Staying out of politics feels like opting out entirely, but the decisions keep getting made regardless of who shows up to make them. Plato named that trap directly. "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors," the popular version reads. Refusing to take part rarely means escaping the outcome. More often it just means someone else decides it instead. It is a considerably older warning than most people probably assume, given how often it gets shared as though it were coined for a specific modern election rather than a debate held in Athens well over two thousand years ago, long before the word politics had any of its current baggage attached to it. That gap between disengagement and consequence is precisely what makes the quote endure, resurfacing whenever apathy toward public life becomes a talking point, whether in ancient Athens or a modern democracy struggling with low voter turnout.
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