Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri Bergson

Democracy, Bergson suggests, runs less on procedures than on a felt commitment to other people. Calling love its "motive power" is a deliberate provocation: it demotes ballots, constitutions, and institutions from engine to chassis. The real fuel is an affective force that pushes citizens beyond mere coexistence toward mutual obligation, the willingness to treat strangers as neighbors even when doing so is costly.

The line only works because it risks sounding naive. Bergson, writing in an era when Europe was learning how quickly modern states could mechanize cruelty, understands that democracy is not self-executing. Rules can be captured; majorities can be whipped into fear; equality can be reduced to paperwork. "Love" here functions as an antidote to democracy's most common failure mode: the slide from civic solidarity into transactional politics, where rights become conditional and the public becomes a market.

In Bergson's broader thought, this is not sentimental romance but a moral energy akin to what he elsewhere called "creative" or "open" love: expansive, outward-moving, capable of enlarging the circle of concern. That matters because democracy depends on a psychological miracle: people agreeing to restrain their own power, to accept loss, to fund schools they may not use, to protect speech they dislike. Fear can mobilize, too, but it mobilizes against. Love mobilizes for.

The subtext is blunt: if a society needs constant enforcement to behave democratically, it isn't really democratic. Without a culture of care, democratic machinery keeps turning, but it starts producing something else.