---
schema_version: "library-reader-v1"
source_type: "original_book"
title: "The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium"
author: null
edition: null
publisher: null
year: null
isbn: "9781732265141"
library_document_id: "65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e"
source_sha256: "5ce4681f6925ec280ef79b11332d97c771babda12c7d1e05c6466d18ecbcc424"
pdf_physical_page_count: 412
pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0
range_start: 280
range_count: 10
html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e?start=280&limit=10"
markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=280&limit=10"
previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=270&limit=10"
next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=290&limit=10"
---
# The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
> 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=280 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
TELESCOPIC PHILANTHROPY, OR THE POLITICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
As I wrote these lines, opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of President Obama’s handling of the economy. The president, who prided himself on his political instincts, was well aware of the numbers, and countered with a condemnation of a system that fosters economic inequality. These are the great issues of American politics, and have been so since the rise, late in the nineteenth century, of high modernist ideals.
I won’t pretend to certainty in understanding what the public has in mind when it evaluates a president’s “handling” of the economy. But I imagine it expects epic outcomes in the economic field, such as high growth and dramatically lowered unemployment, imposed by a ruler who enjoys command and control of the system. President Obama, in some way, has disappointed these expectations. The failure of the stimulus probably weighed heavily on public opinion—but this is a piece of circular logic. President Obama proposed the stimulus because he believed, correctly, that epic economic outcomes were expected of him as president.
Yet the claims of modern government with regard to the economy have been falsified many times over. President Obama, from the top of the power pyramid, resembled a bystander to economic developments far more than a heroic figure with command and control. His post-2010 sectarian rhetoric recognized this implicitly. He would rather have condemned inequality than proposed big economic initiatives, because, politically, it appeared more rational.
The Federal government and the US economy are two aspects of the same monstrously complex social system. Their interactions are uncertain, nonlinear, and prolific with unforeseen consequences. To judge a president’s “handling” of the economy as if he were managing the mortgage and checking account of his own personal sphere is a gross inversion of reality—but I suspect that is precisely what the public has done for a generation and more. If, during this time, politicians have made claims for government that are untethered from reality, and have consequently failed to deliver the impossible, we should not be surprised. Success with the public on election day has entailed failure the day after.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=281 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
The alternative I wish to consider comes in two parts. The first has to do with honesty in our expectations. Presidents can’t handle the economy. They have no clue how to do it. The experts who advise them rarely have what N. N. Taleb has called “skin in the game”: they pay no penalty when they are wrong, as they were, catastrophically, in 2008, and immediately again, with the stimulus, in 2009.
When it comes to economic questions, politicians should be rewarded for the modesty of their claims rather than the heroic ambition of their rhetoric. Sitting presidents should be applauded for discarding the pose of papal infallibility, and speaking about uncertainty, risk, and trade-offs. The more people we elect to office who grasp the concept of trial and error, which means nothing more than learning from mistakes, the happier we should be.
Whether this alternative is practicable I leave for you, wise reader, to decide. But it is a choice. You and me, and every member of the public, can bend our political demands to reality, as we must do with our private needs, when managing our affairs in the personal sphere. The ideal of government as master of the economy is an artifact of the industrial age. Today we know perfectly well that the whirlwind of aggregated activity we call “the economy” isn’t like a factory floor, to be orchestrated by some maestro according to Taylorist principles.
So the choice we face is pretty stark: align our demands with the knowledge of our historical moment, or stay under the shadow of the failed ambitions of the past.
Aligning the public’s expectations with historical reality should have a ripple effect on ideology. The old categories will themselves be realigned. The immanent faith in political power and pseudo-experts, the latter-day feeling of decadence and impotence—all of that, ultimately, will be swept away, replaced by political quarrels and emotions that actually connect to the possibilities of the moment.
I hasten to add, however, that seizing the choice before us doesn’t require some sort of Pauline conversion. You may keep your old political faith and still break new ground: but you may not treat reality like an enemy, and you may not compound failure with dishonesty.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=282 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
There is a second part to this choice. The standards used to evaluate government projects are also inventions of the industrial age. We, the public, are invited to take sides, to applaud or condemn presidents, based on some statistical abstraction, some number—the gross domestic product, for example, or the unemployment and poverty rates. We saw the unemployment rate used like a baseball score in the controversy surrounding the stimulus. The number shows the public who’s winning the political game.
Numbers like the GDP fulfill a rhetorical function. They partake of the prestige of science, appearing superior to the confused jumble of reality as actually experienced. They sustain the high modernist claim that we can know at a glance the truth about vast systems.
But we know that we don’t know. The number is an illusion. If I lose my job, I understand what this signifies in all the intimate details, because I have direct access to my personal sphere. If I am told that the unemployment rate went up from 5.1 to 5.6 percent over the last month, I have no idea what this signifies. I lack access to the reality behind the number. The rise could reflect the machinations of greedy corporations or a corrupt government, or the effects of a natural disaster, or plain misfortune, or any combination of these and many other possibilities.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=283 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Even if the unemployment rate measured the actual number of unemployed Americans—it doesn’t 2—and even if I set aside the vexing question of whether the government should be responsible for employment, playing politics by the number is a frivolous game of make-believe. Politics is nothing like baseball. In the end, the most persuasive story wins, not the highest score. That is true whenever government tries to impose a specific outcome on a complex system. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, for example, the tally of dead American military personnel has been used as a surrogate measure, but the success or failure of war policies have depended entirely on who wins the argument about the rightness of the cause. Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw the most horrific slaughter of US troops in history, is today considered our greatest president.
Much of the negation poisoning the democratic process has stemmed from a confusion of the personal and the statistical. I may hold down an excellent job, but the failure of the stimulus to meet its targets infuriates me. I may live in peaceful Vienna, Virginia, safe from harm—but a report that several Americans have died violently in Kabul appears like a fatal failure of authority. By dwelling on the plane of gross statistics, I become vulnerable to grandiose personal illusions: that if I compel the government to move in this direction or that, I can save the Constitution, say, or the earth, or stop the war, or end poverty now.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=284 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Though my personal sphere overflows with potentiality, I join the mutinous public and demand the abolition of the established order.
This type of moral and political displacement is nothing new. The best character in the best novel by Dickens, to my taste, is Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, who spent long days working to improve “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” while, in her London home, her small children ran wild and neglected. Dickens termed this “telescopic philanthropy”—the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion.
Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, the subject of which seemed to be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed. 3
The revolt of the public has had a telescopic and Jellybyan aspect to it. Though they never descended to details, insurgents assumed that, by symbolic gestures and sheer force of desire, they could refashion the complex systems of democracy and capitalism into a personalized utopia. Instead, unknowingly, they crossed into N. N. Taleb’s wild “Extremistan,” where “we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” In that unstable country, “you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.” 4
I can’t command a complex social system like the United States, but I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality. To seize this alternative, I must redirect the demands I make on the world from the telescopic to the personal, because actionable reality resides in the personal sphere. I can do something about losing my job, for example, but I have no clue what could or should be done about the unemployment rate. I know directly whether a law affects my business for better or worse, but I have no idea of its effect on the gross domestic product. I can assist a friend in need, but I have little influence over the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=285 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government.
A telescopic philanthropist, from the moral heights, would call this selfishness or escapism. Yet selfishness, it seems to me, would entail the demand that the government meet all my needs. Escapism would mean burying my personal responsibilities under a concern for the brotherhood of man. Mrs. Jellyby, as depicted by Dickens, was a selfish escapist. That is not necessarily the case with those who choose to anchor their expectations to the realities of the personal sphere.
From within the short causal links of that intimate space, I can engage the tangled web of politics and government, form opinions, and act, if I wish, on those opinions. I can join vital communities of interest, and participate in philanthropic activity, including protests on behalf of radical change. I can exult when my ideals triumph on the great stage of the world, and feel despondent when they are defeated. That is allowed.
What I cannot do is demand certainty of complexity, or expect that statistical formulas and numbers, accessible only to a chosen few, will have the power to ordain the future. What I should not do is pour a corrosive stream of rejection and negation on a democratic system that has struggled, and mostly failed, to meet my impossible demands and expectations.
ADVICE TO THE PRINCE, OR THE ART OF GOVERNMENT IN SOCIETIES OF DISTRUST
The most consequential choices available under the conditions that prevail at the moment concern the public—you, me—and its political expectations. Such choices are grounded in true contingency: I can align my expectations with reality or with utopian illusions. Nothing is settled. The power to decide is mine (yours, ours).
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=286 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Government also faces epochal choices. Hierarchy and bureaucracy, the expert and the trained professional, are losing favor with the public. The pyramid is shrinking: the distance between top and bottom has grown uncomfortably tight. Wael Ghonim, anonymous administrator of a Facebook page, was sought out by powerful members of the Mubarak regime as a negotiator during the 2011 protests. He had just walked out of a secret prison, where state security had kept him for 11 days.
Power and persuasion have headed in different directions. Legitimacy currently belongs to actions and persons as much as to institutions. Democratic government is everywhere surrounded by a rebellious networked public. Institutional changes, even radical ones, are possible, but they will not arrive as the result of necessity or the laws of history. They must be chosen.
I will tread lightly in my discussion of government, for an obvious reason. For me, there’s no contingency in the question. I can choose my expectations of government, but I have no way to impose these expectations on the human beings and structures that embody the government. Since I don’t wish to dabble in utopian fantasies, or sound like King Lear railing at the storm, my options in dealing with this subject are limited.
But I can’t avoid consideration of the choices of government without leaving a large, inexplicable hole in the center of my story.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=287 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Let me begin with the ideal, if only to dismiss it. In the best of all possible circumstances, government will assume the shape that dominates the imagination of a historical period. Modern government, creature of the industrial age, would give way to networked government, able to exploit “small world” links to reduce, formally, the distance between power and the public. 5 Political issues—proposed legislation, for example—would be debated and resolved on a much vaster virtual stage, on which ordinary people, no less than elected or bureaucratic elites, have their say. The output of government would be crowdsourced and thus sanity-checked.
This won’t happen. Hierarchy is too stubborn a structure. The self-interest of the top and the disinterest in wielding power of the sectarian bottom makes it almost certain that the current structures will endure. The pyramid is losing height, but it almost certainly won’t flatten altogether. Barring some unforeseen and unprecedented breakthrough, the organization of government, like that of corporations, will remain top-down.
In a non-perfect world, which happens to be the one we actually live in, hierarchical government, democratic government, must find ways to regain legitimacy without yielding on every point to the negations of a networked public. The decisive choices, I believe, concern the handling of that perturbing agent, information.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=288 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
Hierarchy, as a structure, has proven transcendentally inept in dealing with digital platforms. Despite a lot of brave modernizing talk, social media and the new communication technologies remain a profound mystery to government, while those at the top of the pyramid continue to detest the intrusion of amateurs and the rude informality of the web. Hence their serial amazement each time the public rode digital tools to materialize, as from thin air, on the streets.
Government’s awkward attempts to embrace digital technology provide the most revealing examples of its incapacity. According to a December 2011 study, some 56 federal agencies owned 1,489 “.gov” domains—but 400 of these domains redirected the user to another government site, 265 didn’t work, and 20 were “under development.” There seemed to be no guiding principle for hosting federal websites: the number per agency varied from 160 to two. A total of 150 different web publishing systems and 250 different web hosting providers were used to run the government’s 11,000 sites. Main users of this crazy quilt of technology and information were “federal workers, followed by researchers and the press.” 7
This was information from the old elites of the industrial age to their brethren, filtered, almost symbolically, through digital systems instead of paper reports. The public need not apply, and was not interested in any case. The USA.gov site, to take just one example, described itself as “The US Government’s official web portal.” That sounded important and ambitious. Between 2010 and 2011, however, the site garnered around 0.02 percent in “daily reach” or total traffic of the web—less than half the daily reach of Icanhascheezburger.com, a website featuring humorous photos of cats. Currently, the US government’s official web portal ranked 1,751 in popularity among US websites, and 6,303 globally. 8
When government has tried to reach the wider public through digital media, it failed in spectacular fashion. The online insurance marketplace that was part of the new health care system cost the federal government \$400 million and took three years to develop. According to the New York Times, the website was supposed to be a “one-stop, click-and-go hub for citizens seeking health insurance.” Instead, it crashed and burned on delivery. Merely to log on was impossible for many users. An insurance executive was quoted by the Times as saying, “The extent of the problem is pretty enormous. At the end of our calls, people say, ‘It’s awful, just awful.” 10 But this should surprise nobody. The government has no idea of how to interact with the public other than from the top down. That is how federal agencies structured their 11,000 websites.
## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=289 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED
下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/65b8fb97-5281-4ca2-a09f-53f39f61ff9e.md?start=290&limit=10)