Politics & Power Quote by Roland Joffe

Politics in Joffe's line isn’t a civics-class abstraction; it’s an ambient drug. “Under the influence” does double duty: it suggests intoxication (clouded judgment, heightened emotion) and conditioning (a system steadily shaping what feels “normal”). Coming from a director whose filmography has wrestled with power, empire, and moral compromise, the phrase reads less like a pundit’s warning than a storyteller’s diagnosis of the set we’re all standing on.

The intent is to puncture the comforting fantasy that politics is a separate room you can choose not to enter. Joffe’s framing makes disengagement feel like self-deception. You can opt out of voting, but you can’t opt out of the forces that decide what you can afford, what counts as “security,” which histories get canonized, whose suffering becomes background noise. The subtext is blunt: neutrality is a posture available mainly to people insulated by someone else’s political labor.

What makes the quote work is its scale and its simplicity. “Our world” isn’t “your country” or “this election cycle.” It widens the lens to everyday life: workplaces, schools, entertainment, even the language we use to describe “order” and “chaos.” And “the truth is” signals impatience with polite euphemism, the way artists often do when they’ve watched institutions launder violence into bureaucracy.

In an era where people insist they’re “not political” while arguing about books, borders, public health, or what stories get funded, Joffe’s line lands as a reality check: politics isn’t a topic. It’s the atmosphere.