"You're not always able to choose"
About this Quote
"You're not always able to choose" lands with the chilly efficiency of a post-Soviet alibi. In the mouth of Anatoly Chubais, the politician most associated with Russia's shock-therapy privatization in the 1990s, the line reads less like personal humility and more like a governing philosophy: history is a conveyor belt, and the people riding it don’t get to vote on the speed.
The intent is defensive but strategic. It reframes contentious decisions not as ideological commitments but as constrained moves inside a shrinking box. That’s a familiar move in technocratic politics: swap moral agency for managerial necessity, recast fallout as “unavoidable,” and you preempt accountability without sounding openly callous. The simplicity is the trick. It’s a sentence built to travel well through interviews, crisis briefings, and memoirs because it sounds like common sense while quietly evacuating responsibility.
Subtext: if you’re angry, aim at “circumstances,” not at the architect. It also signals loyalty upward. In systems where power is centralized and careers depend on proximity to the state, “not always able to choose” doubles as an assurance that the speaker understands the limits of autonomy. It’s a small sentence that flatters the larger machine.
Context matters because Chubais’s career sits at the intersection of reform and rupture: rapid economic transformation, mass dislocation, and the birth of oligarchic capitalism. The line doesn’t argue for those outcomes; it normalizes them as the price of staying afloat. It’s fatalism polished into pragmatism, the kind that asks the public to accept pain as weather.
The intent is defensive but strategic. It reframes contentious decisions not as ideological commitments but as constrained moves inside a shrinking box. That’s a familiar move in technocratic politics: swap moral agency for managerial necessity, recast fallout as “unavoidable,” and you preempt accountability without sounding openly callous. The simplicity is the trick. It’s a sentence built to travel well through interviews, crisis briefings, and memoirs because it sounds like common sense while quietly evacuating responsibility.
Subtext: if you’re angry, aim at “circumstances,” not at the architect. It also signals loyalty upward. In systems where power is centralized and careers depend on proximity to the state, “not always able to choose” doubles as an assurance that the speaker understands the limits of autonomy. It’s a small sentence that flatters the larger machine.
Context matters because Chubais’s career sits at the intersection of reform and rupture: rapid economic transformation, mass dislocation, and the birth of oligarchic capitalism. The line doesn’t argue for those outcomes; it normalizes them as the price of staying afloat. It’s fatalism polished into pragmatism, the kind that asks the public to accept pain as weather.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
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