Public Opinion

by Walter Lippmann

What holds the machine together is a system of privileges.

you can breakup a particular machine by abolishing its privileges.

privilege is entirely relative, and uniformity is impossible.

prelate

Nowhere is the idyllic theory of democracy realized.

prosaic

by mass action nothing can be constructed, devised, negotiated, or administered.

essential fact remains that a small number of heads present a choice to a large group.

coteries

What privileges do within the hierarchy, symbols do for the rank and file.

buncombe.

And so where masses of people must cooperate in an uncertain and eruptive environment, it is usually necessary to secure unity and flexibility without real consent. The symbol does that.

But while people will readily believe that in an unimagined future and in unseen places a certain policy will benefit them, the actual working out of policy follows a different logic from their opinions.

thought is the function of an organism, and a mass is not an organism.

A mass exposed to the same stimuli would develop responses that could theoretically be charted in a polygon of error.

demagogy.

sluice

The far greater number who cannot be held by favors, the anonymous multitude, receive propaganda.

Every official is in some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist.

the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know.

the old constants of our thinking have become variables.

It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.

equanimity,

buncombe,

The critics were about as welcome as a small boy with a drum.

Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations.

In this deadly conflict between their ideals and their science, the only way out was to assume without much discussion that the voice of the people was the voice of God.

they antedated measurement and record, quantitative and comparative analysis, the canons of evidence, and the ability of psychological analysis to correct and discount the prejudices of the witness.

That system, whenever it was competent and honest, had to assume that no man could have more than a very partial experience of public affairs.

Hobbes says that "though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another, yet at all times kings and persons of sovereign authority because of their independency, are in continual jealousies and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another…"

The world, as he found it, was composed of people whose vision could rarely be corrected, and Machiavelli knew that such people, since they see all public relations in a private way, are involved in perpetual strife.

Jefferson more than any other man formulated the American image of democracy.

glacis

it has resulted in all democratic wars being fought for pacifist aims.

in order to have spontaneous self-government, you had to have a simple self-contained community,

men looked at a complicated civilization and saw an enclosed village.

quantitative thinking does not suit a stereotype.

The community could take its supply of information for granted; its codes it passed on through school, church, and family, and the power to draw deductions from a premise, rather than the ability to find the premise, was regarded as the chief end of intellectual training.

licentious

so the lawmaker does not arrive at a true picture of the state of the union by putting together a mosaic of local pictures.

the creation of Congressional opinion is incestuous.

logrolling.

surd

boggle

obtruded

do not pretend to know, but what I do know is that many of the direct channels to news have been closed and the information for the public is first filtered through publicity agents.

human rights that are endlessly debatable in the absence of exact record and quantitative analysis.

The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act. Only at those points, where social conditions take recognizable and measurable shape, do the body of truth and the body of news coincide.

There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth.

Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.