05/09/2025
Osho’s most controversial quote on democracy is about consciousness and about what happens when a society becomes so overloaded with noise and blind loyalty to outdated structures that it forgets how to think for itself.
“Democracy basically means government by the people,
of the people, for the people… but the people are retarded.”
To modern ears, this statement might sound cruel or dismissive.
But Osho wasn’t mocking people’s intelligence.
He was pointing to something far more dangerous, a deep cultural conditioning that discourages independent thought and spiritual maturity.
In his eyes, the average person wasn’t stupid but systematically numbed and robbed of critical thinking by schools that teach obedience, media that sells fear, governments that reward conformity, and religions that punish inquiry.
What Osho was describing was a flaw in how people have been shaped not to handle democracy. Because real democracy requires awakened people. Engaged people.
People who know how to think critically and take responsibility for their lives.
Without that, what we call “democracy” becomes a farce, a puppet show managed by corporate interests and figureheads with PR teams instead of principles.
This theme came roaring back into the spotlight in a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience.
Rogan and his guest peeled back the facade of modern power structures, from the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold on medicine, to government corruption, to the way citizens are discouraged from asking questions that matter.
The throughline was clear, that people are exhausted, overworked, misinformed, and scared. And that’s exactly the numbed state of mind that keeps a broken system running.
Toward the end of the conversation, Rogan referenced Osho’s quote about democracy. Everything they’d just unraveled had brought them to the same unavoidable truth, that many of us are not free. Not in any meaningful sense. Many of us are managed, entertained, medicated, gaslit, and trained to see ourselves as powerless.
But Osho’s believed we are at a choice point and that humanity is being pushed, painfully, toward its own awakening. What looks like collapse is actually the start of a deeper transformation if we have the courage to dismantle the lies we have inherited.
“The youth of the whole world is ready to change all old structures and make every change that helps humanity to become free.
Freedom is such a spiritual necessity that without it, man never attains his manhood.”
This is a transmission about what it means to grow up and to stop outsourcing your knowing to governments, religions, ideologies, and inherited identities and to start living from a place of inner clarity and sovereign action.
Osho was strong in naming what had to go:
No nations, only shared responsibility.
No religions, only individual truth.
No race or color distinctions, only a shared humanity.
No political parties, only people of merit making decisions grounded in actual skill, not just charisma or control.
These are calls to action for a world on the brink of ecological and cultural collapse. A world where, as Osho put it, the “load of the past is too heavy and it is killing everybody.”
A world eerily similar to the one Rogan and his guests described, where people are dying from disconnection, all the spreading misinformation, and the slow erosion of meaning.
“Now the question is: either be ready to commit a global su***de or change the whole structure that has dominated you up to now.”
What Joe Rogan does, week after week, is lift the veil. He doesn’t always frame it in spiritual terms, but the effect is similar.
He breaks open public conversations that name the manipulation and the political theatre and he brings in voices that challenge the idea that we should just sit quietly and trust the system.
So when he echoed Osho’s line at the end of the show, “but the people are retarded,” it was a sobering summary and a reflection of what happens when we let fear and false comfort replace clarity.
As Osho said, “People change only when they come to the very brink of death.” We are there. And the opportunity is massive, if we’re willing to face the truth and dismantle the systems that are no longer serving life.
“This is not the time to be pessimistic, this is the time to rejoice.
Rejoice, and destroy all stupidities that have been dominating you up to now.”
So the question becomes personal:
Where are you still obeying what you know is false?
What parts of you are still sedated by habit or fear of being wrong?
What “democracy” do you defend out of familiarity, even though it keeps you from freedom?
Osho didn’t believe in saving the system. He offers radical methods for liberating body, mind and soul. And from there, the next step becomes easy and natural, a full fledged celebration of life!
Loving Regards,
Ma Ananda Sarita
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