Politics & Power Quote by R. D. Laing

Laing drops a match into the tidy living room of bourgeois self-regard. “We are all murderers and prostitutes” isn’t a literal accusation; it’s a provocation aimed at the psychic machinery that lets “normal” people feel clean while projecting disorder onto the designated mad, criminal, or deviant. The shock phrase works because it collapses two stigmas into a single blunt instrument: “murderer” names our capacity for violence (not only physical, but the slow, socially sanctioned killing of empathy), and “prostitute” names the ways we sell ourselves - our attention, values, even conscience - to stay safe inside a hierarchy.

The line’s rhythm matters: Laing keeps widening the net (“culture, society, class, nation”) until there’s nowhere to hide. That piling-up mirrors his larger project in the 1960s and ’70s, when psychiatry often treated mental illness as an individual defect to be managed, medicated, or contained. Laing, a leading voice in the anti-psychiatry moment, insisted that “sanity” could be a social performance, and that families and institutions could manufacture breakdowns while congratulating themselves on being well-adjusted.

The subtext is ethical, not just clinical: respectable life runs on disavowal. The more “normal, moral, mature” you imagine yourself, the more invested you are in denying the compromises that keep you comfortable. Laing’s insult is democratic and diagnostic: he’s arguing that pathology isn’t a freakish exception. It’s the price of admission.