The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority Quotes

“Following the horrors of 9/11, Fukuyama and his ideas were derided as triumphalist nonsense. But he was only half wrong. Fukuyama, a Hegelian, argued that Western democracy had run out of “contradictions”: that is, of ideological alternatives. That was true in 1989 and remains true today. Fukuyama’s mistake was to infer that the absence of contradictions meant the end of history. There was another possibility he failed to consider. History could well be driven by negation rather than contradiction. It could ride on the nihilistic rejection of the established order, regardless of alternatives or consequences. That would not be without precedent. The Roman Empire wasn’t overthrown by something called “feudalism”—it collapsed of its own dead weight, to the astonishment of friend and foe alike. The centuries after the calamity lacked ideological form. Similarly, a history built on negation would be formless and nameless: a shadowy moment, however long, between one true age and another.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“From start to finish, the 2016 presidential race can best be understood as the political assertion of an unhappy and highly mobilized public. In the end, Trump was chosen precisely because of, not despite, his apparent shortcomings. He is the visible effect, not the cause, of the public’s surly and mutinous mood. Trump has been for this public what the objet trouvé was for the modern artist: a found instrument, a club near to hand with which to smash at the established order. To compare him to Ronald Reagan, as some of his admirers have done, or to the great dictators, as his opponents constantly do, would be to warp reality as in a funhouse mirror.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“An iron triangle of government, the universities, and the corporate world controls the careers of individual scientists. Consequently, the ideal of the lonely and disinterested seeker after truth has been superseded by that of the scientist-bureaucrat.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over every authoritative judgment.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“So I would borrow one more virtue from The Wizard of Oz: courage.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living spirit behind the machinery of the democratic republic, though now almost lost from sight.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“In the tectonic depths of social and political life, the balance of power has fundamentally shifted between authority and obedience, ruler and ruled, elite and public, so that each can inflict damage on the other but neither can attain a decisive advantage. That is the non-utopian thesis of this book.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“life is meant to be lived rather than analyzed,”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs. In Egypt, we saw, the old regime was initially replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which won the country’s only fair elections to date. The hard reality in the Middle East is that Islamist groups have prospered wherever secular Arab authoritarians have wobbled. In the US, the more demanding faiths — evangelists, Mormons, Hasidics — have grown at the expense of older institutions which too much resemble the earth-bound hierarchies of the Center. The spread of Christianity in China is among today’s best-kept secrets. For the governing classes and articulate elites of the world, this turn to religion is both appalling and incomprehensible — but this is a denial of human nature. If the City of Man becomes a passing shadow, people will turn to the City of God.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority

“Under the perilous conditions of the Fifth Wave, governments cling more than they rule.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Negation, digitally amplified, has been the glue holding together a multifarious public.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The two perspectives, I fear, are not mutually exclusive, and may well be complementary. It is perfectly possible for the elites to lapse into paralysis while the public staggers into nihilism. Indeed, this could be our future.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Politics in modern countries, however, takes place beyond the immediate perception of the public. Political information is thus mediated rather than direct—almost always resembling the Iraq war example rather than the truck I can see with my own eyes. This sets up a large number of variables in the interaction between an individual, the mediator, and the information.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“No matter what I believe to be true, there always seems to be another side to the question. If you were to put me to the torture, I’d probably confess that this is my analytic ideal: to consider the question from as many relevant perspectives as the mind can hold.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The revolt of the public will not necessarily usher in an authoritarian age. It does not necessarily foster populism. It is not necessarily destructive of liberal democracy. The revolt of the public, as I envision the thing, is a technology-driven churning of new people and classes, a proliferation and confusion of message and noise, utopian hopes and nihilistic rage, globalization and disintegration, taking place in the unbearable personal proximity of the web and at a fatal distance from political power. Every structure of order is threatened—yes. Nihilism at the level of whole societies, in the style of ISIS, is a possible outcome. But no particular system is favored or disadvantaged—and nothing is ordained.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles. Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Companies intend to survive, indeed to thrive, and act on those intentions. They research the market environment, draft strategic plans, seek to maximize their advantages and minimize their weaknesses. Yet, ultimately, their failure rate is “virtually identical” to the random pattern of animal extinction.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The urge to intervene, to be seen to be doing something, has reached epidemic proportions.”28”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The Dodd-Frank bill that tightened regulation of the US financial system in 2009 covered 848 pages. For comparison, it took 31 pages in 1913 to establish the Federal Reserve, 37 to wrap up the Social Security Act of 1935.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“You would expect the loss of a stable existence on earth to drive a search for fixity on a higher sphere. If this is the case, a rise in the appeal of fundamentalism will testify to the experience of impermanence. That takes me deep into the realm of subjectivity, but there are empirical hints and signs.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“As I tried to show in this chapter, the public has lost faith in the people on whom it relied to make sense of the world—journalists, scientists, experts of every stripe. By the same process, the elites have lost faith in themselves.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“To borrow Taleb’s terminology, capitalism appears to be “antifragile”: it “regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“According to Richard Foster, the average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has declined from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today.61 If the information in both charts is integrated, the story that jumps out is of a business environment riven by conflict and stress. Whether”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The mass consumer was an invention of the industrial age: “one size fits all” followed the logic of the assembly line. The conversion of the masses into a networked public, we have seen, only became possible with the arrival of digital technologies and the development of the global information sphere. A very different logic now seems to be at work—innovation has caused an atomization of demand, and atomized demand has driven ever faster rates of innovation in nearly all fields of economic activity. It is not an illusion that life today feels like a sequential wrestling with one new thing after another, in a vertiginous cycle of change.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution. The criminalization of scientific error was just one clash in this war of the worlds.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“Their findings were astonishing. More information was generated in 2001 than in all the previous existence of our species on earth. In fact, 2001 doubled the previous total. And 2002 doubled the amount present in 2001, adding around 23 “exabytes” of new information—roughly the equivalent of 140,000 Library of Congress collections.1 Growth in information had been historically slow and additive. It was now exponential.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“2004. By 2003, when Apple introduced iTunes, there were more than three billion pages on the web.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

“An affluent, well-educated, hyper-connected public is in revolt against the system that has bestowed all of this bounty upon it. The great motive power of the revolt isn’t economic resentment but outrage over distance and failure. Everyday life is increasingly digital and networked. From dating to hailing a cab, most social and commercial transactions occur at the speed of light. This mode of life incessantly collides with the lumbering hierarchies we have inherited from the industrial age. Modern government, above all, is institutionally unable to grasp that it has lost its monopoly over political reality. It behaves as if imposture and depravity will never be found out: but under the digital dispensation, everything is found out. The public is accustomed to proximity but finds the exercise of power removed an impossible distance away: reasons are never given, questions are never answered, and in this way begins the long, foul rant that is our moment in history.”
― Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium