It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

Gardner is pointing to a psychological and civic problem of modern mass society: when government becomes large, complex, and geographically or bureaucratically “distant,” citizens experience its workings as opaque and impersonal. That invisibility weakens the felt link between one person’s choices (voting, organizing, paying attention, speaking up) and public outcomes, making disengagement seem rational. The line implicitly critiques both bureaucratic scale and citizen passivity, suggesting that democratic responsibility requires mechanisms—local participation, transparency, accountable institutions—that make governance legible and proximate enough for individuals to feel agency and duty.