Elucidating Excerpts: Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” (1922)
Elucidating Excerpts is a new series for paid subscribers that will feature salient excerpts from an array of illuminating books on topics such as propaganda, social engineering, consent manufacturing, mass control, neuropsychology, philosophy, menticide, narcissism, psychopathy, totalitarianism, genocide, democide, depopulation, war, the intellimafia, psychological warfare, and whatever else I find fascinating, inspiring, relevant, or instructive as I read new books or revisit touchstone works.
These passages are intended to expand your knowledge, deepen your understanding, and whet your appetite for the full texts. If you are a bibliophile and avid quote collector like me, you will especially appreciate this series.
I can’t think of a more perfect book than Walter Lippmann’s foundational Public Opinion to launch a series aimed at exposing the trickery used to manipulate the public into accepting absurdities and committing atrocities.
Public Opinion (1922)
by Walter Lippmann
Paperback, Hardcover, Kindle, & Audiobook
It is invisible, intangible, and inaudible, but it has the power to fell millions.
It makes people consume harmful products, ingest toxins, hate outgroups, resist reason, murder strangers, and impale themselves on an idea.
Without it, nations could not war, tyrants could not genocide, cruelites could not enslave, bankers could not lucratize blood, and philanthropaths could not lure believers into committing seppuku.
It is how supranational entities, governments, propagandists, and their kapos and colluders condition people to violate their self-preservation instincts.
In his 1942 essay Looking Back on the Spanish War, George Orwell describes it as follows:
As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.
Sometimes called “consensus,” the dark scientific art of manufactured consent is historically known as public opinion, the forefathers of which are Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays.
Both men served in The Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, whose origins trace back to London’s Wellington House in 1913. For over a century, this group has been quietly deploying persuasion techniques to social-engineer the majority into accepting everything from wars to economic destruction of the middle class.
In his book Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism, Christopher Daly says Lippmann “may have been the most influential American of the twentieth century never to have held elected office.”
In what became known as the Lippmann–Dewey Debate, John Dewey—himself primarily responsible for the contemporary indoctrication system in which students “fail to acquire basic academic skills and knowledge”—felt1 Lippmann’s views led him to “retreat from democratic ideals and to justify the manufacturing of consent by managing public opinion by a technocratic elite.”
Lippmann’s contemptuous attitude toward ordinary people is evident in this passage from Public Opinion:
The mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable, much more considerable there is reason to think than we generally suppose. Thus a wide popular appeal is circulated among persons who are mentally children or barbarians, people whose lives are a morass of entanglements, people whose vitality is exhausted, shut-in people, and people whose experience has comprehended no factor in the problem under discussion.
In 1908, Lippmann’s mentor and Fabian Society leader Graham Wallas2 wrote in Human Nature in Politics:
Popular elections, it is said, may work fairly well as long as those questions are not raised which cause the holders of wealth and industrial power to make full use of their opportunities. But if the rich people in any modern state thought it worth their while, in order to secure a tariff, or legalize a trust, or oppose a confiscatory tax, to subscribe a third of their income to a political fund, no Corrupt Practices Act yet invented would prevent them from spending it. If they did so, there is so much skill to be bought, and the art of using skill for the production of emotion and opinion has so advanced, that the whole condition of political contests would be changed for the future. No existing party, unless it enormously increased its own fund or discovered some other new source of political strength, would have any chance of permanent success.
It seems the Fabian cruelites and their protégés have nearly succeeded in achieving their agenda as Nick Hudson observes in this penetrating speech:
Through constant and massive funding and multigenerational consistency of objectives, Fabianization of the Western world is all but complete.
Although Lippmann, Bernays, Wallas, and other formative mind-manipulators lacked a clear picture of the cognitive landscape that would arrive with advances in neuroscience before the turn of the millennium, the mass control strategies they outline in their seminal texts remain shockingly effective today. People may not be as neurologically susceptible to their methods as once imagined, but the combination of the cognitively vulnerable and the cowardly conformists creates enough societal momentum to propel detrimental policies forward despite the cries of the courageous.
Like magic tricks, the power of these tools to deceive dissolves with awareness. If everyone memorized Hudson’s Razor, for example, the longconners wouldn’t be able to continue corralling us toward one-world tyranny through global terror campaigns:
Hudson’s Razor, stating that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admitting only global solutions (3) amid suppression of dissent, is definitively a scam.
The following excerpts from Public Opinion will further equip you to quickly recognize the cruelites and their PR firms’ tactics whenever they are deployed.
Elucidating Excerpts
Note: Page numbers below are from the Standard Publications Inc. 2007 edition. Emphases are mine for easier skimming.
