Life & Wisdom Quote by Butler Shaffer

Shaffer’s line is built like a trapdoor: you step in thinking it’s about “division,” then you drop straight into a much older libertarian suspicion that the state doesn’t merely govern conflicts but manufactures them. The phrase “introduced division into our thinking” is the key tell. He’s not describing polarization as an accident of culture or media incentives; he’s alleging an intentional cognitive redesign, a kind of political UX that nudges citizens away from horizontal trust (neighbor-to-neighbor) and toward vertical dependency (citizen-to-state).

The subtext is almost clinical: fear is the product, protection is the subscription model. If you can be made to “distrust others,” everyday social life becomes risk management, and the state gets to position itself as the only legitimate insurer. That’s why the sentence’s logic is so streamlined: division creates insecurity; insecurity creates demand; demand justifies expansion. It’s a closed loop that flatters the speaker and indicts the institution in one motion.

Context matters because Shaffer wrote from an anti-statist tradition that treats centralized authority as a self-perpetuating actor, not a neutral referee. His diction - “control,” “introduced,” “look to the state” - frames government less as a democratic instrument and more as an operator with motives, tactics, and a sales pitch. What makes the quote work rhetorically is its simplicity: it converts a messy social phenomenon into a single antagonist. That clarity is persuasive, but it also smuggles in a premise worth interrogating: whether “the state” is a coherent strategist, or a convenient villain for every fracture we’d rather not own ourselves.