"Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests"
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Mills is skewering a peculiarly comfortable American fantasy: that politics can be treated like engineering, not ethics. The line is built around a dodge - "Not wishing to be disturbed" - that frames civic innocence as willful avoidance. He is not describing ignorance so much as a preference: better to imagine government as an "automatic machine" than admit that political economy is a minefield of moral choices about who wins, who loses, and who gets to call those outcomes fair.
The machine metaphor does heavy work. Machines don’t have conscience; they have settings. If the system is self-regulating through the "balancing of competing interests", then no one is responsible for the harm it produces. Inequality becomes a technical byproduct rather than a political decision. Mills is puncturing the pluralist myth that rival factions naturally check one another into justice. Underneath is his broader argument from The Power Elite era: in a mass society, the most organized and well-resourced interests don’t merely compete - they dominate, coordinate, and set the agenda while the public is lulled into thinking equilibrium is democracy.
Context matters: postwar America was selling itself as the rational alternative to ideological conflict, a managerial republic where experts, markets, and institutions kept extremism at bay. Mills sees that as ideology in a lab coat. By calling moral issues "disturbing", he hints at the psychic bargain: trade discomfort for stability, then rename the surrender "common sense."
The machine metaphor does heavy work. Machines don’t have conscience; they have settings. If the system is self-regulating through the "balancing of competing interests", then no one is responsible for the harm it produces. Inequality becomes a technical byproduct rather than a political decision. Mills is puncturing the pluralist myth that rival factions naturally check one another into justice. Underneath is his broader argument from The Power Elite era: in a mass society, the most organized and well-resourced interests don’t merely compete - they dominate, coordinate, and set the agenda while the public is lulled into thinking equilibrium is democracy.
Context matters: postwar America was selling itself as the rational alternative to ideological conflict, a managerial republic where experts, markets, and institutions kept extremism at bay. Mills sees that as ideology in a lab coat. By calling moral issues "disturbing", he hints at the psychic bargain: trade discomfort for stability, then rename the surrender "common sense."
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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