What We Call A Democratic Society Might

When Everyone Thinks Alike, No One Thinks Very Much.

Every Fairly Intelligent Person Is Aware That The Price Of Respectability Is A Muffled Soul Bent On The Trivial And The Mediocre.

The Private Citizen Today Has Come To Feel Rather Like A Deaf Spectator In The Back Row, Who Ought To Keep His Mind On The Mystery Off There, But Cannot Quite Manage To Keep Awake. He Knows He Is Somehow Affected By What Is Going On. Rules And Regulations Continually, Taxes Annually And Wars Occasionally Remind Him That He Is Being Swept Along By Great Drifts Of Circumstance. Yet These Public Affairs Are In No Convincing Way His Affairs. They Are For The Most Part Invisible. They Are Managed, If They Are Managed At All, At Distant Centers, From Behind The Scenes, By Unnamed Powers.

What The Public Does Is Not To Express Its Opinions But To Align Itself For Or Against A Proposal. If That Theory Is Accepted, We Must Abandon The Notion That Democratic Government Can Be The Direct Expression Of The Will Of The People. We Must Abandon The Notion That The People Govern. Instead, We Must Adopt The Theory That, By Their Occasional Mobilizations As A Majority, People Support Or Oppose The Individuals Who Actually Govern. We Must Say That The Popular Will Does Not Direct Continuously But That It Intervenes Occasionally.

Nobody Has Yet Found A Way Of Bombing That Can Prevent Foot Soldiers From Walking.