Daily Inspiration Quote by Neil LaBute

LaBute’s line lands with the blunt force of someone who grew up inside a story the institution insists is already clean. He doesn’t merely accuse religion of hypocrisy; he targets a particular theatrical move: the performance of spotless community. “Absurdity” is doing double duty here. It’s not the cheap joke of weird doctrines (the easy shot at Mormonism) so much as the surreal insistence that harm can be edited out of the frame if you manage the narrative hard enough. That’s a director’s critique: the problem isn’t that the set has cracks, it’s that the crew keeps repainting them while actors are still getting hurt.

The subtext is about brand management. “Pretend that no bad happens” points to a defensive reflex common to tightly knit groups: protect the institution first, treat “bad” as a PR threat rather than a moral emergency. In that light, “taking care of what bad does happen” reads like an ethical minimum that becomes radical only because it threatens authority. Accountability means admitting fallibility, and admitting fallibility punctures the aura that keeps people loyal, paying, and quiet.

Context matters: LaBute’s work repeatedly circles the violence people justify under the cover of romance, faith, or respectability. Coming from an ex-Mormon artist long dogged by questions about religion and control, the quote feels less like an abstract argument and more like a refusal to let any church - his former one included - outsource repentance to public relations. The bite is that he widens the lens beyond Mormonism, denying everyone the comfort of calling this someone else’s scandal.