Time & Perspective Quote by Eugene V. Debs

Debs is doing something sly here: he turns democracy’s favorite comfort object, “the will of the majority,” into a warning label. The line lands with the cadence of a sermon but the intent of a provocation. “As a rule” is the needle he slips in quietly, a phrase that sounds modest while making an explosive claim: mass agreement is not just fallible, it’s predictably unreliable when the stakes are moral and structural.

The subtext is a defense of dissent, and not the cozy kind that gets applauded on anniversaries. Debs is talking about the sort of minority position that looks outrageous in its own moment and only later gets repackaged as common sense: abolition, labor rights, women’s suffrage, civil liberties. His “great principles” are not abstract ideals; they’re the live wires that threaten property, hierarchy, and national myths. When those wires are exposed, the majority tends to choose stability over justice, normalcy over rupture. That’s not because people are uniquely cruel, but because majorities are social ecosystems: they reward conformity, punish risk, and absorb the talking points of whoever controls the megaphone.

Context matters. Debs was a socialist organizer in a United States that repeatedly treated radical labor politics as a kind of contagion, from strikebreaking to surveillance to imprisonment. He knew firsthand that public opinion can be manufactured, policed, and weaponized. The quote isn’t anti-democratic so much as anti-complacent: if you outsource your moral judgment to a headcount, power gets to decide what “reasonable” means.