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Public Opinion
Posted by michaelvdg in Uncategorized.
Apr 9th, 2007 | 13 responses
Apr 9th, 2007 | 13 responses
An interesting quote:
“There is no such thing as spontaneous public opinion. It all has to be manufactured from a Center of Conviction and Energy.”
- Beatrice Webb
Any thoughts on this?
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13 Responses to “Public Opinion”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Democracy simply does not work.” – Kent Brockman.
This is a reflection on sociological experiments on group dyanamics. A group of strangers in a room, not yet speaking to one another, will assume group attitudes according to what the experimenters’ planted conspirator adds to the mix. People are impressionable, gullible and easily manipulated.
Sometimes, there are surprises, however, thank heavens.
The Russians proved that you cannot control the masses…..twice. Best you can do is herd them in a general direction for awhile, before they bolt the other way.
Well, then what creates “a Center of Conviction and Energy”? It doesn’t seem to be a very useful definition.
Also seems to me events like invasions and catastrophes seem to certainly create a very quick set of public opinions.
Public opinion is almost always spontaneous. The masses do not think; they ‘feel’, then justify their biases, and biases are not the result of cogitation, therefore spontaneity rules.
Okay, let me weigh in as well – I deliberately refrained from commenting on the quote in the post, because I was, and still am, wondering what you all think about it, but here’s my 2 cents.
Beatrice Webb was a socialist. She believed very strongly that government could make society. She wanted to influence people from the top down.
In essence, to me, the quote is quite… worrisome. At least, if people agree with it and want to put it into practice. Several ideologies have put it into practice / adopted this view, even those ideologies that are quite the opposite in many ways of socialism. An example: neoconservatism.
If one would be a neoconservative and would agree with this quote, as most conservatives essentially do, the Center of Conviction and Energy is the government, more specifically, the executive.
The background explains a bit of the paranoia the qu. might have, but it’s still divorced from the reality that has been America, and likely most other nations.
ahh, ok, I’m starting to see the point of the quote….
I think the quote is mostly right, but it would be wrong to say there could be only one Center of Conviction and Energy, or even just a small number of them. I think one of the best aspects of freedom of information, speech and assembly is that it allows many such Centers to be created. This should disperse the power of any one Center to affect public opinion.
By limiting freedoms of ideas, etc, one could limit the number of Centers, but no one has yet come up with a form of government that can shut out all external influence. The USSR were not able to keep their population content indefinitely in the face of western advancement, and their own memory of better times. I think the vast difference between what the government is saying and what the rest of the world is saying causes a large amount of stress. Communism, and any other authoritarian regime I can think of, doesn’t really have a pressure release valve, so it just builds up until the system breaks.
I think it might actually be useful to look at the administration’s current public opinion history as an attempt to engineer such a Center of Conviction that is now breaking down under its contradictions with other such Centers (Media, coherent Democratic opposition, UN, etc).
So I wouldn’t be worried by it. Maybe we should rewrite the saying: “A Center of Conviction and Energy and control some public opinion all of the time, or all of public opinion some of the time, but not all of public opinion all of the time.”
cosmo: would you find this idea to be of more concern if it stated that public emotion doesn’t occur spontaneously but is manufactured by a Center of Conviction and Energy? Because once on emotional response is stirred up, bias and opinion fall in line, no?
Change the language, change the course of the river:
My first thought on it resembles what Kevin H said. It is possible to have a center that manufactures the overwhelming majority of public opinion where a tyranny controls all of the methods of distributing information. But in today’s world controlling absolutely all information is virtually impossible.
However it would be best to end by quoting the typical response from most of those I’ve met who follow Fox News only and see what is made of it: “Baa-a-a-a-aah! Ba-a-a-ah!”.
Michael- Neoconservatism in this country is trying to do EXACTLY what you say Beatrice Webb thought should be done-Control from above. But they “say” they are what you describe.
The “neocons” attempt this with outrageous propaganda and other nefarious and treasonous methods of deception. Neoconservatism is NOT a legitimate American political philosophy. It is a media created fad. A fad that is clearly dying. The sooner dead the better.
CS: I just don’t buy into the idea that all thought can be controlled. Yes, most folks are lemmings, but were that true all the time 90% of massively hyped products would not fail, as they do now in retail. Same applies to public opinion.