Politics & Power Quote by Huston Smith

Smith’s opening move is to demote politics without letting politicians off the hook. By calling the world’s “crisis” something “deeper than particular ways of organizing political systems and economies,” he’s not denying that institutions matter; he’s insisting they’re downstream. The hinge-of-a-millennium imagery does double duty: it borrows the drama of calendar-based turning points while warning against the easy millenarian habit of treating history like a reset button. A hinge implies continuity and torque, not rupture. The door swings, but the frame remains.

The intent is diagnostic and, quietly, polemical. Smith is writing as a theologian of religion who spent a career comparing traditions and lamenting modernity’s spiritual thinning-out. So “deeper” is code for metaphysical and moral orientation: what a culture believes about the self, the good, the sacred, and the purpose of life. If those foundations are incoherent or hollowed out, no amount of policy tinkering will feel like repair; it will feel like rearranging the furniture during a house fire.

The subtext pushes against the late-20th-century confidence that technocratic governance and market design can solve meaning-problems. Post-Cold War triumphalism (and the era’s globalization) promised that better systems would deliver human flourishing. Smith suggests the opposite: when societies treat humans primarily as consumers, voters, or economic units, they generate a crisis of orientation that shows up as anxiety, nihilism, and cultural polarization. His sentence is built to widen the frame until spiritual and ethical questions become unavoidable - an invitation, and a rebuke, to a culture that prefers fixes over conversion.