Success Quote by Joseph Ratzinger

A “dictatorship of relativism” is a deliberately barbed phrase: it flips the usual script where relativism poses as tolerant and anti-authoritarian. Ratzinger’s move is to argue that when a culture refuses to name any truth as binding, it doesn’t become freer - it becomes easier to coerce. If nothing is “for certain,” then the loudest institution, the strongest market, or the most fashionable moral mood gets to define reality by default. The provocation is rhetorical: relativism isn’t neutral; it rules.

The subtext is equally pointed at the late-20th-century West. Ratzinger is taking aim at post-1960s moral pluralism, consumer identity, and a public square increasingly embarrassed by metaphysical claims. His warning isn’t just “people are selfish.” It’s that the self becomes the only remaining court of appeal, and that kind of autonomy quickly curdles into conformity: you’re “free” to choose, but the choices are pre-sorted by desire, branding, and social pressure. The “ego” here is less a psychological insult than a cultural principle.

Context matters: this line comes from the theological and political anxieties of a churchman who watched Europe rebuild itself on procedural liberalism and technocratic consensus while Christianity receded as a shared grammar. Ratzinger is staking a claim that democracy needs more than process; it needs truth-claims that can discipline power, including our own appetites. The bite of the phrase is its paradox: a society afraid of absolutes may end up with the most absolute thing of all - the sovereign self.