Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

Saul takes the most “uncivil” verb in the room - be rude - and turns it into a democratic virtue. The provocation is deliberate: he’s not praising trolling or contempt, he’s puncturing the idea that politics should run like a well-mannered industry conference. “Professional intercourse” is the tell. It frames public life as a closed circuit of experts, insiders, and career communicators whose smooth exchanges are designed to minimize friction, contain uncertainty, and keep outcomes predictable. Comfort, here, isn’t a luxury; it’s a tool of governance.

The line works because it flips the moral polarity of politeness. We’re trained to treat doubt as impolite, especially when it interrupts people who “know what they’re doing.” Saul argues that this etiquette is anti-democratic: it pressures citizens to behave like passive clients while professionals behave like proprietors. “Boorish expressions of doubt” is intentionally ugly phrasing, suggesting that real accountability rarely arrives in a tasteful package. The citizen’s interruption won’t sound like a policy memo; it will sound like inconvenience, impatience, even ignorance. That’s the point. Systems that only respond to fluent, credentialed critique have already decided who counts.

The context is Saul’s broader suspicion of technocracy and managerial politics: a late-20th-century drift where expertise substitutes for consent, and process becomes a shield against responsibility. His “rudeness” is civic friction - the refusal to let language, procedure, and insider norms anesthetize debate. Democracy, in this view, isn’t a conversation among professionals; it’s the constant right of amateurs to spoil the script.