PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

3
But how is it that a vague idea so often has the power to unite deeply
felt opinions? These opinions, we recall, however deeply they may be
felt, are not in continual and pungent contact with the facts they
profess to treat. On the unseen environment, Mexico, the European war,
our grip is slight though our feeling may be intense. The original
pictures and words which aroused it have not anything like the force
of the feeling itself. The account of what has happened out of sight
and hearing in a place where we have never been, has not and never can
have, except briefly as in a dream or fantasy, all the dimensions of
reality. But it can arouse all, and sometimes even more emotion than
the reality. For the trigger can be pulled by more than one stimulus.
The stimulus which originally pulled the trigger may have been a
series of pictures in the mind aroused by printed or spoken words.
These pictures fade and are hard to keep steady; their contours and
their pulse fluctuate. Gradually the process sets in of knowing what
you feel without being entirely certain why you feel it. The fading
pictures are displaced by other pictures, and then by names or
symbols. But the emotion goes on, capable now of being aroused by the
substituted images and names. Even in severe thinking these
substitutions take place, for if a man is trying to compare two
complicated situations, he soon finds exhausting the attempt to hold
both fully in mind in all their detail. He employs a shorthand of
names and signs and samples. He has to do this if he is to advance at
all, because he cannot carry the whole baggage in every phrase through
every step he takes. But if he forgets that he has substituted and
simplified, he soon lapses into verbalism, and begins to talk about
names regardless of objects. And then he has no way of knowing when
the name divorced from its first thing is carrying on a misalliance
with some other thing. It is more difficult still to guard against
changelings in casual politics.
For by what is known to psychologists as conditioned response, an
emotion is not attached merely to one idea. There are no end of things
which can arouse the emotion, and no end of things which can satisfy
it. This is particularly true where the stimulus is only dimly and
indirectly perceived, and where the objective is likewise indirect.
For you can associate an emotion, say fear, first with something
immediately dangerous, then with the idea of that thing, then with
something similar to that idea, and so on and on. The whole structure
of human culture is in one respect an elaboration of the stimuli and
responses of which the original emotional capacities remain a fairly
fixed center. No doubt the quality of emotion has changed in the
course of history, but with nothing like the speed, or elaboration,
that has characterized the conditioning of it.