Justice & Law Quote by Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Ortega is aiming a dart at a new kind of confidence: not excellence asserting itself, but mediocrity discovering its muscle. The line turns on a nasty little inversion. The “commonplace mind” isn’t naïve or unaware; it “knows itself to be commonplace” and still feels entitled to govern the terms of culture and politics. That self-knowledge should produce humility. Instead, in Ortega’s diagnosis, it produces swagger.

The intent is less snobbery than alarm. Ortega y Gasset is writing in the shadow of mass democracy, expanding literacy, mass parties, and the early 20th century’s loud collectivisms. In The Revolt of the Masses, he worries about “mass man” not as the poor or the many, but as a psychological type: the person who treats preference as principle, appetite as rights-claim, and opinion as expertise. “Rights” here is doing double-duty. It signals political legitimacy, but also a cultural demand: the right to be catered to, the right not to be challenged, the right to flatten standards so no one feels smaller.

The subtext is a critique of a society where sheer numbers and noise start to substitute for authority earned through discipline, tradition, or achievement. “Impose them wherever it will” is the tell: this isn’t a plea for inclusion; it’s a warning about colonization of every arena by the lowest common denominator - education, art, journalism, governance. Ortega’s cynicism lands because it’s not predicting ignorance; it’s predicting the confident ignorance that comes when the crowd stops asking to be led and starts demanding to be affirmed.