"We're living under the illusion that we have the power to determine what to do with it"
About this Quote
The bite in Johnson's line is the way it demotes human agency without ever sounding fatalistic. "We're living under the illusion" is an indictment, not a sigh: it frames the problem as a shared cognitive error, something socially maintained and politically useful. The phrasing implicates a culture that teaches control as a virtue and then quietly punishes the people who discover its limits. By the time you reach "the power to determine", the sentence has already yanked the rug out from the modern gospel of self-mastery.
The slippery pronoun "it" does a lot of work. Johnson doesn't name the object because he doesn't have to: "it" can be time, opportunity, education, even history itself. That vagueness widens the target. He's pointing at the managerial mindset that treats life as a set of levers to pull, a syllabus to dictate, a future to schedule into compliance. The subtext is that what feels like choice is often constrained by institutions, social roles, and inherited conditions that are invisible to the people benefiting from them and painfully obvious to those shut out.
As an educator working through Jim Crow, world wars, and the rise of mass bureaucracy, Johnson would have watched the rhetoric of "individual responsibility" bloom alongside systems designed to ration real power. The line reads as a warning to students and citizens alike: believing you control the terms of your life is comforting, but it's also a perfect recipe for complacency. If the illusion is the story, the real work is learning to see the structures that write it.
The slippery pronoun "it" does a lot of work. Johnson doesn't name the object because he doesn't have to: "it" can be time, opportunity, education, even history itself. That vagueness widens the target. He's pointing at the managerial mindset that treats life as a set of levers to pull, a syllabus to dictate, a future to schedule into compliance. The subtext is that what feels like choice is often constrained by institutions, social roles, and inherited conditions that are invisible to the people benefiting from them and painfully obvious to those shut out.
As an educator working through Jim Crow, world wars, and the rise of mass bureaucracy, Johnson would have watched the rhetoric of "individual responsibility" bloom alongside systems designed to ration real power. The line reads as a warning to students and citizens alike: believing you control the terms of your life is comforting, but it's also a perfect recipe for complacency. If the illusion is the story, the real work is learning to see the structures that write it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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