Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

These lines come from John Lennon’s song “Working Class Hero,” written in 1970 and released on his 1970/71 solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. The song emerged from Lennon’s post-Beatles period, shaped by his “primal therapy” phase and a turn toward stark, confessional songwriting. In the wake of 1960s counterculture and amid political disillusionment, Lennon wrote a bitter critique of class conditioning and social control in Britain and the wider West. The lyric targets the ways mass culture and conventional institutions can pacify people while preserving entrenched hierarchies, even when individuals feel liberated.

Lennon argues that apparent freedoms—consumer choice, sexual permissiveness, entertainment, and organized religion—can function as sedatives that keep people compliant. The speaker mocks the listener’s belief that they are “clever and classless and free,” insisting that structural class power remains intact: the audience is still treated as disposable labor (“peasants”). The profanity sharpens the contempt and urgency, rejecting polite moral language in favor of a blunt diagnosis of exploitation. The passage encapsulates the song’s larger theme: modern societies can reproduce class domination not only through economics, but through culture, ideology, and distraction.