Politics & Power Quote by Samuel Butler

A good gut, Butler jokes, is a small-town voter: cautious, suspicious of novelty, happiest when nothing changes. The line lands because it raids the language of politics to describe the body, and then flips it back again. Digestion becomes a metaphor for social order: the stomach’s job is to accept, break down, and assimilate; “radical” food is what it can’t process. By implying that physical comfort breeds ideological caution, Butler smuggles a nasty little theory of temperament into a throwaway witticism.

The subtext is less about gastronomy than about the psychology of dissent. Radicalism, in this view, isn’t merely a set of ideas; it’s a kind of metabolic stress. To be a radical is to live with irritation, to have your insides at odds with the world. Conservatives, by contrast, are those for whom the existing arrangement “agrees” with them. That framing is funny because it’s bodily, unglamorous, and faintly insulting: your politics might just be your lunch.

Context matters. Butler wrote in a Victorian culture obsessed with health, propriety, and “nervous” modernity, where digestion and morality were often braided together. His work repeatedly skewers earnest certainties and the self-importance of systems, including religious and social orthodoxies. Here he needles both camps at once: radicals as dyspeptics, conservatives as the smug beneficiaries of comfort. The barb isn’t that radicals are wrong, but that the price of seeing clearly can be visceral discomfort, while “health” may simply be the body’s complicity with the status quo.