PUBLIC OPINION: Exploring the Influence and Impact of Mass Perceptions (2024 Beginner Guide)

By DEXTER ANDREWS

Delve into the intricate world of public opinion with "Public Opinion." This comprehensive book examines the powerful role that collective perceptions play in shaping societies, influencing policy decisions, and driving social change. Whether you're a student of social sciences, a policy maker, or simply curious about the dynamics of public thou

• Language: English
• Publisher: DEXTER ANDREWS
• Release date: Jun 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9783689441791

DEXTER ANDREWS

Dexter Andrews is a distinguished sociologist and author based in New York City. With a keen interest in the dynamics of mass perceptions and public opinion, Andrews has dedicated his career to exploring how collective beliefs shape society. His works are known for their insightful analysis and accessibility to beginners and experts alike.

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Dexter Andrews

Public Opinion (Water Lippmann)

Copyright © 2024 by Dexter Andrews

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

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Contents

1. Chapter I.

2. Chapter II.

3. Chapter III.

4. Chapter IV.

5. Chapter V.

6. Chapter VI.

7. Chapter VII.

8. Chapter VIII.

9. Chapter IX.

10. Chapter X.

11. Chapter XI.

12. Chapter XII.

13. Chapter XIII.

14. Chapter XIV.

15. Chapter XV.

16. Chapter XVI.

17. Chapter XVII.

18. Chapter XVIII.

19. Chapter XIX.

20. Chapter XX.

21. Chapter XXI.

22. Chapter XXII.

23. Chapter XXIII.

24. Chapter XXIV.

25. Chapter XXV.

26. Chapter XXVI.

27. Chapter XXVII.

28. Chapter XXVIII.

1

Chapter I.

The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads

In 1914, a small number of Germans, French, and English people lived on an island in the ocean. That island is not connected by cable, and the British postal ship only visits once every sixty days. It had not arrived by September, and the islanders were still chatting about the most recent newspaper article about Madame Caillaux’s impending trial for Gaston Calmette’s shooting. Therefore, on a day in mid-September, the entire colony gathered at the wharf with greater than normal curiosity to hear the captain’s decision. They discovered that the French and English individuals had been struggling for the sanctity of life for more than six weeks.

However, their situation was not all that dissimilar from that of the majority of Europeans. Although in the continent the period might have just been six days or six hours, they had been misinformed for six weeks. A pause occurred.

There came a time when the image of Europe, where people were going about their lives as usual, had nothing in common with the Europe where people were going to start living disorganized lives. Every guy had a period of time when he was still acclimatized to a setting that was no longer in existence. Men were producing items they would not be able to send and purchasing goods they would not be able to purchase as late as July 25th, all over the world.

When we reflect, we might discover how little we actually understand about the environment we live in. We can see that while the news about it reaches us quickly at times, we handle the information we take to be true as though it were the environment itself. Although it is more difficult to recall that about the beliefs we currently hold, we convince ourselves that, in comparison to earlier people and eras, it was simple to observe when they were fervently committed to absurd conceptions of the universe. We maintain that the world they knew and the world they needed to know were frequently quite different from one another due to our superior hindsight.

It doesn’t support our hopes for a better life in the future. It suffices to understand what the Bible says. So why engage in conflict? However, even fifteen years after St. Ambrose, the issue of the antipodes continued to divide opinion. Because of his scientific achievements, a monk by the name of Cosmas was assigned to compose a Christian Topography, or Christian Opinion concerning the World.2.

He obviously knew exactly what was required of him since, as he read the Scriptures, he based every conclusion he made on them. In light of this, it would seem that the world is a flat parallelogram that is twice as long from north to south as it is broad from east to west. The earth is at the center.

Not only would no Christian sovereign allow him a ship to try, but no devout mariner would want to voyage to the Antipodes. Cosmas didn’t find anything remotely ridiculous about his map. We can only begin to comprehend how he would have feared Magellan, Peary, or the aviator who risked a collision with the angels and the vault of heaven by flying seven miles above the earth by keeping in mind his unwavering belief that this was the universe’s map. Similarly, the simplest way to comprehend the wrath of politics and war is to keep in mind that nearly every member of each party fervently believes in the version of the other that it accepts as true.

"Goodbye, thou terrible, reckless, invading fool!

I assumed you were better off; enjoy your luck."

2

Even in their lifetime, the public typically only knows great persons through a made-up persona. Thus, there is some validity to the proverb that states that no guy is a hero to his valet. There is barely a semblance of reality because the private secretary and valet are frequently lost in their own fantasies. Naturally, royal personas are made-up identities.

There are at least two separate identities—the public and regal self and the private and human self—regardless of whether they support the chamberlain’s staging of their public persona or if they truly believe in it. The histories of these two selves more or less automatically incorporate the biographies of notable individuals. The official biographer recreates the memoir’s candid public life.

However, the type of portraiture that emerges naturally in people’s minds is the most fascinating. According to Mr. Strachey, there was a great wave of enthusiasm among the outside public when Victoria ascended to the throne. Sentiment and romance were becoming popular, and the sight of the young princess driving through her city, with her fair hair and rosy cheeks, charming, innocent, and humble, made onlookers cry with a tender sense of loyalty. Above all, the difference between Queen Victoria and her uncles struck everyone with a powerful impact. The vile old men, depraved and self-centered, pigheaded and ludicrous, with their never-ending burden of bills, misunderstandings, and disreputable activities—they had finally disappeared like winter’s snow, and here, crowned and bright,

As an officer on Joffre’s staff during the soldier’s peak fame, M. Jean de Pierrefeu5 witnessed hero-worship firsthand: For two years, the entire world paid an almost divine homage to the victor of the Marne. The baggage claim agent was literally bending over from the weight of the boxes, parcels, and notes that strangers had sent him, each one a passionate declaration of appreciation. I believe that no commander in the battle has been able to grasp a similar concept of what glory means, save from General Joffre. They sent him boxes of candies from all the world’s best confectioners, champagne boxes, elegant wines from every era, fruits, games, ornaments and cutlery, clothing, smoking accessories, inkstands, and paperweights.

The darkened minds of lunatics, simpletons, half-mad people, and crazy people turned toward him in the same way as they did toward reason. I’ve seen the letters of a Sydney resident pleading with the General to protect him from his enemies and a New Zealander asking him to send some soldiers to a man who owed him ten pounds but wouldn’t pay.

Eventually, a few hundred young girls overcame their sexual shyness and requested engagements, keeping their families in the dark. Some of them simply wanted to serve him."

The success that he, his staff, and his soldiers achieved, the desperation of the war, the grief that he experienced personally, and the promise of future victory all contributed to this ideal Joffre. In addition to hero worship, there is demon exorcism. Devils are created by the same process that gives heroes life. If Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt was the source of all goodness, then Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin, and Trotsky were the source of all evil. They possessed the same omnipotence for evil as the heroes did for good. There was, in the eyes of many naive and terrified minds, no political backlash, strike, blockage, unexplained death, or unexplained conflict in the world whose origins did not trace back to these individual sources.

3

All writers have a place in their hearts for the perfect, undeniable example, but an international spotlight like this on a symbolic character is rare enough to be truly unique. The vivisection of war illustrates such cases; it does not produce them. In public life, symbolic representations influence behavior just as much, but since there are so many competing symbols, each one is considerably less inclusive. Not only does each symbol represent a small fraction of the population at most, but even within that small fraction there is a markedly reduced suppression of individual diversity, so each symbol carries less emotional weight. Public opinion symbols are vulnerable to examination, discussion, and comparison during times of reasonable security.

A significantly larger variety of emotions is triggered at practically all other times, and even during deadlocks in battle, to establish conflict, decision, reluctance, and compromise. As we shall see, the symbolism of public opinion typically displays the signs of this interest-balancing. Consider, for instance, how quickly the fragile and by no means effective symbol of Allied Unity vanished following the armistice and how this was almost immediately followed by the disintegration of each country’s symbolic image of the other: America the Crusader, France observing at the Frontier of Freedom, and Britain the Defender of Public Law. And then consider how each nation’s symbolic representation of itself began to unravel when party and class strife and individual ambition emerged.

It clearly doesn’t matter whether we view this as a return to normalcy or lament it as one of the minor miseries of peace. Our first mistake when it comes to fictions and symbols is to disregard their significance to the current social structure and see them only as vital components of human communication. Ideas deal with occurrences that are invisible and difficult to understand in any civilization that is not entirely self-contained in its interests and is too small for everyone to be aware of all that occurs. Miss Sherwin of Gopher Prairie7 attempts to imagine the war that is raging in France, knowing that it is happening. She has never visited France, and she most definitely hasn’t.

She has seen pictures of German and French soldiers, but she cannot conceive three million men. In actuality, no one can conceive them, and even the experts fail to attempt. They perceive them as two hundred divisions, roughly. Miss Sherwin, however, lacks access to the battle map’s order, so when she considers the conflict, she fixes her thoughts on Joffre and the Kaiser as though they were having a private duel. If you could see what she sees in her mind’s eye, the composition of the image may resemble an engraving of a famous soldier from the eighteenth century. With a ghostly army of little soldiers, he stands there larger than life size and proudly undisturbed.

Anyone’s sole emotion for an incident they do not witness is the emotion sparked by their mental picture of it. We therefore cannot fully comprehend the actions of others until we are aware of what they believe to be true. I witnessed a young girl who was raised in a mining town in Pennsylvania go from total joy to a fit of rage after a wind blow broke the kitchen window pane. She was inconsolable and incomprehensible to me for hours at a time. When she was able to speak, however, it became clear that a broken window pane indicated the death of a close relative. As a result, she was grieving for her father, who had scared her into leaving the house.

In some cases, abnormality is merely a question of degree. We see that much the same mechanism is at work when an Attorney-General, scared by a bomb that burst on his doorstep, convinces himself that a revolution is going to place on May 1, 1920, by reading revolutionary literature. Naturally, the war provided several instances of this pattern: the incidental fact, the imaginative leap, the will to believe, and among these three components, a falsification of reality that elicited a furious primal reaction. Because it is evident that, in certain situations, men react to fictions just as strongly as they do to facts, and that, frequently, they even contribute to the creation of the same fictions.

One thing that all of these cases have in common is worth noting. It is the introduction of a pseudo-environment between man and his surroundings.

His actions reflect his reaction to that made-up surroundings. However, since it is behavior, the acts—if any—that result from it function in the real environment, where the action takes place, rather than in the artificial environment where it is stimulated. It could take a while before there is a discernible change in the fictional world’s texture if the behavior is not the result of practical actions but rather what we refer to as raw thought and feeling. Contradiction, however, quickly arises when the stimulus of the pseudo-fact leads to action toward objects or other people. The feeling of hitting one’s head against a stone wall then appears.

I don’t mean lying when I say fictions. I refer to an image of the surroundings that has been influenced by human activity to some extent. The spectrum of fiction spans from total delusions to the scientists’ eminently self-aware utilization of a schematic model, or their determination that precision to a certain extent is unimportant for their specific issue. A work of fiction can be practically any degree of faithful, and fiction is not deceptive as long as the degree of faithfulness is considered. The selection, reorganization, pattern-tracing, and stylization of what William James referred to as the random irradiations and resettlements of our ideas constitute, in fact, a major portion of human civilization.9.

4

The triangle relationship between the action scene, the human picture of the scene, and the human response to the picture emerging upon the action scene must thus be acknowledged by the public opinion analyst. It resembles a play that the actors were inspired to write based on their personal experiences, with the plot being performed out in real life as opposed to just in their on-stage roles. With remarkable brilliance, the moving picture frequently highlights this dual drama of internal motivation and outward behavior. The two men are fighting, seemingly over money, but there’s something deeper at play.

Subsequently, the image disappears, and the images that each of the two men sees in their minds are reenacted.

There was a similar scene performed in the US Senate. During their morning meal on September 29, 1919, a few Senators perused a Washington Post news article regarding the arrival of US marines along the Dalmatian coast. According to the newspaper:

FACTS NOW ESTABLISHED

"It appears that the following significant facts are already known. Rear Admiral Andrews, who was in charge of the American naval forces in the Adriatic, received orders from the British Admiralty through Rear Admiral Knapps in London and the War Council. It was not requested if the American Navy Department approved or disapproved.

WITHOUT DANIELS’ KNOWLEDGE

When cables indicating that the forces he is believed to have exclusive authority over were engaging in what amounted to naval warfare without his knowledge arrived, Mr. Daniels was undoubtedly put in an unusual situation. It was clearly understood that in order to hold D’Annunzio’s supporters in check, some country would have to make a sacrifice, and the British Admiralty may choose to ask Rear Admiral Andrews to act on behalf of Great Britain and her Allies."It was also understood that foreigners would have the authority to command American naval forces in an emergency under the new League of Nations plan, with or without the Department of Navy’s approval.

Mr. Knox, the Pennsylvania senator, is the first to offer commentary. He demands an investigation with indignation. Mr. Brandegee of Connecticut, the following speaker, already showed signs of disbelief due to his outrage. Mr. Brandegee asks what would have happened if marines had been killed thirty seconds after Mr. Knox furiously demands to know if the report is accurate. Mr. Knox responds, forgetting that he originally requested an inquiry because he is so intrigued by the query. It would have been war if American marines had been slain. The argument is still in a conditional spirit. The discussion continues. Senator McCormick of Illinois alerts the Senate about the Wilson administration’s propensity for starting little, unapproved wars. He reiterates the remark made by Theodore Roosevelt about waging peace. More discussion. Mr.knox.

As of right now, the senators are still just dimly aware that they are talking about a rumor. Despite becoming lawyers, they can nevertheless recall some types of evidence.

However, because they are red-blooded males, they immediately feel all the outrage that comes with the fact that Congress has not given its approval and that a foreign administration has sent American soldiers into combat. They want to emotionally accept it since they are Republicans opposing the League of Nations. This infuriates Nebraska’s Democratic leader, Mr. Hitchcock. Because the Supreme Council was operating under war powers, he defends it. Republicans are holding up peace negotiations, which is why it hasn’t been finalized yet.

As a