Naming Our Impressions

A stereotype was originally known as a physical block of text used on a printing press. It wasn’t until the 1920s that it started to define people’s psychological habits. Stereotypes, “largely determine what group of facts we shall see and in what light we shall see them,” according to the writer Walter Lippman who crystallized the new definition. He says, “For the most part we do not first see and then define, we define first and then see. In the great booming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out of the clutter what is already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

He used the word to define a practice that has been going on as long as humans have been around. We categorize. But he makes the point that we’re not always doing it for ourselves. Often leaders or our culture do it for us, usually with symbols or metaphors. He says:

“Human qualities are vague and fluctuating. They are best remembered by a physical sign. And therefore the human qualities we tend to ascribe to the names of our impressions, themselves tend to be visualized in physical metaphors… The courage people display may be objectified as a rock, their purpose as a road, their doubts as forks of the road, their difficulties as ruts and rocks, their progress as a fertile valley.”

Naming impressions is a powerful way to spread an idea or motivate a crowd.

Soul Mining

For a guy who has sold hundreds of millions of records, it’s hard to believe that Bruce Springsteen sometimes goes years without writing a song. You’d assume he’s waking up with them in his head, as Howard Stern told him in a recent interview. Springsteen replied with an image for how the songwriting process works. He said:

“You’re soul mining. You’re down in the soul mines and just like any mine you’re chipping away looking for a vein. Now, I’ve been lucky, I’ve hit a lot of veins in my lifetime. But you do not know if you’re going to hit another one. Nobody knows and nobody can tell you. Until you do and then when you do, bang, you get on it, I’ve written records in 2 or 3 weeks after that.”

The image of being down in a dirty mine looking for a vein is a great way to motivate yourself to keep writing.

Righteousness Like A Mighty Stream​

Up against centuries of systematic oppression and faced with seemingly immovable public opinion, Martin Luther King Jr. had a superpower. He could distill heavy and complex subjects into simple ideas. As he faced a sea of over 250,000 faces desperate for hope at the Lincoln memorial in 1963, he gave them a visual metaphor:

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”

Relying on the words of a prophet from the Bible, Dr. King gave people an image to believe in. He cut through the complex situation they were all in. He named the impression.

Talk to you next week,

Dawson