Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s sting here isn’t merely that power exists; it’s that power hides behind the bland alibi of competence. “People who know how to do things” sounds almost reassuring, like a meritocracy humming along. Then she twists the knife: this supposed know-how becomes the mask that legitimizes a sealed-off ruling layer. The line performs a quiet bait-and-switch, moving from the language of skills (“equipped”) to the language of caste (“peasants”). It’s not an argument so much as a diagnosis of how modern domination sells itself: not as tyranny, but as management.

The subtext is less conspiracy theory than social psychology. Lessing captures the learned helplessness that bureaucracy and expertise can produce in ordinary citizens: when systems become too complex to narrate, they become too complex to contest. “We don’t understand what’s going on” is the real tragedy, because it implies a politics of permanent spectatorship. The “up there” is deliberately vague, a spatial metaphor that mirrors how power is experienced: distant, elevated, unanswerable, and always slightly out of focus.

Contextually, Lessing’s career was shaped by colonial Rhodesia, disillusionment with grand ideologies, and a lifelong interest in how groups form myths to justify themselves. This quote reads like the distilled aftertaste of the 20th century: technocracy, propaganda, and institutional confidence colliding with the citizen’s suspicion that the rules are being written elsewhere. She’s warning that the most effective domination doesn’t require brutes; it only needs experts, and a public trained to call itself incapable.