The Violence Inherent in the System: Monty Python’s Masterclass in Political Philosophy

By Michael Kelman Portney

In 1975, Monty Python’s The Holy Grail gave us the best deconstruction of political legitimacy ever filmed—delivered by a guy covered in mud yelling about watery tarts.

The “Constitutional Peasants” scene shouldn’t work as political philosophy. It’s absurdist comedy featuring a self-proclaimed anarcho-syndicalist commune, a confused king, and someone collecting “lovely filth.” Yet fifty years later, it remains the sharpest commentary on the question that still defines political systems: by what right do you rule?

I didn’t get it as a kid. The Knights Who Say Ni were funnier. But years later, standing at Occupy Houston debating whether to buy a tarp while police prepped for eviction, I finally understood. Dennis the peasant wasn’t just a joke—he was prophecy.

When Peasants Start Doing Political Theory

Arthur rides up and asks, “Whose castle is that?” What follows is a philosophical collision disguised as slapstick. The scene flips the hierarchy: peasants lecture a king.

Arthur declares, “I am your king.” Dennis doesn’t kneel. He delivers a political thesis: “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.” His friend drops the knockout line: “Well, I didn’t vote for you.”

Arthur’s claim—“a lady in a lake gave me a sword”—sounds absurd when stripped of pageantry. And that’s the point. Python shows how legitimacy hides behind myth, ritual, and divine language. Once you restate it plainly, it collapses under its own stupidity.

Mystification and the Rhetoric of Power

Arthur’s speech is gorgeous: “The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur…” It’s liturgical nonsense wrapped in poetry. The cadence alone carries authority. You’re not supposed to question it.

Dennis dismantles it with blunt translation. “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.” He doesn’t counter the myth—he exposes it. The humor isn’t in mocking the peasant’s skepticism; it’s in realizing we’ve all been trained to accept this kind of mystification as normal.

That’s how power still works. Institutions bury absurd logic under complexity, procedure, or tradition to dodge simple questions. Arthur hides behind shimmering samite. Modern authority hides behind constitutions, corporate charters, or “the way things are done.”

Dennis’s brilliance is media literacy in its purest form. He strips the story down until it sounds as insane as it actually is. Arthur has no response except to get angry.

Who’s Educated Here?

Arthur is “educated.” Tutors, etiquette, history—the full aristocratic syllabus. But his education is indoctrination. His worldview was preinstalled: kings rule, peasants obey, divine mandate justifies everything.

Dennis can’t read, but he can think. His “I didn’t vote for you” slices straight through a thousand years of feudal mythology. He doesn’t need philosophy textbooks to see the contradiction in someone claiming to rule him without consent.

Then Dennis delivers one of the most coherent summaries of democratic governance ever written:

“We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week, but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority for purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority for more major decisions.”

That’s not parody—that’s a working constitution. Rotating leadership. Majority and supermajority thresholds. Participatory meetings. Checks on executive power. Compare it to Arthur’s: “Sword from lake. I’m in charge.”

The peasants are rational. The king is delusional. But because he has the sword, his delusion wins.

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Problem

Dennis’s commune sounds utopian, but I’ve lived it. At Occupy Houston, we ran on consensus. Every decision had to pass unanimously. Buying a tarp took hours. Everyone had a voice, which meant no one could move. The process became the point.

Dennis’s system, with rotating executives and majority votes, is more efficient than consensus, but still fragile. It only works for small groups with aligned interests and time to deliberate. Once scale, urgency, or opposition enters the picture, horizontal systems grind under their own virtue.

Arthur’s autocracy is efficient because it skips consent. He can just decide. The cost is justice. Dennis’s commune is just because it demands consent. The cost is time. Python doesn’t moralize between them—it just lets you watch both collide.

The Joke Everyone Misses: They’re Already Free

The best hidden twist: Dennis is railing against oppression while living in freedom. His commune exists outside the castle’s reach. They don’t pay taxes. They have no lord. They govern themselves. Arthur doesn’t even know they exist. He’s literally lost.

Dennis isn’t oppressed—he’s auditioning for it. He needs Arthur to repress him so he can prove his point. When Arthur finally loses patience and grabs him, Dennis screams, “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” He’s performing victimhood, but the violence is real. Arthur uses force to end debate, proving Dennis right.

It’s a perfect meta-joke: revolutionaries sometimes create the confrontation that justifies their worldview. But that doesn’t make the oppression fake—it just makes it visible. The moment power is challenged, it reveals its reliance on force.

Arthur’s Real Fear: Irrelevance

Arthur isn’t threatened because Dennis is rebellious. He’s threatened because Dennis doesn’t care. The peasants didn’t know they had a king. They were doing fine without one.

That’s the nightmare of every ruler: not uprising, but irrelevance. A population that governs itself renders hierarchy obsolete. If word spreads that you don’t need kings, the whole system collapses. That’s why Arthur eventually gets violent—not to crush rebellion, but to reassert meaning. The peasants’ indifference undermines the premise of monarchy itself.

And Dennis nails it: “If I went around saying I was an emperor because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!” The only difference between divine right and insanity is collective belief backed by force.

“I Didn’t Vote for You” and the DNA of Democracy

That one line—“I didn’t vote for you”—contains the entire logic of democracy. It doesn’t demand philosophy. It’s instinctive fairness. If you rule me, I should have a say.

Arthur responds, “You don’t vote for kings.” That’s not an argument. It’s a confession. His system has no mechanism for consent, only inheritance and violence.

The woman’s confusion—“Who are the Britons?” “I thought we were an autonomous collective”—exposes how fragile authority is without recognition. Power only exists when people believe it does. When that belief evaporates, all that’s left is coercion.

That’s the line between legitimacy and tyranny. You can enforce obedience, but you can’t enforce belief. Once people stop playing along, the crown’s just metal and the throne’s just furniture.

The Modern Version of the Same Joke

We’ve traded castles for institutions, but the argument hasn’t changed. By what right do you rule?

Supreme Court justices shaping the nation—“I didn’t vote for you.”
Electoral College nullifying the popular vote—same.
Corporate boards making life-or-death decisions for workers—same.
Founding Fathers invoked like gods—“Strange men in wigs writing documents is no basis for modern governance.”

The vocabulary shifts from “divine right” to “constitutional originalism” or “shareholder value,” but the structure’s identical: a story to justify why someone gets to make decisions that others must obey.

And every time, there’s a Dennis asking, “But why, though?” The question never goes away because legitimacy never stops needing justification. Every generation invents new Arthurs and new Dennis figures to argue it out again.

Why Revolutionaries Lose (and Why They Matter)

Dennis loses. He’s correct, articulate, and irrelevant. Arthur rides away. That’s the core tragedy of reason: it doesn’t matter unless power acknowledges it.

Arthur doesn’t have to win the debate; he just has to ignore it. That’s how authority survives—by being immune to logic. The sword outweighs the syllogism.

Every just system demands consent. Every efficient system bypasses it. That’s the paradox Dennis represents: justice costs time and energy. Tyranny is faster. And most people will trade freedom for convenience if the violence stays politely hidden.

But Dennis still matters. He refuses to accept “that’s just how it is.” He demands justification even when it gets him grabbed and shaken. He loses the argument today so that centuries later, people quoting him can win it.

“The Violence Inherent in the System”

When Dennis shouts, “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!” it’s played for laughs. But his final line—“the violence inherent in the system”—is deadly serious. He’s not just describing Arthur’s grip; he’s naming the mechanism of all hierarchical power.

Every system that concentrates authority—monarchy, capitalism, bureaucracy—rests on violence, either explicit or implied. The sword may become a badge, a law, a paycheck, but it’s still a threat. The moment you stop complying, someone enforces compliance.

Arthur’s rule seems peaceful because everyone accepts it. Challenge it, and you find the steel underneath. The same goes for “civil” modern states: ignore a court order, refuse taxes, organize labor—eventually, men with guns arrive. The violence is just hidden under procedure.

That’s Dennis’s true insight. Power isn’t sustained by belief alone. It’s sustained by the credible threat of harm when belief fails.

What Monty Python Actually Understood

Python made the peasants rational on purpose. They could’ve played it as Arthur the hero versus Dennis the fool. Instead, they flipped it: the peasant is logical, the king is delusional, and the woman asking “I didn’t vote for you” is the only sane voice in the conversation.

The comedy is in the clarity. Dennis overexplains like a political science major, but he’s right. His commune, with all its pedantry, is better. More legitimate. More just. It just doesn’t have swords.

Arthur’s frustration is the frustration of every entrenched power: the irritation of being asked to justify itself to those it considers beneath it. That irritation inevitably turns to force, because there’s no argument that can make “I was chosen by a lake” sound reasonable.

Python doesn’t resolve the debate. They show it looping forever. Arthur leaves unchanged. Dennis keeps yelling. The powerful keep ruling. The righteous keep ranting. But five decades later, we’re still quoting it—because we still recognize it.

The Argument That Never Ends

Every generation reenacts this scene with new costumes. Monarchs become CEOs. Peasants become voters. Swords become laws. But the structure remains: mystified power meeting rational skepticism.

Arthur says: “This is tradition, divine order, constitutional procedure.”
Dennis says: “That’s nonsense. Show me the consent.”
Arthur says: “Shut up.”
Dennis says: “You’re proving my point.”

The tension never resolves because civilization itself sits on that fault line—between order imposed by power and order negotiated by consent. The moment consent fails, the system reverts to violence. And every time someone points that out, the king grabs them by the collar.

The Final Lesson

The Holy Grail was supposed to be parody, but it aged into prophecy. “The violence inherent in the system” isn’t just a punchline—it’s the foundation of governance. Power may dress itself in law or ritual, but the sword is always there, gleaming beneath the rhetoric.

Python understood that the only honest question in politics is still the simplest: why you? Every institution, from monarchy to democracy to corporate bureaucracy, eventually hides behind mystification when faced with that question. And every generation produces a Dennis to strip the language back to plain English.

The violence is inherent. The absurdity is too. But so is the hope—because somewhere, some muddy peasant is still willing to ask why.