Daily Inspiration Quote by Jean-Francois Lyotard

Power, Lyotard implies, is less a costume than a job title. The “ruling class” isn’t defined here by inherited manners or even wealth in the abstract, but by a brutally practical credential: the ability to decide. In one clean turn, he strips class talk of its romantic fog and reframes it as governance-by-control of choices that stick. Who gets to set priorities, allocate resources, declare emergencies, name risks, and decide what counts as “reasonable”? That’s the ruling class.

The line also carries Lyotard’s trademark suspicion of big emancipatory stories. Coming out of the post-1968 French intellectual scene and writing in the shadow of his broader argument about the collapse of grand narratives, he’s wary of the comforting promise that history naturally trends toward liberation. The future tense, “will continue,” reads like a cold shower: don’t expect the system to dissolve just because the slogans are better. Decision-making capacity reproduces itself through institutions, expertise, credentials, bureaucratic procedure, and the quiet legitimacy granted to some voices over others.

There’s a second bite in the phrasing. “Class of decision makers” sounds almost managerial, as if domination has been updated into a neutral-sounding function. That’s the subtext: modern power often hides in process. It doesn’t need to declare itself tyrannical; it just needs to control the agenda, the metrics, and the definitions. Lyotard’s point isn’t only that elites exist. It’s that the most durable inequality is unequal authority to decide what reality will be, operationally, for everyone else.