"The ideal of the omni-competent, sovereign citizen is ... a false ideal. It is unattainable. The pursuit of it is misleading. The failure to achieve it has produced the current disenchantment. At the root of the effort to educate a people for self-government there has ... always been the assumption that the voter should aim to approximate as nearly as he can the knowledge and the point of view of the responsible man. He did not, of course, ever approximate it very nearly. But he was supposed to. It was believed that if only he could be taught more facts, if only he would take more interest, if only he would read more and better newspapers, if only he would listen to more lectures and read more reports, he would gradually be trained to direct public affairs. The whole assumption is false ... No progress can be made towards this unattainable ideal. This democratic conception is false because it fails to note the radical difference between the experience of the insider and the outsider ... No device of publicity, no machinery of enlightenment can endow [the outsider] during a crisis with the antecedent detailed and technical knowledge which is required for executive action. The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd."