Politics & Power Quote by Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson’s line is a neat little ideological ambush: it flatters both camps by conceding their favorite paranoia, then yanks away the comfort of thinking paranoia is partisan. The Right says government is self-serving, coercive, bloated, prone to mission creep. The Left says big business is self-serving, coercive, bloated, prone to monopolize and capture everything it touches. Wilson’s punch is that both descriptions can be simultaneously true because they’re describing power, not teams.

The intent isn’t “centrism” so much as Wilson’s trademark reality-hacking. He wants you to notice how political identity functions like a filter: conservatives are trained to see bureaucratic overreach, liberals to see corporate predation. Each side becomes a specialist in one species of domination while remaining oddly innocent about the other. The subtext is that our moral outrage is often just selective vision, and selective vision is useful to the very institutions we claim to distrust.

Context matters: Wilson came out of the postwar American mash-up of Cold War suspicion, 1960s counterculture, and late-20th-century media saturation. He watched institutions professionalize their persuasion and witnessed the rise of the corporate-state handshake: regulation written by industries, public services privatized, campaigns bankrolled, think tanks staffed, “public-private partnerships” marketed as pragmatism. In that world, government and business aren’t opposites; they’re interoperable systems with different uniforms.

The line works because it makes a heretical move in one sentence: it treats cynicism as a shared data point rather than a partisan weapon. The real target isn’t either side’s critique, but the refusal to apply it consistently.