PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

life is just one thing after another, to the specialist things are
highly individual. For a chauffeur, an epicure, a connoisseur, a
member of the President's cabinet, or a professor's wife, there are
evident distinctions and qualities, not at all evident to the casual
person who discusses automobiles, wines, old masters, Republicans, and
college faculties.
But in our public opinions few can be expert, while life is, as Mr.
Bernard Shaw has made plain, so short. Those who are expert are so on
only a few topics. Even among the expert soldiers, as we learned
during the war, expert cavalrymen were not necessarily brilliant with
trench-warfare and tanks. Indeed, sometimes a little expertness on a
small topic may simply exaggerate our normal human habit of trying to
squeeze into our stereotypes all that can be squeezed, and of casting
into outer darkness that which does not fit.
Whatever we recognize as familiar we tend, if we are not very careful,
to visualize with the aid of images already in our mind. Thus in the
American view of Progress and Success there is a definite picture of
human nature and of society. It is the kind of human nature and the
kind of society which logically produce the kind of progress that is
regarded as ideal. And then, when we seek to describe or explain
actually successful men, and events that have really happened, we read
back into them the qualities that are presupposed in the stereotypes.
These qualities were standardized rather innocently by the older
economists. They set out to describe the social system under which
they lived, and found it too complicated for words. So they
constructed what they sincerely hoped was a simplified diagram, not so
different in principle and in veracity from the parallelogram with
legs and head in a child's drawing of a complicated cow. The scheme
consisted of a capitalist who had diligently saved capital from his
labor, an entrepreneur who conceived a socially useful demand and
organized a factory, a collection of workmen who freely contracted,
take it or leave it, for their labor, a landlord, and a group of
consumers who bought in the cheapest market those goods which by the
ready use of the pleasure-pain calculus they knew would give them the
most pleasure. The model worked. The kind of people, which the model
assumed, living in the sort of world the model assumed, invariably
cooperated harmoniously in the books where the model was described.
With modification and embroidery, this pure fiction, used by
economists to simplify their thinking, was retailed and popularized
until for large sections of the population it prevailed as the
economic mythology of the day. It supplied a standard version of
capitalist, promoter, worker and consumer in a society that was
naturally more bent on achieving success than on explaining it. The