especially in the West, oscillate between soft drift and hard awakening. There’s also an implied warning: if dramatic events are the only reliable catalyst, then reform is reactive by design. The line dares readers to ask whether their society is capable of deliberate self-correction - or whether it’s waiting, passively, for the kind of upheaval that makes choices for you.
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