Public Opinion
Walter Lippmann, 1922
You speak with confidence about wars, elections and foreign countries you have never seen with your own eyes. In 1922 Walter Lippmann showed that we act not on the world itself but on pictures in our heads, assembled from censorship, scraps of news and ready-made images. You will learn how these pictures take shape and where they mislead you, and you will get questions that help you tell the world from the map.
Who it is for
For anyone who reads the news every day and wants to understand where confidence about events none of us has seen comes from, and how to notice your own stereotypes.
For the most part we do not first see and then define. We define first and then see.
Six weeks of friendship with the enemy
Imagine an island in the middle of the ocean in 1914. A few English, French and German people live there. There is no telegraph, and the mail steamer comes once every sixty days. In mid-September the whole colony gathers at the pier to learn from the captain how the famous Paris trial ended. Instead they learn something else: for six weeks the English and French have been at war with the Germans. All this time the neighbours on the island behaved like friends, although their countries were enemies.
Walter Lippmann, an American journalist, opens his 1922 book with this story and notices that the islanders were not so different from the rest of Europe. Some were wrong for six weeks, some for six days or six hours, but each of them had a moment when he lived in a world that no longer existed and trusted the picture in his head.
Hence the book's main question. The world we argue about lies almost entirely beyond our sight: wars, elections, foreign countries, decisions made in distant offices. Lippmann examines how our picture of such a world is put together and where it diverges from the world itself. In his view, the blame lies most often not with stupidity or malice, but with the very structure of knowledge.
You will see how senators argued about an event that never happened, how generals edited a report from the front, and how one speech pleased people who wanted the opposite. At the end you will get questions that help you notice where the world ends and the picture begins.
A Senate that argued about something that did not happen
On the morning of 29 September 1919, American senators were reading the newspaper over breakfast. It said that United States marines had landed in the Dalmatia region on the Adriatic on the orders of the British Admiralty, and that the American naval ministry had not even been asked. The paper presented this as established fact. The main topic in the Senate at that moment was the League of Nations. The report implied that foreigners were already commanding American troops.
Senator Knox indignantly demanded an investigation, but half a minute later, answering a colleague, he was already reasoning about what would happen if the marines had been killed: there would be war. The Republicans, opponents of the League, talked as if everything had been proven, while the Democrat Hitchcock argued that the order was lawful, since the peace had not yet been concluded. Both sides took the message for the truth, although they were debating a resolution to verify it. A few days later it turned out that the marines had been landed at the request of the Italian authorities, to protect Italians, and that the Italians had thanked them.
Lippmann explains the scene through a triangle: the place of the event, the picture in the head, and the act in response to the picture. Between a person and the world stands a representation assembled from messages, guesses and expectations, and the author gave it a name: the pseudo-environment. We react to it, and the consequences arrive in the real world. The picture, Lippmann suggests, was slipped in by someone who cared not about the Adriatic but about the fight against the League, and the picture was accepted because people badly needed it.
The pseudo-environment is not a lie, however. The world is too large, complex and changeable to be known directly, so each of us simplifies it into a model, as a map simplifies terrain. Trouble begins when a person forgets that he is holding a map and takes it for the land itself. Two peoples attack each other, and each is certain it is defending itself. They live in one world, but think and feel in different ones.
Hence the first habit. When news provokes a strong feeling, separate three things in your mind: what happened, what you know about it and where you know it from, and what you want to do. The more convenient the picture is for your position, the more reason you have to check what it rests on.
About the author
Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), American journalist and political commentator. “Public Opinion” came out in 1922, shortly after the First World War.
All books by this author: Walter Lippmann
Terms from the book
- Hitchcock
- Smith
- Lincoln
- Aristotle
- Hughes
- Wilson
- Dalmatia: A historical region on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, today mostly in Croatia.
- League of Nations: An international organisation created after the First World War to keep the peace. The United States never joined it: the Senate did not approve the peace treaty.
- Knox: An American senator from Pennsylvania, one of the implacable opponents of the League of Nations.
- pseudo-environment: Lippmann's term, not a strict scientific one: a picture of the world assembled from messages, guesses and expectations. It stands between a person and reality, and the person reacts to it.
- Verdun: A city in north-eastern France. The Battle of Verdun in 1916 became one of the longest and bloodiest battles of the First World War.
- communiqué: An official announcement. Here, the daily military report that the headquarters passed to the newspapers.
- Douaumont: Fort Douaumont, one of the main fortifications around Verdun. German troops took it in February 1916.
- metronome: A device that beats an even rhythm. In experiments at the beginning of the twentieth century it was used to distract subjects while their associations were being tested.
- Göttingen: A university city in Germany.
- stereotype: For Lippmann, a ready-made image that culture gives a person in advance, and through which he perceives people and events.
- Eastern Front: The line of fighting between Germany and its allies and Russia in the First World War. It fell apart when Russia left the war in 1918.
- Fiume: A port city on the Adriatic, today Croatia's Rijeka. After the First World War it was contested by Italy and the new South Slav kingdom.
- Lusitania: A British passenger liner sunk by a German submarine in 1915. Among the dead were Americans.
- manufacture of consent: Lippmann's phrase from this book: the old art of securing general agreement, which he says has become more precise thanks to psychology and new means of communication.
- clerk: An employee who keeps records and documents. Here, the county official who registers bankruptcies.
- Lenin: Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), leader of the Bolsheviks and of the Soviet state. Lippmann describes a case when newspapers, relying on an unreliable source, repeatedly reported his death.
- Helsingfors: The old name of Helsinki. According to Lippmann, many unverified reports about revolutionary Russia passed through this city and other European capitals.
All terms
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