There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
Such a consciousness presents in fact the spectacle of mind deprived of its normal functioning, because it is baffled by the actualities in connection with which alone it is truly mind, and is driven back into secluded and impotent revery.
The notion that men may be free in their thought even when they are not in its expression and dissemination has been sedulously propagated.
An obvious requirement is freedom of social inquiry and of distribution of its conclusions.
We can borrow that much from the spirit and method of science even if we are ignorant of it as a specialized apparatus.
The prime condition of a democratically organized public is a kind of knowledge and insight which does not yet exist.
Why should the public and its officers, even if the latter are termed statesmen, be wiser and more effective?
But such knowledge goes relatively but little further than that of the competent skilled operator who manages a machine.
That within limits those successful in affairs have knowledge and skill is not to be doubted.
The current itself is as much beyond them as was ever the river by the side of which some ingenious mechanic, employing a knowledge which was transmitted to him, erected his saw-mill to make boards of trees which he had not grown.
Some occupy strategic positions which give them advance information of forces that affect the market; and by training and an innate turn that way they have acquired a special technique which enables them to use the vast impersonal tide to…
Skill and ability work within a framework which we have not created and do not comprehend.