Seeking invisibility differs fundamentally from having insignificance imposed

Evidence

The man who had had to wait outside so many offices liked being on the inside of everything. He talked—perhaps a bit more than was discreet—about what Jimmy Walker had said to him and about what he had said to Walker. He liked to describe how some assemblyman had refused his instructions on a bill and how he had told the Governor about it and how the Governor had laid down the law, and, thereafter, how the assemblyman had jumped to obey when he, Moses, gave him instructions. If what he was on the inside of was a world he would once have despised, he did not seem to remember those earlier feelings now. Reform work was, more and more, an irritating intrusion on his time. The hours he put in at the New York State Association office each week became fewer and fewer. The gaps between issues of the State Bulletin, once a monthly publication, grew longer and longer. And when the Bulletin did appear now, it made less and less pretense of being a reform pamphlet. More and more, it resembled a Tammany Hall broadside in support of Al Smith. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 620 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The power to not-see is constitutive of seeing itself; Secrecy and illegibility are deliberate design features, not incidental side effects — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1091; Refusing hospitality is a visible assertion of adversarial distance. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action , 1601 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Deferential invisibility inside power corrupts an idealist’s stated goals #complicates (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 620