PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But
there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are
the people who are at the head of affairs. Parents, teachers, and
masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into
the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than
another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we
need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a
newspaper or an acquaintance who is interested in public affairs to
public personages. The literature of psychoanalysis is rich in
suggestive hypothesis.
At any rate we do find ourselves trusting certain people, who
constitute our means of junction with pretty nearly the whole realm of
unknown things. Strangely enough, this fact is sometimes regarded as
inherently undignified, as evidence of our sheep-like, ape-like
nature. But complete independence in the universe is simply
unthinkable. If we could not take practically everything for granted,
we should spend our lives in utter triviality. The nearest thing to a
wholly independent adult is a hermit, and the range of a hermit's
action is very short. Acting entirely for himself, he can act only
within a tiny radius and for simple ends. If he has time to think
great thoughts we can be certain that he has accepted without
question, before he went in for being a hermit, a whole repertory of
painfully acquired information about how to keep warm and how to keep
from being hungry, and also about what the great questions are.
On all but a very few matters for short stretches in our lives, the
utmost independence that we can exercise is to multiply the
authorities to whom we give a friendly hearing. As congenital amateurs
our quest for truth consists in stirring up the experts, and forcing
them to answer any heresy that has the accent of conviction. In such a
debate we can often judge who has won the dialectical victory, but we
are virtually defenseless against a false premise that none of the
debaters has challenged, or a neglected aspect that none of them has
brought into the argument. We shall see later how the democratic
theory proceeds on the opposite assumption and assumes for the
purposes of government an unlimited supply of self-sufficient
individuals.
The people on whom we depend for contact with the outer world are
those who seem to be running it. [Footnote: _Cf._ Bryce, _Modern
Democracies_ Vol. II, pp. 544-545.] They may be running only a
very small part of the world. The nurse feeds the child, bathes it, and
puts it to bed. That does not constitute the nurse an authority on
physics, zoology, and the Higher Criticism. Mr. Smith runs, or at least
hires, the man who runs the factory. That does not make him an
authority on the Constitution of the United States, nor on the effects
\of the Fordney tariff. Mr. Smoot runs the Republican party in the State