The following series of excerpts are taken from The Unconscious Civilization, a series of lectures by Canadian philosopher and writer John Ralston Saul.

The most powerful force possessed by the individual is her own government. Or governments, because a multiplicity of levels means a multiplicity of strengths. The individual has no other large organized mechanism that he can call his own. Theres are other mechanisms, but the reduce the citizen to the status of a subject. Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good. Without this greater interest the individual is reduced to a lesser, narrower being limited to immediate needs. He will then be subject to other, larger forces, which is necesarily come forward to fill the void left by the withering of the public good. Those forces will fill it with some other directing interest that will serve their purposes, not the larger purposes of the citizen. It would be naive to blame them for occupying abandoned territory. (p. 76)

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People ask: what kind of government? How much government? I think the primary question is: whose government? If individuals do not occupy their legitimate position, then it will be occupied by a God or a king or a coalition of interest groups. If citizens do not exercise the powers conferred by their legitimacy, others will do so. (p. 78)

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The corporatist idea that elected representatives are merely representing interests has led them to apply pressure directly on the politicians. The result has been a remarkable growth of the lobbying industry, which has as its sole purpose the conversion of elected representatives and senior civil servants to the particular interest of the lobbyist. That is, lobbyists are in the business of corrupting the people's representatives away from the public good. (p. 97)

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Virtually every politician portrayed in film or on television over the last decade has been venal, corrupt, opportunistic, cynical, if not worse. Whether these dramatized images are accurate or exaggerated matters little. The corporatist system wins either way: directly through corruption and indirectly through the damage done to the citizen's respect for the representative system. (p. 99)

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