Public Opinion — Chapter XII Self-Interest Reconsidered

1. 1. The same story is interpreted differently by each listener because no two experiences are identical, and each person reenacts the story in their own way.
2. 2. The more mixed the audience, the more abstract the common factors in a story become, leading to greater variation in response.
3. 3. People conceive public affairs through their set patterns and recreate them with their own emotions, treating stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargement of their private life.
4. 4. A person's character varies according to circumstance, and there is no single self always at work; which self is engaged is crucial in forming public opinion.
5. 5. Modern psychology suggests that outward behavior is an equation between the resistance of the environment, repressed cravings, and the manifest personality.
6. 6. War legitimizes the impulse to kill, which then seeks vent not only on the enemy but on all previously hated persons and objects, and it takes time to regain self-control after war ends.
7. 7. Moral education must prepare characters for all situations people may face, either by offering patterns of conduct for every phase of life or by guaranteeing those situations never occur.
8. 8. The naive view of self-interest omits the cognitive function; men's ideas of all things and of themselves are not instinctive but acquired.
9. 9. James Madison argued that the most common and durable source of factions is the various and unequal distribution of property, but he did not claim that property determines opinions, only that differences in property cause differences in opinion.
10. 10. Economic determinism fails because men's economic interests are made up of their variable concepts of those interests; there is no fixed set of opinions that go with being an owner of a factory.
11. 11. Marx and Lenin went wrong because they thought men's economic position would irresistibly produce a clear conception of their interests, but events showed that even they themselves lacked such clarity.
12. 12. Human nature is not fatally constituted to crave or act in particular ways; cravings and actions are learned and can be learned differently in another generation.