There are two divergent visions conjured by the idea of a “public meeting.”

First, there’s the ideal: a rich discussion of views and values; a robust exploration of a problem and collective reasoning about solutions; diverse communities thoughtfully engaging together in the hard work of associated living. Such a public meeting is not unlike an idealized college seminar – everyone contributes, everyone grows, and the co-created output of this public work is far better than anyone would have created on their own.

Then there’s the all too common reality; the reason so many of us avoid public meetings in the first place. The inefficient use of time, the yelling, the talking over and past each other, and – if you have the same pet peeves I do – the people who seem to feel the overwhelming need to hear the sound of their own voice, who feel compelled to speak before taking the time to consider what value they are adding to the conversation.

My friend and civic colleague Josh Miller recently pointed me to one such epitome of terrible public meetings, captured in the Milwaukee Record under the headline Lake Park’s Pokemon Go Meeting Was Boring, Livid, and Gloriously Absurd.

To be fair, those adjectives could easily be used to describe many public meetings on a wide variety of topics.

As author Matt Wild described, “Yes, last night’s meeting was the sound of a ridiculous situation taken to its ridiculous extremes. It was the sound of two sides possessing both reasonable concerns and defiant inabilities to listen to one another. It was the sound of privileged people droning on and on and on. It was the sound of people who always seem to have obnoxious Qs during Q&As asking those obnoxious Qs.”

I can’t tell you how many public meetings I’ve been to in my life which fit that description.

So perhaps it seems strange that I cling to the ideas of collaborative public work, of productive public dialogue. Perhaps such an idyllic vision is too much to ask for and far too much to expect: after all, let’s not pretend that those leafy college seminars always go off without out a hitch.

And I make no denials that such a vision of public collaboration is hard. It is very hard. That is, perhaps, why Harry Boyte’s term of public work seems so apt even for the process of dialogue. Real deliberation is work.

But I find it a noble effort; a work worth engaging in even if the results come up short.

We must then ask ourselves – why do so many public meetings go so horribly awry?

For one thing, we must think carefully about the structure of such meetings. The common structure of most public meetings is designed to maintain the power of public officials. Public officials discuss, deliberate, invite expert testimony, and finally, in a nod to democracy, allow for public comments. Then the officials discuss and deliberate further – putting the matter to a vote or requesting further study of the issue at hand.

“The public” does not attend with the role of deliberator or authority, but is relegated to 60 minutes of anecdotes no one really wants to listen to.

There are reasons this structure might be good – society must be protected from the “trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd,” as Walter Lippmann wrote. Perhaps it is wise not to give “the public” too much power.

And while I would far prefer to see public meetings which truly embraced the role of the public – which invited residents as stakeholders and experts to talk together and collaborative address public problems – the current model seems like possibly the worst of all worlds.

Wild describes the many failures of the Pokemon Go meeting:

The meeting was clearly flawed, with far too much time given over to the panel members, and precious little time given to concerned Pokemon players. If more minutes had been dedicated to audience remarks and general Q&A, perhaps the pro-Pokemon contingent would have gotten their cries of “I LOVE POKEMON AND THIS IS BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER” out of the way and focused on the main problem at hand: How does a residential park that wasn’t designed to handle thousands of people congregating in a relatively small space seven days a week for three months straight suddenly handle thousands of people congregating in a relatively small space seven days a week for three months straight?

Urban planner Bent Flyvbjerg argues that “power is knowledge,” that “power defines what counts as knowledge and rationality, and ultimately…what counts as reality.” This observation comes precisely from his work in public space planning: decisions are made, implicitly or explicitly, behind closed doors and public information is shaped and shared in such a way as to create the illusion of public participation while ensuring the outcome preferred by those with power.

This dynamic creates a self-enforcing cycle of public disaffection and civic defeat. As Lippman argued in 1925, “the private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row …In the cold light of experience he knows that his sovereignty is a fiction. He reigns in theory, but in fact he does not govern…”

And thus we find ourselves with disastrous Pokemon Go meetings, with enumerable public meetings in which a disaffected public rouses itself to share various concerns, where some find it to be their duty to speak out, to try to engage in the process, while the rest of us sitting at home – reading the recap in the local paper, rolling our eyes, and wondering with a discontented sigh, where did it all go wrong?

Walter Lippmann was very concerned about the inaccessibly of Truth. “The facts we see depend on where we are placed and the habits of our eyes,” he wrote in his 1921 work, Public Opinion.

He repeats this concern numerous times. “We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

Lippmann, an American journalist with an intimate familiarity with propaganda and war-time rhetoric, had reason to be concerned. “Rationally, the facts are neutral to all our views of right and wrong. Actually, our canons determine greatly what we shall perceive and how.”

Lippmann’s concern is perhaps most concisely expressed as Bent Flyvbjerg’s more recent axiom: power is knowledge.

We each have a unique experience of the world, and we each filter our experiences through our constructed stereotypes of meaning.

Lippmann, in fact, coined the word stereotype. Writing in Public Opinion:

In untrained observation, we pick recognizable signs out of the environment. The signs stand for ideas, and these ideas we fill out with our stock of images. We do not so much see this man and that sunset, rather we notice that the thing is a man or sunset, and then see chiefly what our mind is already full of on those subject.

There is economy in this. For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question…Modern life is hurried and multifarious, above all physical distance separates men who are often in vital contact with each other, such as employer and employee, official and voter. There is neither time nor opportunity for intimate acquaintance. Instead, we note a trait which marks a well-known type and fill in the rest of the picture by means of the stereotypes we carry about in our heads. He is an agitator. That much we notice or are told. Well, an agitator is this sort of person, and so he is this sort of person. He is an intellectual. He is a plutocrat. He is a foreigner. He is a ‘Southern European.’ He is from Back Bay. He is a Harvard Man. How different from the statement: he is a Yale Man. He is a regular fellow. He is a West Pointer. He is an old army sergeant. He is a Greenwich Villager: what don’t we know about him then, and about her? He is an international banker. He is from Main Street.

These stereotypes – helpful heuristics which help us make sense of a busy world – are comforting. “They are an ordered, ore or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves,” Lippmann writes. “We feel at home there. We fit in there. We are members. We know our way around.”

It is perhaps because of this comfort that we cling so desperately to our stereotypes.

Lippmann remarks that what matters is “the character of the stereotypes and the gullibility with which we employ them.” That those who hold the wise philosophy “that each man is only a small part of the world, that his intelligence catches at best only phases and aspects in a coarse net of ideas,” are more likely to “to know that they are only stereotypes, to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly.” But this is easier said than done.

Our stereotypes are such a familiar comfort that “any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of our universe, and where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any distinction between our universe and the universe.”

Thus, even the wise intellectual, aware of their own stereotypes and open to altering them, may easily make the mistake of taking individual truths to be universal truths; and to take those individual truths to be self-evident.

“What is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes. We do not see what our eyes are not accustomed to take into account. Sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy,” Lippmann warns.

These stereotypes, “loaded with preferences, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope” can then be evoked by manipulative elites through the use of symbols.

“The detached observer may scorn the ‘star-spangled’ ritual which hedges the symbol,” Lippmann writes, “…but the leader knows by experience that only which symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out.”

Lippmann is widely considered to be an elitist – marked by his fear of how easily the “bewildered heard” of the masses are manipulated – but I’ve tended towards a kinder reading. If the public cannot be trusted, it is because elites are corrupt, because those with power actively seek to shape the knowledge and beliefs of the public at large.

Flyvbjerg’s warning “power is knowledge” gets at exactly that point. Power defines reality. Power determines what knowledge enters the public domain and how that knowledge is presented. As  Flyvbjerg writes in a detailed urban planning study, “Rationality is penetrated by power, and it becomes meaningless, or misleading – for politicians, administrators, and researchers alike – to operate with a concept of rationality in which power is absent.”

So perhaps it is to be expected that those with power will deploy symbols to keep the masses in thrall, and perhaps it is to be expected that such magic tricks have great effect. It is not, inherently, the people who are flawed, it is the system. Power is knowledge and power defines reality.