"... There is then nothing particularly new in the disenchantment which the
private citizen expresses by not voting at all, by voting only for the head of
the ticket, by staying away from the primaries, by not reading speeches and
documents, by the whole list of sins of omission for which he is denounced. I
shall not denounce him further. My sympathies are with him, for I believe that
he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an
unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my
main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to
do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is
going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which
confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody,
from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who
came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and
omnicompetent citizen...
.. Today’s theories assume that either the voters are inherently competent
to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress toward such an
ideal. I think it is a false ideal. I do not mean an undesirable ideal. I mean
an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to
try to be a ballet dancer. An ideal
should express the true possibilities of its subject. When it does not
it perverts the true possibilities. The ideal of the omnicompetent, sovereign
citizen is, in my opinion, such a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit
of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current
disenchantment.
.. The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs. He
does not know how to direct public affairs. He does not know what is happening,
why it is happening, what ought to happen. I cannot imagine how he could know,
and there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorance in
masses of people can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs...
.. The need in the Great Society not only for publicity but for
uninterrupted publicity is indisputable. But we shall misunderstand the need
seriously if we imagine that the purpose of the publication can possibly be the
informing of every voter. We live at the mere beginnings of public accounting.
Yet the facts far exceed our curiosity… A few executives here and there read
them. The rest of us ignore them for the good and sufficient reason that we
have other things to do....
.. Specific opinions give rise to immediate executive acts; to take a job,
to do a particular piece of work, to hire or fire, to buy or sell, to stay here
or go there, to accept or refuse, to command or obey.
General opinions give rise to delegated, indirect, symbolic, intangible results:
to a vote, to a resolution, to applause, to criticising, to praise or
dispraise, to audiences, circulations, followings, contentment or discontent.
The specific opinion may lead to a decision to act within the area where a he
has personal jurisdiction, that is, within the limits set by law and custom,
his personal power and his personal desire. But general opinions lead only to
some sort of expression, such as voting, and do not result in executive acts
except in cooperation with the general opinions of large numbers of other
persons.
.. Since the general opinions of large numbers of persons are almost
certain to be a vague and confusing medley, action cannot be taken until these
opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform… the
making of one general will out of a multitude of general wishes ... consists
essentially in the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been
detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas,
and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous will out of a
heterogeneous mass of desires. The process, therefore, by which general
opinions are brought to cooperation consists of an intensification of feeling
and a degradation of significance. Before a mass of general opinions can
eventuate in executive action, the choice is narrowed down to a few
alternatives. The victorious alternative is executed not by the mass but by
individuals in control of its energy....
.. This,
then, is the ideal of public action which our inquiry suggests. Those who
happen in any question to constitute the public should attempt only to create
an equilibrium in which settlements can be reached directly and by consent. the
burden of carrying on the work of the world, of inventing, creating, executing,
of attempting justice, formulating laws and moral codes, of dealing with the
technique and the substance, lies not upon public opinion and not upon government
but on those who are responsibly concerned as agents in the affair ....
http://www2.maxwell.syr.edu/plegal/history/lippmann.htm
- WALTER LIPPMANN was an elitist who got his mind to think he was an individual that understood the idea of being a citizen, an ordinary human being
- Walter was indeed one of the first to decide how the society in 'modern' time was to be engineered and the idiot was not in the least bit a bright and innovative thinker ~ MARK TWAIN was, more than likely not Lippmann's ideology of a Sovereign and Omnicompetent Citizen ~
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