PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

services in a feudal system, to jobs and publicity in a modern
democracy. That is why you can breakup a particular machine by
abolishing its privileges. But the machine in every coherent group is,
I believe, certain to reappear. For privilege is entirely relative,
and uniformity is impossible. Imagine the most absolute communism of
which your mind is capable, where no one possessed any object that
everyone else did not possess, and still, if the communist group had
to take any action whatever, the mere pleasure of being the friend of
the man who was going to make the speech that secured the most votes,
would, I am convinced, be enough to crystallize an organization of
insiders around him.
It is not necessary, then, to invent a collective intelligence in
order to explain why the judgments of a group are usually more
coherent, and often more true to form than the remarks of the man in
the street. One mind, or a few can pursue a train of thought, but a
group trying to think in concert can as a group do little more than
assent or dissent. The members of a hierarchy can have a corporate
tradition. As apprentices they learn the trade from the masters, who
in turn learned it when they were apprentices, and in any enduring
society, the change of personnel within the governing hierarchies is
slow enough to permit the transmission of certain great stereotypes
and patterns of behavior. From father to son, from prelate to novice,
from veteran to cadet, certain ways of seeing and doing are taught.
These ways become familiar, and are recognized as such by the mass of
outsiders.
4
Distance alone lends enchantment to the view that masses of human
beings ever cooperate in any complex affair without a central machine
managed by a very few people. "No one," says Bryce, [Footnote: _Op.
cit._, Vol. II, p. 542.] "can have had some years' experience of
the conduct of affairs in a legislature or an administration without
observing how extremely small is the number of persons by whom the
world is governed." He is referring, of course, to affairs of state.
To be sure if you consider all the affairs of mankind the number of
people who govern is considerable, but if you take any particular
institution, be it a legislature, a party, a trade union, a
nationalist movement, a factory, or a club, the number of those who
govern is a very small percentage of those who are theoretically
supposed to govern.
Landslides can turn one machine out and put another in; revolutions
sometimes abolish a particular machine altogether. The democratic
revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the
course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the
other. But nowhere does the machine disappear. Nowhere is the idyllic