On Public Opinion

(The Rajaram College, Kolhapur)

Of all the forces that influence human affairs and regulate great movements of history, there is none so powerful as what is called ‘Public Opinion.’ Every revolution, whether in social or in religious affairs, has sought the sanction of public opinion, and even scientific inventions and discoveries have had to go through a period of apprenticeship until finally they became part of the general opinion of the public. Old, decayed ideas have often lived beyond their time simply because they found protection behind the barricades of public opinion; and new ideas have always had to try their strength against these barricades. Orthodoxy of all kinds, in its losing fight, has posed as public opinion, and heterodox concepts, in metaphysics as well as hygiene, have been ridiculed and jeered at as long as they did not fit in well with public opinion. The wise philosopher who shocked current public opinion, and declared that both Reality and Knowledge were objective and that men were merely fooling themselves with untrue opinions, had to drink the cup of poison. And again, the man who dared to say, against the public opinion of his time, that the earth moved round the sun, was considered dangerous.

Moral ideas much more than any other have always tended ultimately to crystallize in public opinion, and thereby to outlive their proper share of validity and currency. The Good and the I Right have been, in every country and time, confused with popular belief and popular custom. What the public does and thinks has persistently been held up as the moral standard in India. ‘Custom’ was regarded as an authority higher than the Shastras. "When five persons speak, the Almighty speaks," has not been a mere epigram with us, but an accepted principle of distinguishing the True from the False, and the Right from the Wrong.

And this strange exaltation of public opinion cannot be said to illustrate an exceptional trait of ancient Indian culture; it is a common human trait observable even in the ultra-modern democracies of the West. In fact, what is a democracy if not a form of government in which public opinion is virtually the highest authority, and the rulers are theoretically supposed to be responsible to public opinion? Even the Dictators of this century can hope to sit on their invisible throne, and wear their invisible crown, provided they successfully placate and satisfy public opinion.

And yet, what is this thing called ‘Public Opinion’? Can it be defined? Can its origin be determined? And in the light of psychological analysis, can its ultimate value be determined? But why these round-about questions? Let us be candid and ask: Is ‘Public Opinion’ really ‘public’ ‘opinion’, or something else passed as such like a counterfeit coin?

It is a characteristic trait of ‘public opinion’ that it is hopelessly fickle. True, it often shows a surprising tenacity and refusal to alter; but equally often it manifests a fickleness that defies all description. The history of the world is replete with instances of heroes who awoke one morning to find themselves victims of public indictment, if not wrath. Those who play the game of leading the masses have always to bear in mind how there is no knowing when the cart may refuse to be drawn by the horse, and begin to drag the horse, instead! The pages of history have been in several places stained by the blood of great humanitarians and benefactors whom for no intelligible reason the public suddenly misunderstood and killed. The politics of India is perhaps more strewn than any other field with remarkable examples of the fickleness of public opinion. There was a time when Mrs. Besant commanded the highest reverence of crores of Indian people; but within a few years’ time the halo round her name disappeared, and when she died, she died unsung and unknown except by her Theosophical devotees and the higher intelligentsia of the country. The magic rise of the Ali Brothers into unbounded fame and their dramatic fall is still fresh in everybody’s memory. Bepin Chandra Pal of Bengal did not die as great a hero as he was in the hectic days of the Bengal Partition. Even Mr. Gandhi, who has had the fate of the Indian continent in his hand for several years and has shouldered the burden of thirty-five millions of people may, if Fate so chooses, lapse into public disfavour and unpopularity. The public adores a statesman one year and repudiates him the next. In the hour of the famous Armistice, three men were extraordinarily popular with the public of their own countries–Clemenceau the Frenchman, Lloyd George the Englishman, and Woodrow Wilson the American. But all three toppled down their thrones before long. The public is thus notoriously fickle in its opinions, and its likes and dislikes.

Does not this strange phenomenon of the unstableness of public opinion reveal both its psychology and its moral worth? I think it does. Let us bear in mind that we speak of public ‘opinion,’ not ‘truth.’ Let us also remind ourselves of the distinction which Socrates pointed out between ‘truth’ which is the product of patient, discriminating, rational judgment, and ‘opinion’ which is the child of fancy, sentiment, prejudice and delusion. This would enable us at once to remark that behind public opinion there is at work, not clear penetrating thought, but rather a nebulous mass of sentiments, prejudices, feelings, and emotions. Public opinion does not represent what the people ‘think’ but only what the people ‘feel’–why they hardly know. People base their opinion not on information or knowledge, but on whims and caprices. In fact, it is very often difficult to separate public opinion from popular prejudice, intolerance and organised propaganda. Public opinion does not necessarily coincide with the opinion of a given member of a society. He would be hopelessly wrong who would suppose that individual citizens first inform themselves thoroughly on some public question like the Sarada Act, or the Temple Entry Bill, think about it, study every aspect of the problem, reach some common conclusions, and announce these as the ‘public opinion.’

If it was so, many of the world’s ills would never arise. But the sad fact is that the average man does very little independent thinking about vital public questions. He has neither the competence, nor the will, nor the time to do this. The average citizen has to do quite a good deal of thinking about his personal affairs. That keeps his mind sufficiently engaged, and naturally when public questions are concerned he is only too glad to let some other fellow do the job of hard thinking. Even If you offer the average man the liberty to think for himself, he would, in ninety-nine cases out of hundred, throw it away instead of enjoying it. Mr. Shaw very convincingly brings this out in his Preface to The Apple Cart. So far from wishing to exercise his political initiative, the ordinary man in the economic only wants to know what to do," and is always prepared to accept as an authority the man who has the courage to tell him.

As with actions so with opinions. Tell the ordinary man what to believe and he will be honestly grateful to you for having saved him the bother of thinking. This is why religion has always been man’s most popular institution. The public is always anxious to get its ideas, opinions and beliefs ready-made from somebody, as it gets its boots and clothes from the shop-windows.

This is the psychology of ‘public opinion.’ The masses of the people swallow the opinion of a few leaders, and they voice it forth as their own opinion. They obey the few and delude themselves into supposing that they have an opinion. Obedience, truly speaking, is not an inborn human characteristic. The child is not naturally obedient. In fact, it reacts to the parental order with suspicion and unwillingness. But institutions like the family and the school combine and make the child acquire the habit of obedience; and by the time the average boy has grown to manhood this habit becomes the law of the greater part of his life. The majority of individuals, therefore, who constitute the public habitually consent to be ruled by the few in all matters, so that their opinion is hardly anything better than the echo of what the few believe. It is usual to talk of the public ‘mind.’ Many a measure is opposed by Government in the Indian Legislatures on the ground that the public mind is not sufficiently prepared for them. Leaders are always heard to boast that they know the public mind. Psychologists tell us that there exists a collective mind of the people as distinct from the individual minds of the individuals that constitute the people. The assumption of the existence of the public ‘mind’ undoubtedly facilitates the discussion of several social and political problems; and yet, we have to ask ourselves the question: "Does the public mind think just in the same way, and by the same laws as the individual mind?" If all quibbling and hair-splitting was set aside, the only correct answer to this question would appear to be that the public mind does not think–at least not in the sense in which a given concrete person thinks. We are told by psychologists that when an individual joins a crowd, a great part of his analytical and critical powers of thought evaporate. The group or the crowd is not as critical as the persons constituting it severally and individually are. The rational and the intellectual calibre of a crowd has to be always measured by the lowest common denominator. Pursuing this line of argument we may arrive at the conclusion that the public ‘mind’ is incapable of thinking, that its thoughts are not really its own but merely represent a nebulous accretion of ideas that have been current for hundreds of years, and that what is known as public ‘opinion’ is not, in the last analysis, the opinion ‘of’ the public but the opinion manufactured ‘for’ the public and skillfully imposed upon the public by a few persons whose interest it is to win public favour and support. When we say that Mahatma Gandhi is a great leader, what we truly mean is that his individual opinion with marvelous quickness becomes public opinion–that he forms and expresses ideas on political questions which crores of Indian people immediately accept as their own. The personal opinion of an individual is like a fountain springing from the depths of his mind. Public opinion, on the contrary, falls from the top downwards.

If the reader suspects that this brief treatment of the genesis of public opinion is intended to disparage its value, he has guessed correctly. I do wish to aver that the ethical estimate of public opinion ought to be obvious to anyone who correctly understands how it comes to be formed. The value of a product can be deduced from its process. Public opinion is always manufactured by one individual or a few individuals, and it can never claim greater finality or infallibility than the opinion of a single mind.

It may perhaps be thought that in countries where the machinery of Government is largely democratic and the general standard of education has attained a very high level, public opinion must be intelligent and independent. But this is doubtful. On the contrary, there is room to suppose that, in regard to the elevation of public opinion, democracy defeats its own end. Universal franchise makes the vote universal, not the thinking behind it. On the contrary, the scramble for votes and the warfare of election bring into existence opposing party leaders who are interested in preventing people from thinking. And again, the natural human apathy for original and independent thinking increases a hundredfold when democratic government, makes most of the public problems extremely complicated. A hundred years ago, when the political, social and economic problems of India were comparatively simpler than they are today, it was not impossible for the average citizen to study them and to form his opinion of them, if he had the desire to do so. But now the situation is entirely different–not only in India, but everywhere in the world. No man or woman of average capacity and industry can hope to become personally familiar with all the problems of a modern nation. Should the Congress contest the elections, or should it stand aloof from them? Or again, supposing the Congress fought the elections and secured a majority in all the legislative bodies, should it or should it not accept office? The plain truth is that the average Indian does not know anything about it, and cannot hope to know so much about it as to be able to form a decided opinion. With the result that the public accepts the opinion of some one leader as valid–not on the merits of the question, mind, but rather on the irrelevant grounds of sentiment, tradition, hero-worship etc. And the truth remains that some one individual or a few individuals determine public opinion.

While modern inventions have on the one hand brought to the individual seeker after Truth greater opportunities of profiting by the wisdom and achievements of his fellow-men, they have, on the other hand, tended to reduce public opinion to a matter of finance. The printing machine, the postal service, the telegraph, the telephone, the film, the radio–all these have made it possible for one individual or a group of individuals to bring his or their ideas to the eyes and ears of millions within a few hours. Any article of merchandise can today be sold on a stupendous scale if widely advertised. And selling ideas can be done by the same process as selling a tooth-paste. A famous American politician is said to have once remarked that "the man who has enough money to hire a hall is the man who makes public opinion." Democracy is supposed to be a form of government in which all men have an equal share in directing and controlling the affairs of the State. In fact, however, it degenerates into a form of government in which the millionaire can manufacture public opinion and, purchasing the public vote, become the ruler of his country. Democracy means government by public opinion. But public opinion can be moulded by propaganda; and propaganda is after all a matter of finance.

I started by saying that public opinion has very little intrinsic value, because the average man or woman is naturally devoid of a genuine desire and readiness to think. And my treatment of the subject has now revealed to us another, and a more ugly, truth–that even supposing that the average citizen had that desire and readiness, he is not allowed to enjoy the liberty of thought in our modern world. All the democracies of today, and also the Dictators claim that they have the sanction of public opinion. But they only show one side of the picture. They are careful not to divulge how strenuously they work to manufacture favourable public opinion and to stifle opposition. Criticism is silenced, free opinion suppressed, dissentients persecuted. The press becomes the pen of the State, and the radio its voice. Not only in India, which is admittedly under foreign domination, but even in countries which are supposed to be free nations, Truth as such today scarcely exists. There is only the Communist truth, Nazi truth, Fascist truth etc. Mr. Joad despairingly remarks: "Over two-thirds of the so-called civilised world of today, men’s minds have been sent to prison, and their rulers hold the keys of their cells."

If my purpose was to draw a picture of the grim process of corruption by which artificial public opinion is being created in the present day democracies and dictatorships, it would not have been hard for me to quote figures after figures to show that in Germany, Italy, England, Ireland, Russia, Japan, millions of pounds are yearly spent to manufacture a particular type of public opinion, and thousands of men and women are sent to gaol or shot down simply because they impede this manufacture. But such a picture is scarcely needed to emphasise the three points which emerge sufficiently clearly from the foregoing considerations,–viz., (1) that public opinion is not the product of any serious and deep thought on the part of the public, (2) that it is largely the result of popular incapacity of thought, sentiment, prejudice and slavish acceptance of ideas forced upon the people by some one individual or a few individuals, and (3) that it can be made or marred by those who have the necessary means and instruments at their disposal.

The inference is inevitable that the moral worth of public opinion is negligible, that its finality cannot be taken for granted, and that its authority can never exceed that of a personal opinion. Vox Populi Vox Dei! We do not know who invented this lie. Possibly some demagogue who had succeeded in filling the public mind with his own ideas, and humoured the public by calling its voice divine, chuckling to himself all the while at the facility with which he was indirectly assuming divine attributes. Public opinion is not the considered opinion of many, it is only an opinion held by many. It possesses very little qualitative value; it has only a quantitative strength. Opposition to public opinion or indifference to it cannot therefore be a sin. He who dares to flout or oppose it, or to change it, has every right to do so. In fact, strange as it may seem, the public often likes the man who flouts its opinion. A Bernard Shaw usually makes a fortune by flinging insulting epigrams at the public, and by telling them that they are a pack of fools. And apart from this morbid fondness on the part of the public for insolent genius, it remains true that all the founders of great religions, political faiths, and social traditions, started on their career by challenging public opinion. History is replete with examples of how the brute of public opinion hunted, maimed, and devoured benevolent souls who honestly intended to serve their brethren. But history also shines with examples of strong, tenacious minds who resolved to revolutionise current ideas and institutions, and, by dint of their sincerity, persistence, and suffering, ultimately achieved a complete conquest of public opinion, As long as the miracles of such lives happen, there is hope for civilisation!