They reverse the
process by which interesting public opinions are built up. Instead of
presenting a casual fact, a large screen of stereotypes, and a
dramatic identification, they break down the drama, break through the
stereotypes, and offer men a picture of facts, which is unfamiliar and
to them impersonal. When this is not painful, it is dull, and those to
whom it is painful, the trading politician and the partisan who has
much to conceal, often exploit the dullness that the public feels, in
order to remove the pain that they feel.
2
Yet every complicated community has sought the assistance of special
men, of augurs, priests, elders. Our own democracy, based though it
was on a theory of universal competence, sought lawyers to manage its
government, and to help manage its industry. It was recognized that
the specially trained man was in some dim way oriented to a wider
system of truth than that which arises spontaneously in the amateur's
mind. But experience has shown that the traditional lawyer's equipment
was not enough assistance. The Great Society had grown furiously and
to colossal dimensions by the application of technical knowledge. It
was made by engineers who had learned to use exact measurements and
quantitative analysis. It could not be governed, men began to
discover, by men who thought deductively about rights and wrongs. It
could be brought under human control only by the technic which had
created it.
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