Public Opinion — Chapter XI The Enlisting of Interest

1. 1. The human mind does not passively record impressions but creatively reworks them into personal expressions through poetic faculty.
2. 2. We tend to personalize quantities and dramatize relations, treating social movements, economic forces, and public opinion as persons.
3. 3. Public affairs are made interesting by translating them into moving pictures that allow identification and emotional engagement.
4. 4. Visualization often captures stimulus and result but caricatures internal desires, which intuition perceives better.
5. 5. Pictures are the surest way to convey an idea, but the idea becomes fully our own only through empathy—identifying with some aspect of the picture.
6. 6. Sexual passion and fighting are the two easiest forms of exercise for audience engagement, with a fight about sex being the most universally appealing.
7. 7. To make distant situations interesting, they must be translated into pictures that allow taking sides and identification with a struggle.
8. 8. Popular taste demands a drama that starts with realistic enough settings for plausible identification and ends with romantic enough outcomes to be desirable.
9. 9. Stereotypes of what is true, good, or evil are fixed by earlier experiences and carried into later judgments, limiting pioneering artists.
10. 10. Pioneering artists like Sinclair Lewis succeed when they project what many people are obscurely trying to say, establishing a new stereotype.
11. 11. Political ideologies follow the same rules: they start with a plausible analysis of real evil but cross into unverifiable promises of a happy ending.