Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

“Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy” lands like a polite slap at two modern faiths at once: the cult of markets and the romance of rebellion. Saul’s move is to treat “competition” not as an economic mechanism but as a story we tell ourselves - a metaphor that smuggles ideology in under the guise of nature. “Unregulated” is the pressure point. It’s the word that exposes how much so-called free markets depend on rules, enforcement, and someone powerful enough to define what counts as fair play. Strip those away and you don’t get a sleek meritocracy; you get raw contest: monopoly, coercion, capture.

The “naive” isn’t just a dig at libertarian optimism; it’s an indictment of a particular kind of intellectual laziness. Calling competition “anarchy” flatters both sides: market evangelists get to sound daring and anti-bureaucratic, while anti-state radicals get their language hijacked and repurposed as a business plan. Saul’s subtext is that metaphors are doing policy’s dirty work. When you romanticize the absence of regulation, you’re not abolishing power - you’re relocating it to the least accountable actors, then congratulating yourself for being “free.”

Contextually, Saul is writing out of late-20th-century neoliberal triumphalism, when deregulation was sold as efficiency and inevitability. He counters with a civic-humanist warning: societies don’t function on autopilot. Rules are not the enemy of freedom; they’re the infrastructure that makes freedom more than the privilege of the strong.