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Looking back we can see how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live. We can see that the news of it comes to us now fast, now slowly; but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself.
Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare enough to be clearly remarkable,
At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish conflict, choice, hesitation, and compromise.
Think, for example, of how rapidly, after the armistice, the precarious and by no means successfully established symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed almost immediately by the breakdown of each nation's symbolic picture of the other:
Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it as a return to sanity is obviously no matter here.
She has never been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the battlefront.
but it is impossible for her to imagine three million men. No one, in fact, can imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as, say, two hundred divisions. But Miss Sherwin has no access to the order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser
The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event. That is why until we know what others think
Abnormality in these instances is only a matter of degree.
In all these instances we must note particularly one common factor. It is the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment. To that pseudo-environment
the consequences, if they are acts, operate not in the pseudo-environment where the behavior is stimulated, but in the real environment
the murder of a Beautiful Theory by a Gang of Brutal Facts,
the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions.
The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination to the scientists' perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model,
The alternative to the use of fictions is direct exposure to the ebb and flow of sensation.
although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.
Emotionally they want to believe it, because they are Republicans fighting the League of Nations.
Both sides now assume that the report is true, and the conclusions they draw are the conclusions of their partisanship.
The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.
They live, we are likely to say, in different worlds. More accurately, they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.
For each of these decisions some view of the facts is taken to be conclusive, some view of the circumstances is accepted as the basis of inference and as the stimulus of feeling. What view of the facts, and why that one?
[Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Mad Hatter and the Sane Householder," Vanity Fair, January, 1921, p. 54]
what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off.
The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.
what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond,
The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined.
He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember.
He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch...
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they ignore the difficulties, as completely as did the original democrats, because they, too, assume, and in a much more complicated civilization, that somehow mysteriously there exists in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach.
representative government, either in what is ordinarily called politics, or in industry, cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.
the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.
apologists expect the press to realize this fiction, expect it to make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy, and that the readers expect this miracle to be performed at no cost or trouble to themselves. The newspapers are regarded by democrats as a panacea for their own defects,
the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion.
My conclusion is that public opinions must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today.
until late in 1917, the orthodox view of the war for all the Allied peoples was that it would be decided by "attrition." Nobody believed in a war of movement.
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited,
It is often very illuminating, therefore, to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?
Within each social set there are augurs like the van der Luydens and Mrs. Manson Mingott in "The Age of Innocence," [Footnote: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.] who are recognized as the custodians and the interpreters of its social pattern.
Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow.
There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.
When we use the word "Mexico" what picture does it evoke in a resident of New York?
According to a group of New England college students, writing in the year 1920, an alien was the following: [Footnote: The New Republic: December 29, 1920, p. 142. ] "A person hostile to this country." "A person against the government." "A person who is on the opposite side." "A native of an unfriendly country." "A foreigner at war." "A foreigner who tries to do harm to the country he is in." "An enemy from a foreign land." "A person against a country." etc…. Yet the word alien is an unusually exact legal term, far more exact than words like sovereignty, independence, national honor, rights,
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These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception,
even the eyewitness does not bring back a naéve picture of the scene.
how differently an experienced layman and a chemist might define the word metal.
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see.
