Quotation of the Day: Fickle Public Opinion

In a sense, public opinion is like one of those mountain snow accumulations…. As snow builds up, the likelihood that the whole drift will come crashing down the mountain steadily increases. Finally, as the ultimate snowflake falls on top of the drift, the weight is now too much too be borne, and the whole drift comes down. Major changes in public opinion tend to take the same form. A very large number of books, articles, and lectures which appear to have no great effect nevertheless prepare the way. Eventually a critical mass is reached and what appears to be an overnight change of opinion occurs.

That’s from Gordon Tullock’s “Foreword” to J. Ronnie Davis’s 1971 book The New Economics and the Old Economists (source: Don Boudreaux at Café Hayek)

Public opinion is fundamentally driven by mawkishness and unctuousness.

Public opinion, today, can be characterized by several dominant cognitive biases; particularly, the comfort of the crowd, appeal to tradition, appeal to majority, appeal to experts and appeal to the emotion.

There hardly have been any critical thinking involved in what have been deemed as ‘cerebral’ discussions among conventional experts. Debates mostly revolve around the acceptance of current circumstances, conditions and methodology, where variances of ideas mostly deal with interpretation of events and or on personality issues and or semantical dimensions (mostly bordering on the abstract).

This means that public opinion has been largely influenced by the way elites or how the intellectual class think and project on the issues.

Yet questioning on the validity and the biases of the sources of information, the socio-economic political theories and or the philosophical underpinnings of the current institutional framework would be considered as heresy that risks ostracism for the expositor. Thus, conformity and social acceptance are prioritized at the expense of reality which drives the popular mindset.

And that’s why politics has mainly been centered on the manipulation of public opinion.

Nevertheless, times have been changing.

Real time connectivity has been encouraging on more critical thinking. A diffusion of critical thinking could influence a shift in public opinion through a change in the direction of the way the intellectual group thinks.

Structural changes are happening at the margins. So will public opinion.