PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

difference between Frege and Peano, or between Sassetta's earlier and
later periods, may be good stanch Republicans at another level of
appeal, and when they are starving and afraid, indistinguishable from
any other starving and frightened person. No wonder that the magazines
with the large circulations prefer the face of a pretty girl to any
other trade mark, a face, pretty enough to be alluring, but innocent
enough to be acceptable. For the "psychic level" on which the stimulus
acts determines whether the public is to be potentially a large or a
small one.
6
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 scanty 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.
PART III - STEREOTYPES
CHAPTER VI
STEREOTYPES
1
Each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth's surface,
moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few
intimately. Of any public event that has wide effects we see at best
only a phase and an aspect. This is as true of the eminent insiders
who draft treaties, make laws, and issue orders, as it is of those who
have treaties framed for them, laws promulgated to them, orders given
at them. Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach
of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe.
They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have
reported and what we can imagine.
Yet even the eyewitness does not bring back a naÈve picture of the
scene. [Footnote: _E. g. cf._ Edmond Locard, _L'EnquÍte Criminelle
et les MÈthodes Scientifiques._ A great deal of interesting material has
been gathered in late years on the credibility of the witness, which