Daily Inspiration Quote by Ernest Bevin

The insult lands with bureaucratic precision: scapegoating isn’t just immoral, Bevin suggests, it’s lazy thinking in a suit. Calling it the habit of the “unintelligent” reframes blame-shifting as an intellectual failure before it’s a political one. That’s the point. He’s not diagnosing one bad actor; he’s condemning a whole mental shortcut that turns messy systems into simple villains.

Bevin’s life gives the line its bite. A trade union organizer who became a wartime Labour heavyweight and then foreign secretary, he worked in arenas where failure is rarely personal and always tempting to personalize. Wartime shortages, postwar austerity, labor conflict, the early Cold War: all produced public anxiety, and anxiety hunts for faces to pin itself to. His quip reads like a preemptive strike against the politics of easy answers, the kind that protects leaders from accountability and offers the public emotional relief at the cost of reality.

The subtext is also defensive and managerial: grown-up governance requires complexity, trade-offs, and collective responsibility. Scapegoats are politically useful because they convert policy into morality play; they let crowds feel righteous without learning anything. Bevin flips that seduction into a stigma. If you reach for a scapegoat, you’re not merely angry or grieving - you’re advertising that you can’t parse cause and effect.

There’s a class edge here too. From a man who climbed from working poverty into the state, “unintelligent” doubles as a warning to demagogues: don’t flatter the public’s worst impulses. The line is less a sneer at “ordinary people” than a rebuke of anyone - officials included - who chooses simplicity over responsibility.