What is Propaganda?

“Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. 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. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach. Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs.”

-- Walter Lippmann

We shall assume that what each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him. If his atlas tells him that the world is flat he will not sail near what he believes to be the edge of our planet for fear of falling off. If his maps include a fountain of eternal youth, a Ponce de Leon will go in quest of it. If someone digs up yellow dirt that looks like gold, he will for a time act exactly as if he had found gold. The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do. It does not determine what they will achieve. It determines their effort, their feelings, their hopes, not their accomplishments and results.

The very men who most loudly proclaim their "materialism" and their contempt for "ideologues," the Marxian communists, place their entire hope on what? On the formation by propaganda of a class-conscious group.

But what is propaganda -- if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? What is class-consciousness but a way of realizing the world? What is national consciousness but another way of seeing the nation?

Try to explain social life as the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain and you will soon be saying that the hedonist begs the question, for even supposing that man does pursue these ends, the crucial problem of why he thinks one course rather than another likely to produce pleasure, is untouched. Does the guidance of man's conscience explain? How then does he happen to have the particular conscience that he has? The theory of economic self-interest?

But how do men come to conceive their interest in one way rather than another?  The desire for security, or prestige, or domination, or what is vaguely called self-realization? How do men conceive their security and what do they consider prestige? How do they figure out the means of domination, or what is the notion of self that they wish to realize?

Pleasure, pain, conscience, acquisition, protection, enhancement, mastery, are undoubtedly names for some of the ways people act. These are the dispositions that work toward such ends. But no statement of the end, or any description of the tendencies to seek it, can explain the behavior that results.

The very fact that men theorize at all is proof that their pseudo-environments, their interior representations of the world, are a determining element in thought, feeling, and action. For if the connection between reality and human response were direct and immediate, rather than indirect and inferred, indecision and failure would be unknown. The chief difficulty in adapting the psychoanalytic scheme to political thought arises in this connection. The Freudians are concerned with the maladjustment of distinct individuals to other individuals and to concrete circumstances. They have assumed that if internal derangements could be straightened out, there would be little or no confusion about what is the obviously normal relationship.

But public opinion deals with indirect, unseen, and puzzling facts, and there is nothing obvious about them. The situations to which public opinions refer are known only as opinions.

We must look at how the larger political environment is conceived -- and how it can be conceived more successfully.

What is a normal social career...or one freed from suppressions and conventions? Is society the sort of thing that corresponds to the conservative idea of what is normal, or the sort of thing that corresponds to their idea of what is free? Is society the sort of thing that corresponds to the liberal idea of what is normal, or the sort of thing that corresponds to their idea of what is free?

Both ideas are merely public opinions.

The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. The pictures inside the heads of human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions. Those pictures that are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion -- with capital letters.

What are some of the reasons why the picture inside so often misleads men in their dealings with the world outside? 

There are factors that limit their access to the facts:

1) The artificial censorships -- the limitations of social contact, the comparatively meager time available in each day for paying attention to public affairs,

2) the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages and the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and

3) the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten our established routines.

Lippmann, Walter (2004.) Public Opinion. Public Domain.

How is this trickle of messages from the outside affected by the stored up images, the preconceptions, and prejudices which interpret, fill them out, and in their turn powerfully direct the play of our attention, and our vision itself?

How is the individual person the limited by messages from outside? 

How is that person’s opinion formed into a pattern of stereotypes that identify with his own interests as he conceives them?

How are opinions crystallized into what is called “Public Opinion”? 

How is National Will, a Group Mind, a Social Purpose, or whatever you choose to call it, formed?

Thoughts?