‘Them and Us’: Public Impotence and Government Power

Abstract

The moral proposition, ‘It is no concern of mine’, must be closely related to the empirical proposition, ‘There is nothing I can do about it’. I wish to analyse the way we talk about and the way we understand the plain and huge gap between ‘You’, and ‘I’, and the ‘It’, ‘Them’, ‘The Thing’ or ‘The System’. And, as if the problem were not difficult enough, someone has to remind us that the distance between ‘Them’ and ‘Us’ is complicated by an inherent relativity of viewpoint. If I am tempted to thunder or to be sly about ‘them up there’, immediately establishing a happy community of mutual grievance between all of us here, someone must remember that we all here look very like them up there in the eyes of those down here.

The text of this lecture was printed in Public Law, Spring 1968. A version also appeared in B. Crick, Political Theory and Practice (London, A. Lane, 1972).