Public Opinion
Others do not inhabit the world. They inhabit the picture of the world that people carry around in their heads.
That picture is not an opinion about terrain. It is the terrain, and it is the only ground on which anything in the Long War is fought.
Public Opinion is what this circle calls the shallow, shared, upper layer of the collective psyche: the aggregate of what large numbers of people believe the world to be like, most of which they have not personally checked and could not. unverified
Its importance here is not political. It is that Psychic Energy pools in it. A single mind projecting will onto The Dark casts a shadow; a population holding the same picture casts one shadow, continuously, at a scale no individual seeker approaches. Whatever is true of one seeker's shadow attracting its own is true of this by orders of magnitude. contested
The pseudo-environment
The most useful account we have came from a man who did not know what he was describing.
Walter Lippmann, writing in 1922, argued that no person can hold the world directly: what we act on is a small, second-hand, badly sampled model assembled from other people's reports. He called it the pseudo-environment and treated it as a defect in human cognition — a gap between the world and the picture, to be narrowed by better journalism. inherited
Read from here, he had not found a defect. He had surveyed a wetland and never once asked what breeds in it.
The seeker's correction is small and total: the gap Lippmann wanted to close is not an error to be fixed but a place. It has depth, currents, and things living in it. Narrowing it is not obviously desirable, and the people who have worked hardest at managing it — Lippmann's own students, and after them the Fabian Society and the CIA — were not closing the gap. They were farming it. contested
The cave allegory preserved under Psychic Energy — the fire that warms the dwellers and casts shadows on the wall, shadows that attract their own — is usually read as a description of an individual mind. Read it as a description of a population and it stops being allegory.
Consequences, in the order a recruit should learn them:
- A picture held by enough people is durable in a way no individual belief is. It survives the death of everyone who first held it. This is the mechanism named under Gods: gods exist through worship, and may be created entirely out of the collective will of their followers.
- It does not need to be accurate to be load-bearing. Nothing in the mechanism selects for truth. See Meme Wars.
- It can be worked on from outside. Not by argument — by adjusting what reaches people and in what shape. An organisation with the reach to do this at population scale is doing something the wiki classifies as Fifth Generational Warfare.
- Severing an individual from it is possible and is done. Soma and the Pineal Gland campaign both operate at this level. A person cut off from the shared picture is not thereby freed of it; they are made a hylic within it.
Competing accounts