In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Baudrillard’s aphorism satirizes modern delegation and the way institutions relieve individuals of burdens that are also forms of agency. Just as representative politics can tempt citizens to outsource power (and thus responsibility) to “statesmen,” academic and expert systems can tempt people to outsource understanding to “scholars.” Calling this outsourcing an “abjection” is deliberately provocative: it suggests a humiliating dependence in which people accept passivity as comfort. The line fits Baudrillard’s broader critique of late-modern societies where mediation, expertise, and systems of representation replace direct engagement with reality, producing subjects who consume ready-made meanings rather than participate in making them.