Public Opinion (1922) byWalter Lippmann

Walter Lippmann

• American intellectual, writer, reporter and political commentator.

• Introduced the concept of cold war for the first time

• Awarded the Pulitzer Prize

THE WORLD OUTSIDE AND THE PICTURES IN

OUR HEADS

GROUP : 1

Presented by

Abhishek Kumar 9401Prerna Dawda 9404Prakruti Jani 9407

Images, Beliefs and the Environment

• Lippman explains the way that our individual opinions can differ from those that are expressed in the outside world.(Hence the title 'The world outside and the pictures in our heads’.

• Whatever we believe to be a true picture we treat it as if it were the environment itself.

• The world as we needed to know it, and the world as we did know it, are often two contradictory things.

• It is enough to know what scriptures states.• A monk named Cosmas, famous for his

scientific attainments was therefore deputed to write a Christian Topography, or, “Christian Opinion concerning the World.”

• Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality. (Constructed personalities)

• Hero-worship.

BRAINWASHING

* How the British use the media for Mass Psychological Warfare.

“ I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV sets contradicts the image, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images.”

- Hal Becker, media “expert” and management consultant, The Futures Group, an an interview in 1981.

Symbols of Public Opinion

• Symbolic pictures are no less governant of behaviour.

• Each Symbol is far less inclusive because there are so many competing ones.

• Check and comparison and argument of symbols of Public Opinion

• Disappearance of Allied Unity after the World War

Reality v/s Fiction• The mental image of an event.• Man’s response to fiction and reality.• The environment and the pseudo environment.• Adjusting to the environment• What is Human Culture?

The selection, rearrangement, the tracing of patterns upon and the stylizing of the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas.

• The Map of Fiction

Analyst of Public Opinion• Triangular relationship between-

Scene of action The human picture of that scene andThe human response to that scene

• The human response to that picture working itself upon the scene of action.

Without Daniel’s Knowledge• The parties involved:

League of nationsThe ruling partyThe opposition

• Fiction is badly needed

• World wide spectacle of men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli, from their pseudo-environments.

Political behaviour of Man• Live in the same world but think and feel in

different ones.• Fictions that determine man’s political behaviour

are private or group, or class, or provincial, or occupational, or national, or sectarian artifacts.

• To expect that all men for all time will go thinking different things, and yet doing to the same things, is a doubtful speculation.

• But, as rational beings it is worse than shallow to generalise until there is a measurable similarity between the environments to which behaviour is a response.

• The inadequate picture of the great society.• What man does is based not on direct or certain

knowledge,but on pictures made by himself or given to him.

• What is propaganda?• Pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.• Ways people act in: Pleasure, pain, conscience,

acquisition, protection, enhancement, mastery, etc.

• Men theorize-element in thought, feeling, action.• Reality-indirect-or then indecision and failure

unknown.

Public Opinion

• Deals with indirect, unseen and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them.

• The Psychoanalyst assumes:Environment is knowable. If not knowable, at least bearable toAny unclouded intelligence.

Who is Man?• “Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all

existence. 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.

• Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.

What is Public Affairs?

• Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behaviour of other human beings, in so far as that behaviour crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or interesting to us, we call roughly Public Affairs.

What is Public Opinion?

• Pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes and relationship, are their public opinion.

• Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion.

Chapters to follow:

• Approaches to the World Outside• Stereotypes• Interests• The Making of a Common Will• The Image of Democracy• Newspapers• Organised Intelligence

• In the succeeding sections the book examines how opinions are crystallized into what is called Public Opinion, how a national will, a group mind, a social purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, is formed.

Conclusion• Reformers ignore the difficulties as completely as did

the original democrats, because, they too, assume, in a much more complicated civilisation, that somehow mysteriously there exists in the hearts of men a knowledge of the world beyond their reach.

• The seriousness of acceptance of the principle that personal representation must be supplemented by representation of the unseen facts would alone permit a satisfactory decentralisation and allow us to escape from the intolerable and unworkable fiction that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs.

• Public Opinion must be organised for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press as is the case today.

• Task of a political science – Opportunity to enrich itself and to serve the public.

- Thank you…