"It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government"
About this Quote
Gardner is naming a civic magic trick: scale turns agency into fog. When government becomes “huge and distant,” responsibility doesn’t disappear because people get worse; it disappears because the system is engineered, experienced, and narrated as something that happens elsewhere. The key word is “invisible.” He’s not talking about corruption in smoke-filled rooms so much as the everyday bureaucracy that runs on forms, acronyms, and delegated authority. Invisible processes are the perfect alibi. If you can’t see the gears, you can’t find the lever you’re supposed to pull.
The sentence also carries a quiet rebuke to the modern citizen-consumer posture: we complain, we vote occasionally, we outsource the rest. “Individually responsible” is an intentionally lonely phrase, implying a burden that feels almost quaint in a mass society where problems arrive as headlines and solutions arrive as policy packages. Gardner’s educator’s instinct is to treat that drift not as a moral failing but as a predictable psychological response to complexity: distance numbs, abstraction anesthetizes, and the diffusion of responsibility becomes a default setting.
Context matters. Gardner lived through the rise of the administrative state, the Cold War’s national-security bureaucracy, and the Great Society’s ambitious programs - eras when government promised big solutions while becoming harder to understand from the sidewalk. The intent is diagnostic and strategic: if democracy is going to function, institutions have to be made legible and proximate again, and citizens have to be given real, graspable points of responsibility. Otherwise, “distant government” becomes a self-fulfilling excuse for disengagement.
The sentence also carries a quiet rebuke to the modern citizen-consumer posture: we complain, we vote occasionally, we outsource the rest. “Individually responsible” is an intentionally lonely phrase, implying a burden that feels almost quaint in a mass society where problems arrive as headlines and solutions arrive as policy packages. Gardner’s educator’s instinct is to treat that drift not as a moral failing but as a predictable psychological response to complexity: distance numbs, abstraction anesthetizes, and the diffusion of responsibility becomes a default setting.
Context matters. Gardner lived through the rise of the administrative state, the Cold War’s national-security bureaucracy, and the Great Society’s ambitious programs - eras when government promised big solutions while becoming harder to understand from the sidewalk. The intent is diagnostic and strategic: if democracy is going to function, institutions have to be made legible and proximate again, and citizens have to be given real, graspable points of responsibility. Otherwise, “distant government” becomes a self-fulfilling excuse for disengagement.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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