passages-judgment-mass-public-made-problem-existential

# The judgment that a mass public cannot govern... > The judgment that a mass public cannot govern complex technical questions is one of the oldest conclusions in political thought, and every serious strategist of democracy has reached some version of it. Plato's _Republic_ described the ship of state as a vessel whose sailors quarrel over the helm, flatter whoever promises them the wheel, and dismiss the one man who studies the stars and seasons as a useless stargazer. Gustave Le Bon wrote in _The Crowd_ in 1895 that by the mere fact that a man forms part of an organized crowd, he descends several rungs on the ladder of civilization. Walter Lippmann, the most influential American political commentator of the twentieth century, concluded in _The Phantom Public_ in 1925 that "the public must be put in its place," so that each of us "may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." {{The founders of modern democratic theory understood that a public which cannot be educated must be managed, and they said so openly a century before artificial intelligence made the problem existential.}} **Source:** [[articles/The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public|The Immediate AI Risk Is the Public]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The judgment that a mass public cannot govern complex technical questions is one of the oldest conclusions in political thought, and every serious strategist of democracy has reached some version of it. Plato's Republic described the ship of state as a vessel whose sailors quarrel over the helm, flatter whoever promises them the wheel, and dismiss the one man who studies the stars and seasons as a useless stargazer. Gustave Le Bon wrote in The Crowd in 1895 that by the mere fact that a man forms part of an organized crowd, he descends several rungs on the ladder of civilization. Walter Lippmann, the most influential American political commentator of the twentieth century, concluded in The Phantom Public in 1925 that "the public must be put in its place," so that each of us "may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." The founders of modern democratic theory understood that a public which cannot be educated must be managed, and they said so openly a century before artificial intelligence made the problem existential.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-judgment-mass-public-made-problem-existential ```