"Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us"
About this Quote
Chapman’s line is an early 20th-century takedown of moral outsourcing: the habit of treating other people’s sins as an alibi for your own inertia. The sentence moves like an indictment, not an observation. “Wherever you see” turns the reader into a witness; “you see a cog” turns that witness, uncomfortably, into a potential suspect. The genius is that Chapman doesn’t bother arguing that “The Machine” exists. He assumes it does, because the machine is built out of a recognizable human reflex: using corruption and prejudice not as problems to confront, but as excuses to disengage.
The subtext is sharper than simple civic exhortation. Chapman is warning that passivity isn’t neutral; it’s functional. A cog doesn’t have to be evil or even enthusiastic. It just has to keep turning. By naming the rationalization itself (“someone else’s corruption... someone else’s prejudice”), he exposes a particularly respectable form of complicity: the person who prides himself on being too principled, too disgusted, too realistic to act. The critique isn’t aimed at the openly bigoted or the obviously bought. It’s aimed at the self-styled conscientious observer who thinks he’s opting out.
Context matters: Chapman wrote in an America wrestling with industrial consolidation, machine politics, and the moral arguments around reform. “The Machine that governs us” reads as both political and psychological. Governance isn’t only ballots and bosses; it’s the stories people tell themselves to avoid risk. Chapman’s intent is to make that story embarrassing, even corrosive: your refusal to act doesn’t stand outside the system. It is the system.
The subtext is sharper than simple civic exhortation. Chapman is warning that passivity isn’t neutral; it’s functional. A cog doesn’t have to be evil or even enthusiastic. It just has to keep turning. By naming the rationalization itself (“someone else’s corruption... someone else’s prejudice”), he exposes a particularly respectable form of complicity: the person who prides himself on being too principled, too disgusted, too realistic to act. The critique isn’t aimed at the openly bigoted or the obviously bought. It’s aimed at the self-styled conscientious observer who thinks he’s opting out.
Context matters: Chapman wrote in an America wrestling with industrial consolidation, machine politics, and the moral arguments around reform. “The Machine that governs us” reads as both political and psychological. Governance isn’t only ballots and bosses; it’s the stories people tell themselves to avoid risk. Chapman’s intent is to make that story embarrassing, even corrosive: your refusal to act doesn’t stand outside the system. It is the system.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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