He charmed all those who met
him, helped many a stranded war worker, and was superb when he
unveiled a monument.
He did not understand that the power of the expert depends upon
separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring,
in his expert self, what decision is made. The man who, like the
ambassador, takes a line, and meddles with the decision, is soon
discounted. There he is, just one more on that side of the question.
For when he begins to care too much, he begins to see what he wishes
to see, and by that fact ceases to see what he is there to see. He is
there to represent the unseen. He represents people who are not
voters, functions of voters that are not evident, events that are out
of sight, mute people, unborn people, relations between things and
people. He has a constituency of intangibles. And intangibles cannot
be used to form a political majority, because voting is in the last
analysis a test of strength, a sublimated battle, and the expert
represents no strength available in the immediate. But he can exercise
force by disturbing the line up of the forces. By making the invisible
visible, he confronts the people who exercise material force with a
new environment, sets ideas and feelings at work in them, throws them
out of position, and so, in the profoundest way, affects the decision.
Men cannot long act in a way that they know is a contradiction of the
environment as they conceive it.
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