"A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power."
This book is a useful read right now, as we live through a world-wide, multi-domain and multi-front propaganda war.
In Public Opinion Lippmann articulates the playbook on how to manufacture consent, on how governments can easily persuade citizens to support a(ny) war, on how mass media achieves control over peoples' behavior and social mores, and--more indirectly--he explains how to destabilize and ennervate an entire population with fear, anger and "othering."
Lippmann wrote this book back in the 1920s, yet he foresaw many of the mechanisms now used by Big Tech to actively and openly censor, deplatform and demonetize in a near-orgy of surprisingly effective thought control. We the people continue to be well-used "test subjects" of the tools, techniques and insights Lippmann identified precisely one century ago.
This book is also a tremendously helpful exercise for grooving habits of epistemic humility. Once we are outside of a reality that we can directly touch and experience (hmmm, for example, a distant conflict in Ukraine?), it addresses how incredibly limited and therefore easily shaped are our perceptions of the external informational environment. You'll see step-by-step examples of how this reality-shaping is done.
At the same time one can of course read this book with great epistemic arrogance, assuming one is immune to opinion shaping and perception shaping. "I'm a great critical thinker: this only affects all those other dummies, not me." Just like in the domain of cognitive fallacies, those who think they're immune are always the easiest to fool.
Once you read this book, you will never overconfidently opine on anything that you hear about or read about in the media ever again. This alone is a laudable achievement.
Notes:
Ch 1: Introduction: The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads* "There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived..." Imagine living there and learning (six weeks after the fact) that you were "at war" with the other people living on your island. What really is your reality there when WWI starts? Who decides that those particular people are at war?
* "We can see how indirectly we know the environment in which we live"
* "No man is a hero to his valet": constructed leaders, constructed royal or political personages, the difference between the public "self" and the actual self. These fictions and symbols act as instruments of the existing social order and are an important part of the machinery of human communication (and control).
* Mental images of events we have not experienced (a war, a general leading a million men, etc.) and the use and manipulation of those mental images to shape opinion and behavior.
* "...the insertion between man and his environment of a pseudo-environment" (c.f.: the internet/social media, also our internal mental milieu, since our perceptual interfaces need some form of data compression too). A type of map/territory problem.
* "...men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their pseudo-environments." The pseudo-environment (which is easily manipulated or shaped and never completely perceived) actually causes us to take action, hold opinions, "other" other people for holding different opinions, etc. It causes changes to our actual environment.
* We act based on pictures made by our minds or given to us, not by direct (and thereby much more certain) knowledge.
* p 31-2: (!!) He wants an "independent, expert organization" to help make reality "intelligible to those who have to make the decisions" which will be organized by political science experts. Uhhh this "expert problem" is why we're in this mess in the first place!
Ch 2: Censorship and Privacy
* French generals editing and approving a news report on the disaster at Verdun, framing it as if the loss of ground in that battle was "no surprise." The men who arranged this pseudo-environment knew the real environment! See then the various problems that came up as German claims and inconvenient facts that didn't match the generals' original narrative became known/public, and none of it matched up with what the French media had been saying. (A similar example today would be the inconvenient facts (and the steadily growing study evidence) regarding highly effective COVID early treatment protocols that were verboten throughout the past two years.)
* Exaggeration of German losses, mega-exaggeration.. reminiscent of "pandemic of the unvaccinated" today. The phrases are used until they are overworked (or widely recognized as false), and then they disappear.
* "We have learned to call this propaganda." (Interesting to see the more pejorative use of the word propaganda, much as we use it today, when back in the 1920s the word largely lacked this pejorative sense: see Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda for example).
* You need censorship and/or a barrier between the public and the event in order to shape perception. WWI as a great example since nobody back home had direct experience of the front.
* "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?... You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, with the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection."
Ch 3: Contact and Opportunity
* Interesting example of World War I propaganda in the United States: there was a tremendous effort to convey a message encouraging US involvement there, which took a long time and a extraordinary amount of people. Note also: since so much information never reaches the general public at all, you can safely conclude that the message you do hear is likely to be a message constructed for you by people who do not have your interests at heart!!
Ch 4: Time and Attention
* People spend a hilariously small amount of time trying to understand what's going on in the world around them, something like 15 minutes or less per day. Obviously this makes you a juicy, fat target for control. Probably better to literally tune out media and use those 15 minutes a day to meditate.
Ch 5: Speed, and Clearness
* Signal compression over cable dispatches in that era, translations, the use of words to describe things, and our use of those words to "see" reality.. all examples of (literal and cognitive) signal compression.
* Someone deciding on the "substance" of something for me and telling me *that*, not the actual thing itself. (See for example my video on the dangers of pre-chewed information, specifically here with company earnings transcripts compared to a WSJ article on it!)
* Interesting footnote here on words as tokens of value, and how some cultures "inflate" their language (French, Italian) while others do not (English from England, which is understated in the extreme). So "a distinguished scholar" in English might be translated to "a great savant" in French. Thus if you're reading something from another language you have to adjust--do like a "verbal currency exchange"--given the relative bombasticness of one language versus another.
* How a busy city life, filled with noise and distraction, can flatten people's information discrimination capability. "The intolerable burden of thought" when "every man whose business is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself pool of silence."
* On the "refraction" of information and impressions via various filters (money quote here): "Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scant attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. 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, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead."
Ch 6: Stereotypes
* Frailty of memory, frailty of witnesses and their perceptions, how our minds add or take away words and visual images, etc., without us realizing it.
* How slow we are at forming habits of simple apprehension in domains with which we are unfamiliar. See also different understandings of specific words: the word "metal" means something totally different to a layman versus a chemist (or how once I used the word "securitization" with someone who was never a professional investor, thus he had a totally different, general media-based, and yet confidently-held definition of the same word). How this plays a role in reality-shaping: "For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see... We pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture."
* On how we misview, misremember, mis-relate events where we were actually present... This syncs in well with Donald D. Hoffman's book The Case Against Reality, which talks about how our perceptual system is designed for evolutionary fitness, not for truth or accuracy.
* "If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds through which they have filtered it." Anti-solipsism on two levels. It's a wonder how anybody understands anybody, ever.
* How we group, divide and perceive things based on our cognitive habits: A real estate investor would see a landscape as a collection of potential building lots, but another man may think of it as landscapes hanging in his parlor as paintings... We fill out reality with our interior mental stock of images. It's a type of cognitive miserliness: thus we'll use or notice a specific trait of a person who maybe we don't know well and use that stereotype as a type of cognitive image we carry about in our heads to represent him. "He is an agitator, he is a Harvard man, he has a West Pointer," etc.
* The cinema as a brand new (back then) and incredibly influential instrument of propaganda and persuasion. In the past we had very very few objects that were pictured for us (meaning: where we are literally handed the mental image via media). Photographs also have significant authority over imagination: we think they are documentary, that they come to us without human meddling, thus they seem utterly real. The problem is all the cognitive and perceptual work has still already been done for you (by someone else!) as soon as this picture is put in front of you. An example from this era that survived until today: everyone's visual picture of the Ku Klux Klan took shape thanks to the movie Birth of a Nation.
Ch 7: Stereotypes as Defense
* We hold on to our stereotypes (Lippmann uses this word in the cognitive sense, not in the racial/ethnic sense) because they keep things the same in our lives, they help defend our position in society.
* [One second order take away here is the more you can let go of your perceptual matrix, the more you can de-stereotype reality in all senses, the more flexibly you'll be able to adapt to things as they change over time, you'll be increasingly robust to radical change. Also it helps explain why people as they get older, and lose more and more neuroplasticity, they cannot handle rapid or significant societal change, in fact change to to great a degree often destroys them.]
* Any threat to our set of cognitive stereotypes is a threat to the egoic universe, thus is it a much larger threat than it actually seems because it's a threat to *our* universe. Thus stereotyping is a substitute form of order for the confusion of reality, it is also an (egoic) projection of our own value and position in the world. We feel safe behind the fortress of our perceptual stereotypes. As always, it's better to let go of your ego: here we see we can better perceive reality when we do so!
* Aristotle, writing about slavery, "had to teach the Greeks a way of seeing their slaves that comported with the continuance of slavery." The problem with Aristotle's argument is that he "erected a great barrier between himself and the facts" by assuming that slaves are by nature intended to be slaves (which is a false premise), and without that premise the entire argument falls apart because each case of slavery would be in doubt, leaving us with no certain test for whether someone should or was destined to be a slave. [I had no idea that Aristotle held these views, and that he blew it so badly with this particular argument. Very interesting]
* The nature of the plasticity of a person and that person's response to an exception to a stereotype: It can be an "exception that proves the rule" (in other words you ignore the exception, or just use it to defend your held stereotype), we can discredit the witness, we can "manage to forget all about it, etc. The person's ability to handle exceptions and be open to truth/genuine perception is a function of his curiousity and open-mindedness, also his neuroplasticity, his ability to modify his mental image, also his willingness to make it convenient or inconvenient to rearrange his stereotypes (a type of agency on the second-order).
* In some cases a rearranging of stereotypes can shake a person's foundations to the extent that he will "distrust all accepted ways of looking at life, and to expect that normally a thing will not be what it is generally supposed to be." [Interesting: this is basically defaulting to a reactance-based stereotype of "whatever they tell me it is, it's gotta be the opposite."]
Ch 8: Blind Spots and Their Value
* The word "stereotype" is itself an act of stereotyping, you could use the word "ideal" in its place for example: the ideal German, the ideal enemy, the ideal politician, etc.
* Marxism is not necessarily what Karl Marx wrote: it is whatever all the warring sects who claim to be faithful Marxists believe.
* The "evolution" of the word evolution from a technical biological hypothesis into implications for all sorts of other domains in a much broader meaning. The same with the word relativity, which [again, this is from 1922 when this book was published] is likely to migrate from Einstein's specific sense to much broader sense in the future according to this author. [Coincidence alert in a world where there are no coincidences: I just got done reading a history book where the author literally did this: Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times took the word "relativity" and used it as a metaphor for the moral and societal unmooring of the early 20th century]
* The American perceptual stereotype of "progress" which acts as a lens to see certain things and not see other things. [After all what is progress other than progress toward what, specifically? Or as this author puts it "aims were ignored" and, regarding the United States involvement in World War I, "there was no place for the consideration of what the fruits of victory were." In other words, we were so enamored of our own ideas of progress we didn't think where we were going or what we would do when we got there! This is so, so typical of United States culture, and we did the same thing with Afghanistan, even the COVID lockdowns.]
* "More Hamlet and less Henry the Fifth": on how governments would (and should, but won't) be more humble and indecisive if they really knew what was going on... And how stereotypes protect us "from all the bewildering effects of trying to see the world steadily and see it whole."
Ch 9: Codes and Their Enemies
* More on our misperceptions: "...the way we see things is a combination of what is there and of what we expected to find."
* Economic mythology: economic models that are about as representative of reality as when a child draws a cow with a "parallelogram with legs and head."
* [An interesting second-order conclusion from the idea that our stereotypes call attention to the facts which support them, and "kindly people discover so much reason for kindness, malicious people so much malice"... It all suggests that you want to make sure you choose stereotypes that are effective for you. Thus not necessarily stereotypes that are actually true!]
* "The judgment has preceded the evidence."
* Our moral codes drive our conduct, drive our perceptions, drive our judgments. Around every code "is a cloud of interpreters who deduce more specific cases."
* Codes as domain dependent: "a loving father can be a sour boss"
* A highly explanatory paragraph for much of the vitriol of today: "And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous... For a while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a 'question,' they do not believe that there are two sides to what they regard as a 'fact.' ... So where two factions see vividly each its own aspect, and contrive their own explanations of what they see, it is almost impossible for them to credit each other with honesty [emphasis mine]. If the patterns fit their experience at a crucial point, they no longer look upon it as an interpretation. They look upon it as 'reality.'" Yup. Jesus.
Ch 10: The Detection of Stereotypes
* Dividing "Ruritania" (a fictional country), seeing WWI as a "two front war", etc., as exercises in applied perceptual stereotyping.
* Temporal examples of perceptual stereotyping: the idea that the here and now is going to be the same in the hereafter, change, or the implicit mental assumption we make that things will change in the way we expect them to. "A presumption about time enters widely into our opinions. To one person an institution which has existed for the whole of his conscious life is part of the permanent furniture of the universe: to another it is ephemeral."
* "An important part of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the time-conception that properly belongs to the thing in hand. The person who uses the wrong time-conception ranges from the dreamer who ignores the present to the philistine who can see nothing else." This lines up well with some of Dan Gilbert's ideas in Stumbling On Happiness where he talks about our "prospectiscope": how when we think about the future we basically think of a slightly altered version of the past, and from time to time this causes us to make terrible decisions.
* We have a misperception of time just as we have a misperception of space. And because we can't perceive time or space accurately, we have to sample and pick out specific summaries or generalizations to navigate this information/perceptual landscape.
* Discussion of various problems of statistics and sampling.
* "A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much easier if only they would stay where we put them."
* Adding on top of our stereotype problem: that "we read readily accept sequence or parallelism as equivalent to cause and effect." (e.g. the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.)
* "In a superstitious mind... emotion is a stream of molten lava which catches and imbeds whatever it touches. When you excavate in it you find, as in a buried city, all sorts of objects ludicrously entangled in each other. Anything can be related to anything else, provided it feels like it." This author really does sing out with some very good quotes here and there.
* And then the whole thing "culminates in the fabrication of a system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of the absolute shows itself."
Ch 11: The Enlisting of Interest
* "... intuitions remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions, he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. When he talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist." I feel like that a lot when I talk to people.
* Identification of the hero: the hero is always marked, it is always clear who is the hero in the news in any movie or popular work etc. If it's not clear, the movie almost certainly will not be popular! The same thing is done in media, in how it represents geopolitical events/personalities.
* There also has to be a fight, or in politics an issue that people fight over. And then of course there have to be people who have an interest in the result, otherwise why would we care? We have to be able to take sides.
* See Sinclair Lewis in his book Main Street, saying definitively what many people are obscurely trying to stay inside their heads, "you have said it for me," which becomes a new form which is then copied until it too becomes a stereotype of perception.
* I didn't quite get with the author is trying to say in this chapter.
Ch 12: Self-Interest Reconsidered
* The different selves that we have, and which self is engaged or appealed to by a given public opinion or public even. Our higher or lower self, or spiritual versus material self, our Divine versus carnal self, whatever the case these distinctions exist on some level.
* Different circumstances give rise to our different dispositions: "When the unexpected occurs, we learn much about ourselves that we did not know."
* See for example the people of a country and their will to go to war, the cultivation of a self that would do such a thing. How this harnesses a "murderous self" that is a powerful impulse that can be only gradually re-controlled after the war is over. Interesting connection here to Keith Lowe's book Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.
* Considering "class consciousness" and the socialist idea that "if men are economically situated in different ways, they can be induced to hold certain views." If this were true then we could prophesy everything: Marx tried this of course and went totally wrong. The Marxists thought men's economic position would automatically produce a clear conception of their economic interests. And they thought that they knew what that set of interests was and then everyone else would agree with them. It turns out that Marx and Lenin weren't even right about having a clear conception in the first place. There is no master key to social processes.
* Lenin also as a good example of "how little determinism there is in the opinions of a determinist" as he repeatedly flip-flopped about his economic policies and his effectiveness at establishing true socialism.
* This chapter also is kind of adrift a little bit, isn't clear how it fits into the book, other than to say something that could be said in a sentence: that it is difficult to know and predict people's interests.
Ch 13: Transfer of Interest
* How do great numbers of people feeling so privately in their minds develop any common will? How does a simple and constant idea emerge from this complex of variables?
* The election of 1920 that brought a Republican, Warren Harding, into the White House: what did the election say about the League of Nations? Nobody could tell because people across the entire political spectrum would have had a wide range of opinions on the League of Nations, which were not directly articulated by the election itself. "After all, the art of inducing all sorts of people who think differently to vote alike is practiced in every political campaign."
* See for example Charles Evan Hughes, Republican candidate for president in 1916, attempting to unify the Republican party when it was anything but. See the use of "binder words" in his speech: ("the party of Lincoln," "correct principles"). And then "the neutral tint formed out of the blending of many colors" is what results when you represent a collection of diverse and divergent opinions: "Where superficial harmony is the aim and conflict the fact, obscurantism in a public appeal is the usual result. Almost always vagueness at a crucial point in public debate is a symptom of cross-purposes."
* Stimulus-response phenomenon with people's emotions, for example a showing an image of starving child somewhere: "Therefore, if among a number of people, possessing various tendencies to respond, you can find a stimulus which will arouse the same emotion in many of them, you can substitute it for the original stimuli. If, for example, one man dislikes the League, another hates Mr. Wilson, and a third fears labor, you may be able to unite them if you can find some symbol which is the antithesis of what they all hate."
* "...Feeling flows toward conformity under the symbol rather than toward critical scrutiny of the measures... A leader or an interest that can make itself master of current symbols is master of the current situation."
* President Wilson's 14 points as an attempt to produce such a symbol. By 1917 the organized perception of World War I was obliterated as well, especially with a signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Wilson's 14 Points was (rhetorically speaking) essentially the same as Charles Evans Hughes's nomination speech: vague, designed to satisfy a wide range of interests (and avoid provoking disunion), etc. See for example Point 8, which deals with the restoration of French territory and the question of Alsace-Lorraine. The French wouldn't necessarily fight on indefinitely for the annexation of this territory, nor would the English or Italians.
* Interesting to think of the deliberate use of vague, symbolic speech as a specific instrument of power.
* Ascending the hierarchy of symbols: "As you go higher up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you reach the top with some phrases like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little... For the phrase, ever more vacant, capable of meaning almost anything, soon comes to mean pretty nearly everything." This is well put.
* Likewise an integration in the United States of a sense of the confederation of states, the nation, when for most of its history what was "real" to an American was their state and their community, not the greater confederation. Alexander Hamilton as an early man to see this phenomenon, and to help drive Federalism. Note also that he had no "primitive attachment" to any state because he was born in the West Indies!
* Hamilton didn't care where the capital was, what he wanted was Federal assumption of State debts because it would more effectively formalize the Union, "so he gladly traded the site of the capital for two necessary votes from men who represented the Potomac district." Wild.
Ch 14: Yes Or No
* How do symbols take root in a particular person's mind? "It is planted there by another human being whom we recognize as authoritative."
* "The Democratic revolution set up two alternating machines, each of which in the course of a few years reaps the advantage from the mistakes of the other. But nowhere does the machine disappear." And that machine is run by a surprisingly small number of people.
* People experience discomfort until they know where they stand, until they can "feel" a yes or no opinion with regard to a given issue.
* Establishing a concrete choice, a simple yes or no symbolic opinion that can organize a group as for or against something. [Vaxed/not vaxxed; lockdowns/no lockdowns; etc.]
* HG Wells describing elections with the word "selections."
* "... the necessary simplicity of any mass decision is a very important fact in the view of the inevitable complexity of the world in which those decisions operate."
* "The Many can elect after the Few have nominated." [And today we have basically a type of one-party/two-faction rule in the USA as the Republicans and Democrats look more and more alike and differ on only superficial levels or on each party's respective fringe.]
Ch 15: Leaders and the Rank and File
* "The disintegration of a symbol... is always the beginning of a long upheaval."
* "The symbol is both a mechanism of solidarity, and a mechanism of exploitation." They also produce unity, and simple and clear choices.
* Military leaders as symbols: they need to stay unified in order to be effective, both in their own theater of war, but also from the perspective of the people: "For the spectacle of a row on Olympus is diverting and destructive."
* He's producing an interesting argument in this book;
First: that we have pseudo-realities in our own heads that are not representative of actual reality;
Second: those pseudo-realities can be put in our head;
Third: symbols can be created to frame and concretize these pseudo-realities;
Fourth: symbols can be produced that produce these pseudo-realities and thereby a small coterie of leaders "wields" us or leads us along as a coherent group.
* For example: World War I the casualties were so high, such a high percent of the total soldiers, that "no command in this war dare to publish a candid statement of its losses. In France the casualty lists were never published. In England, America, and Germany, publication of the losses of a big battle were spread out over long periods so as to destroy a unified impression of the total. Only the insiders knew until long afterwards what the Somme had cost, or the Flanders battles."
* Very interesting point here about the relatively minor event that triggered the major mutinies among French soldiers in 1917: clearly it was a cumulative series of events with Nevelle's offensive as the final straw.
* See also the relation between the policy and its effect on those imposing it: teetotalers would have no problem with prohibition, it doesn't impose on their private habits. Likewise this is "one great reason why governments have such a free hand in foreign affairs." Most people in a given country don't interact with the people in the other country or experience any (direct) impact at all from foreign affairs. Most Americans wouldn't care or wouldn't be able to tell the difference if we liberated "Czechoslovakia or Jugoslovakia." It's all part of some distant, unseen environment, none of which seems real, and from which convincing pseudo-realities can be manufactured. In local affairs the cost of a policy is much more easily visible. This is why most leaders prefer policies where costs are indirect or unseen, taxes are indirect and not directly perceived, etc.
* Wise leaders, instead of looking for consent from the masses, look for consent in subordinates of the hierarchy. The 0.1% ultra-elite has to control the 1% elite, which has to control the next 10% in order to control the remaining 90%...
* "But all leaders are not statesman, all leaders hate to resign, and most leaders find it hard to believe that bad as things are, the other fellow would not make them worse."
* The "manufacturer of consent" [so Chomsky didn't invent this phrase after all!] has improved enormously in technique thanks to analysis, psychological research, modern communications etc. "A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power."
Ch 16: The Self-Centered Man
* "The existence of a force called Public Opinion is in the main taken for granted" but there's very little study of it or literature on it, specifically on "how well we learn to use knowledge of the way opinions are put together to watch over our own opinions when they are being put together."
* A structural problem with the 18th century thinkers who designed modern constitutional democracies: while they wanted citizens who would bend their knee to no other man, they also denied "that all men are reasonable all the time, or educated, or informed, to note that people are fooled, that they do not always know their own interests, and that all men are not equally fitted to govern." So in a world of MPAI (most people are idiots) where people are highly fallible and easy to exploit, this only would have empowered aristocratic arguments! "So the early Democrats insisted that a reasoned righteousness weld up spontaneously out of the mass of men." This is delusionally hopeful, and "the cleverest, like Thomas Jefferson, had all sorts of private reservations" about it. Basically, Lippmann is articulating a structural problem of democracy that it gives too much power to individuals who lack the tools to participate competently.
* And of course all of this happened before modern media: Even in the 1920s media was far more sophisticated than in the 18th century, with photography, films, worldwide press services etc. This author is actually optimistic that media coverage will be done better in the future and will more accurately report reality to people far from the scene of action. "It [media reporting] is often done badly, but the fact that it is done at all shows that it can be done, and the fact that we begin to know how badly it is often done, shows that it can be done better." I guess everyone is entitled to a little delusional optimism from time to time. ;)
Ch 17: The Self-Contained Community
* Systems that assume a pre-established harmony in which everyone "does their duty" and everything just works out, such that we'd (magically) have a harmonious, well-functioning world. See Plato's Republic, see bureaucratic socialism, see syndicalism, etc.
* However, see Machiavelli, "a man most mercilessly maligned" because he explained the mechanisms of manipulating things, opinions and events. People read Machiavelli and mistake the messenger for the message. Machiavelli gave you the tools to see the game being played on you! "He has a worse name and more disciples than any political thinker who ever lived."
* States as gladiators vs people with a will to decide their own fate and find a peace not imposed by force, this public opinion is a reconciliation of these two entities via manipulation.
* Jefferson defining democracy in a very narrow sense of a small community of independent farmers, without manufacture, without foreign commerce, without a navy... basically a focus on the small self-governing group. Criticized as "an eternal rusticity." A special condition of democracy that grew into a gospel stereotype through which Americans of all parties have since looked at politics. People then assumed that public opinion was spontaneous, sincere, and not manipulated--actually from the people themselves, not imposed by political strategists, media, etc.
* The Jeffersonian ideal does not work in the modern era with dense cities, complex interactions between the State and local communities, world and interstate trade, etc. Everything is entangled, nothing is autonomous. Worse, there's no such thing as an "omnicompetent citizen," which was another Jeffersonian delusion (the fallacy of the omnicompetent citizen).
* It's interesting to think about Jeffersonian democracy as literally what brought about American isolationism as an ideal: a self-contained, self-sufficient society that was unwilling to get involved outside its sphere of influence.
* See also: "The [self-contained, Jeffersonian] environment was so familiar that one could take it for granted that men were talking about substantially the same things. The only real disagreements, therefore, would be in judgments about the same facts. There was no need to guarantee the sources of information. [emph mine] They were obvious, and equally accessible to all men." How things have changed in the modern era! Back then there was less complexity, more homogeneity in terms of people's way of looking at the world, people's backgrounds; truth could be more easily seen, more easily debated, people didn't come at each other with completely different perceptions/conceptions of reality (or better put: completely different pseudo-realities): "the power to draw deductions from a premise, rather than the ability to find the premise."
Ch 18: The Role of Force, Patronage, and Privilege
* Alexander Hamilton talking about "thirteen distinct sovereign wills" in the US colonies: the problem of having an effective confederation with 13 disparate wills, 13 self-centered communities, that why the Articles of Confederation did not work, and thus the founders changed their perspective on government, more or less centralizing more power at the Federal level rather than at the decision-making level of each colony's independent democracy.
* Madison and Hamilton understood the need to control and limit the government's power, which is why they put a system of checks and balances in place, but they still effectively neutralized local power and local opinion. And then Aaron Burr's pistol "blew the brains out of the Federal party" (holy cow what a great phrase! Hamilton literally was the brains of the operation, uh, until Aaron Burr dropped him like a $10 bill).
* Has the USA been an oligarchy all along? It was formed as one, that's for sure, only landowners could vote, the Senate was indirectly chosen by state legislators, the electoral college, etc. Maybe things haven't changed...?
* Unexpected results of short office terms in USA politics: it created the very bureaucracy and permanent government workers nobody wanted in the first place! Yet they were necessary for continuity, for competence, etc.
* A two party system as "a substitute for the rule of gentry." In other words "offices oscillated between the henchmen." "The professional politician was permanent." Likely we've been a two-faction one party system for a lot longer than I had thought too.
Ch 19: The Old Image In a New Form: Guild Socialism
* "If decisions were decentralized they soon floundered in a chaos of local opinions. If they were centralized, the policy of the state was based on the opinions of a small social set at the capital. In any case force was necessary to defend one local right against another." And in either case force is used against us as individuals.
* Modern democracy was a reaction against kings and a regime of detailed economic regulation (basically mercantilism, which has now re-reared its ugly head in modern neo-mercantilism)
* The era of the big trust companies (call it late 1800s into early 1900s) led to a centralization race between unions and corporations, both of which consolidated into larger and larger groups.
* How most people are delusional about or ignorant of (or just don't want to think about) the high level of coercion and force in modern life. See also socialist writers from that era talking blatantly about the violence required to make a transition to their system, obviously violence is coercion in its worst (or perfected?) form. See for example G.D.H. Cole's book Guild Socialism.
* The new "Democrat" moves from the Jeffersonian idealized rural township as the propagandistic image of democracy, to the workshop and factory in the city as the fundamental unit of democracy. [So, what would the fundamental unit be today, the cubicle farm??] The underlying question is "what is the underlying 'unit' of democracy?"
* "...there are two kinds of uninstructed voter. There is the man who does not know and knows that he does not know. He is generally an enlightened person... But there is also the man who is uninstructed and does not know that he is, or care. He can always be gotten to the polls, if the party machinery is working. His vote is the basis of the machine." [I thought we had essentially lost our democracy in the past couple of decades. It turns out we haven't had a functionally legitimate participatory democracy in the USA for more than a century.]
Ch 20: A New Image
* Thus public opinion "can be managed only by specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality." This is a significant difference between theory and practice of the democratic system.
* The Democratic fallacy: "Men do not long desire self-government for its own sake. They desire it for the sake of the results. That is why the impulse to self-government is always strongest as a protest against bad conditions."
* Other aspects of the democratic fallacy:
+ That Democratic power would be beneficent if done in the right way
+ That the people's will can be clearly expressed and known
+ That the use of power can be controlled
+ That the dignity of man would be expressed instinctively in wise laws and good government
* "...social control depends upon devising standards of living and methods of audit by which the acts of public officials and industrial directors are measured... we can steadily increase our real control over these acts by insisting that all of them shall be plainly recorded, and their results objectively measured."
Ch 21: The Buying Public
* On how truth originates from the competition of opinions, open inquiry, that it's (allegedly) inherent in all men, "that truth freely put in circulation will win acceptance", etc... "But when you are dealing with an invisible environment, the assumption is false. The truth about distant or complex matters is not self-evident, and the machinery for assembling information is technical and expensive."
* On the domain of news gathering, something not studied as of the writing of this book, also a disdain of the people who write the news, reporters etc., but the press is the chief means of contact with the unseen environment, and the [naively innocent!] assumption underlying it is that "every day and twice a day it will present us with a true picture of all the our world in which we are interested."
* [Perhaps this is an early (the first?) book to really grasp and convey the cynicism and partisanship of the media]
* "We expect the newspaper to service with truth however unprofitable the truth may be. For this difficult and often dangerous service, which we recognize as fundamental, we expected to pay until recently the smallest coin turned out by the mint." [News media was structurally broken from the very first inning. Worse, see modern mass media through the lens of the dictum "If the product is free you are the product": the incentive is to manipulate your political views (and extend the power of the state) via this "free" product. Of course, it's worse by far to actually pay money for something that manipulates you, like paying for a New York times subscription...]
* On the "indirect revenue model" of journalism (with advertisements): "The public pays for the press, but only when the payment is concealed." "An indirect taxation of the reader."
* Thus the newspapers will be edited and published with a bias for reflecting the point of view of the buying public.
* From the standpoint of a modern media consumer steeped in the cynicism of how pathetic modern media is nowadays, the author comes across as hopelessly naive when he shares his hopes for how a well-operated media could function.
* "Roughly speaking, the economic support for general news gathering is in the price paid for advertised goods by the fairly prosperous sections of cities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants." [Now let's do the same exercise for today: who does it, and who are they?]
Ch 22: The Constant Reader
* On why a reader continues to read a given newspaper (or consume a given media source) whether he judges it accurate or not. This is typically done for subjects that he already knows about or participates in: "What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess then that the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion?" Lippmann is scratching here at the Gel-Mann Effect, and of course we can't judge the accuracy of the newspaper with regard to something that we can't see or are not participating in--the only way a pseudo-reality can be created is in a domain where we don't have actual direct knowledge.
* Newspapers edited on the principal that readers wish to read about themselves (e.g., a local paper that features local people in it); newspapers focused on the lives of other people like high society people (e.g., the NYT society page).
* "The press services standardize the main events" (AP/UPI wires provide the same news to all papers)
* Papers also have to meet the needs of readers and their stereotyped expectations even though "they have no independent knowledge of most news they read." Thus we have the explanation for narrative-based news consumption.
Ch 23: The Nature of News
* Something definite must occur, it has to be something worth noticing, it has to be a "man bites dog" type situation as well.
* Also: de minimis non curat lex: the law (read: the news) does not concern itself with trifles.
* "The news does not tell you how the seed is germinating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first sprout breaks through the surface." Insightful. See also the thought experiment of a game without a final score: how would it be reported in the news? There'd be nothing to summarize it with! Stock prices are discrete and easily quantified for another example. Election returns likewise known and quantified. It all creates a strange relation of certainty to reality. This is a really interesting metaphor that the author is discussing here. Things that are difficult to measure are impossible to report! Mass feeling, intention, sincerity of a people, also news about what is going to happen. They don't exist until an easily observable event happens or something happens to makes a tangible issue out of them. A type of ludic fallacy example here, where unless something is literally in the textbook or in the teacher's answer key, it does not exist in the minds of the students.
* On the hiring of a press agent between an institution and newspapers and reporters: If reporting were a simple recovery of obvious facts, press agents would be nothing more than clerks. In reality, they shape everything, while saving the reporter much trouble, and while producing for the public the prospective that the institution wishes the public to see. "He is censor and propagandist."
* "News value" as the underlying measure of whether something is covered and thus becomes part of the pseudo-reality.
* Also an interesting idea where the news value of say a "labor strike" would be a representation of one point in time of a long process of building up to the work stoppage: poor work conditions, of various people's experiences on the way to this point, etc. But this event (read: the media's reporting of it) doesn't show up as something that even exists until a salient crux point happens. Another example of how the news creates a pseudo-reality much different from actual reality.
* The newspaper has to make the strike "interesting" to the reader, which means the actual truth of the nature of the labor dispute (many specific facts) are left out, and the entire event by definition must be deliberately misrepresented. "The labor dispute in another city has to be very important before the news account contains any definite information as to what is in dispute." (!!) Another example of the germination of a seed being shown only in the form of a sprout breaking through the surface of the soil.
* This is just one of a long list of structural problems with rendering reality accurately--we have a literal layer cake of biases: the readers', the journalists', the editors', the publishers', the structural realities of newspaper economics, the need to make news "interesting" and "relevant", the structural reasons for why news must be sensationalized, the need for subscribers and advertisers, etc.
* The difference between something being of news interest (to an editor) and something containing actual useful information. The editor has to decide what will absorb a time and attention of a broad group of readers and give them that.
* In a way this can all be summarized by Mark Twain's dictum: "if you don't read the news you're uninformed, if you read the news you're misinformed." Better to not read the news, at least then you can approach all subjects with "beginner's mind" rather than the stereotypes imposed on you by the news that alters your pseudo-reality!!
* Newspapers and their influence on each other. Especially during World War I, a new phenomenon where London was key crossing point of news via cable, thus Americans could only read the English press, and this influenced American newspapers heavily.
* "The hardest thing to report is chaos" which is why no one knew what was really going on in the Russian revolution until much, much later.
* Walter Bagehot: "It has been said" writes Walter Bagehot, "that if you can only get a middle class Englishman to think whether there are 'snails in Sirius,' he will soon have an opinion on it." People form decisive confident opinions on things they know almost nothing about thanks to their consumption of tidbits of news, while at the same time in domains where they have deep knowledge they see all sorts of shades of gray and will lack forceful opinion. Dunning-Kruger Effect basically.
* Note also that the newspaper itself grooves its opinions because the readers get used to the newspapers opinions on a subject: "That is why many a newspaper finds that, having honestly evoked the partisanship of its readers, it cannot easily, supposing the editor believes the facts warrant it, change position. If a change is necessary, the transition has to be managed with the utmost skill and delicacy. Usually a newspaper will not attempt so hazardous a performance. It is easier and safer to have the news of that subject taper off and disappear, thus putting out the fire by starving it." We're seeing this right now in real time with various changes in coronavirus/pandemic narratives, also in the Russia-Ukraine story, also in the vaccine safety narratives. etc.
Ch 24: News, Truth, and a Conclusion
* "When I wrote Liberty and the News, I did not understand this distinction clearly enough to state it." Interesting footnote on page 358, on a writer's journey to understand precisely what he's trying to say and how to frame it and articulate it appropriately, and how the act of writing itself is an internal journey toward understanding. I know the feeling.
* I think this might be why I like investing: the truth is the results: what the investment did, what the stock price did, this is part of understanding too. Rather than playing parlor games or guess games about what will happen next in the news, or on guesswork about informational noise about what various tidbits or data points will happen in the coming days/weeks/years, but actually putting your capital down on a theme and later looking at the scoreboard and seeing the results.
* "[The press] can record only what has been recorded for it." A tremendously helpful (if cynical) maxim on what news can (and can't) do right there.
* "Unless the event is capable of being named, measured, given shape, made specific, it either fails to take on the character of news, or it is subject to the accidents and prejudices of observation."
* We have invented a "machinery of knowledge"
Ch 25: The Entering Wedge
* The imposition of a technical class/an "expert class" to make complex issues and complex governmental programs intelligible to elected leaders. Statisticians, accountants, auditors, research men, scientists, each with a jargon of their own. "The statesman, the executive, the party leader, the head of a voluntary association, found that if he had to discuss two dozen different subjects in the course of the day, somebody would have to coach him."
* On the frailties of the social scientists' hypotheses: "He cannot prove his theories before offering them to the public." Sound familiar? Think about today's novel mRNA biotherapies, where our society experienced the twisted example of having an actual real voting FDA member say, live, in a public hearing, "We're never gonna learn about how safe the vaccine is until we start giving it." Another example from modernity comes from the Obamacare bill, when Nancy Pelosi famously said "we have to pass it to see what's in it."
* Why there are no successful social sciences who show uncertainty about their own work...?
* This is a weird chapter because Lippmann comes across as very pro-social science, and this chapter and the clear conclusions a reader draws from it do not at all fit with Lippmann's overall epistemic humility. The idea that idealized ideas can be produced by some centralized expert authority and imposed on a society is the height of what is wrong with modern mass democracies.
* Ah, I get it: he's differentiating between academic social scientist, and a social/political scientist who acts from inside the halls of power (maybe the difference between an ivory tower sociologist and a pragmatic realpolitik expert like Henry Kissinger). But he still appears to believe that there is "the beginning of experimental method in social science" which is a classic modernist's epistemic error.
Ch 26: Intelligence Work
* The assembling of information about comparative statistics on infant mortality is often followed by a reduction in the death rate of babies. Before there is no place in our picture of our environment for this information, but the statistics made the issue visible: "as visible as if the babies had elected an alderman to air their grievances."
* [It's very interesting as the author goes through all these examples of flaws in how we perceive reality, how our pseudo-environment is easily shaped by journalists and the media, that he resolves the underlying paradox of how to deal with this by assuming the professionalization of a social science domain that would order our environment for us. (!!!) If he could only imagine the modern era where our social sciences are unbelievably politicized, doctrinaire and literally unable to accurately perceive reality, and how they lead our society in exactly the wrong direction more often than not. It's a very odd and deeply unfortunate conclusion for such a smart work to reach.]
* On intelligence work and how the gatherers of facts and information have to be separated from the policymakers--otherwise there's confirmation bias. How institutions in every domain need to think about this risk: that the people bringing facts to the decision makers will shape those facts, and thus those groups need to be separated, paid differently, have appropriate (and different) incentives etc. This is an interesting structural problem, "the messenger problem" one might call it.
* It is strange to see the author--after all this debate about opinion shaping--resort to institutions that are going to suffer from the very same problem he's describing throughout the book. He thinks that they can be perfected somehow.
* Now a series of prescriptions for formulating and funding mini-bureaucracies for intelligence, for the federal government, for different governmental departments. Also organizing coordination of information, research and of intelligence-gathering across federations of institutions: state government, cities, rural counties,schools, etc., information sharing about different problems, comparing outcomes and results, etc. This chapter is the most delusionally optimistic--and the most boring--of the book so far!
"It is possible to-day, it will become more possible when more labor has gone into it, to reduce the discrepancies between the conceived environment and the effective environment. As that is done, federalism will work more and more by consent, less and less by coercion." If the modern era today is any indication, this author could never have been more wrong. We are under more coercion than ever, with more obscurantism and opacity than ever between our perceived environment and our actual environment.
* "When men act on the principle of intelligence they go out to find the facts and to make their wisdom. When they ignore it, they go inside themselves and find only what is there. They elaborate their prejudice, instead of increasing their knowledge." As if man will default to intelligent action! He's assuming an impossible perfectibility in human beings (and in human institutions, which are even more imperfect) and his entire edifice of solutions is predicated on this impossible perfectibility.
Ch 27: The Appeal to the Public
* On the unintelligibility of most public issues for the standpoint of regular people, even intelligent citizens. "...the threads of memory and emotion are in a snarl."
* Education should help, but there's very little education in the domain of knowledge of human institutions and how they function. At least we can deal with the world with greater sophistication about our own minds.
* "The destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, enables us to break down our current categories and break up a hard simple version of the world. "The scene turns vivid and full." Again, Lippman is delusionally optimistic about humanity eliminating its prejudices and making competent/rational decisions about complicated subjects.
Ch 28: The Appeal to Reason
* "I have written, and then thrown away, several endings to this book." I know the feeling.
* On the difficulty of recognizing expertise, on the difficulty of convincing citizens of your expertise (if you're a leader), the difficulty that we as citizens have judging the expertise of our leaders, and of ourselves. Explained in an interesting parable of ship where there might or might not be a mutiny. The sailors are sailors, the captain is a captain, they are not trained or schooled in judging expertise in mutinying or how to handle it, and in any case an education on these topics would take years anyway! You can't school the sailors or the captain on these topics when you're already on your voyage. An interesting metaphor: we are like this in society: there might be a few instance where we can train ourselves to make a judgment about a distant reality, a war, some propaganda event, but the event may not even matter, may not even be relevant to our lives anyway. And in the meantime we have to live! We have to tend to the business of (metaphorically) sailing our own ship.
More good vocab from this book (is it just me or were people just smarter a hundred years ago?):
Solecism: incorrect speech, or more specifically grammatically incorrect speech.
Foozled: to botch or bungle
Azoic: having no trace of organic life; remains
Buncombe (modern: bunkum): nonsense (named after a county in North Carolina)
Surd: something uttered under the breath; or (in phonetics) literally: a speech sound uttered with the breath and not the voice (e.g. f, k, p, s, t ).
Irrefragable: not able to be refuted or disproved; indisputable.
Reading list (start with the asterisked books first):
Sinclair Lewis: Main Street
Graham Wallas: Our Social Heritage
Edward J. Kempf: Psychopathology
George Creel: How We Advertised America
Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War
John Dewey: How We Think
Fernand van Langenhove: The Growth of a Legend
James Brice: Modern Democracies (2 vols)
John Bagnell Bury: The Idea of Progress
Herbert Spencer: The Complete Works
**Mark Francis: Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life
H. G. Wells: Outline of History
Carter Goodrich: The Frontier of Control
William James: Some Problems of Philosophy
Frances Taylor Patterson: Cinema Craftsmanship
Joseph Jastrow: The Psychology of Conviction
**Everett Dean Martin: The Behavior of Crowds
**Harold J. Laski: Foundations of Sovereignty
Peter S. Wright: At the Supreme War Council
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Charles Beard: Economic Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy
Henry Jones Ford: Rise and Growth of American Politics
**John L. Given: Making a Newspaper
G. D. H. Cole: Guild Socialism: A Plan for Economic Democracy