CALFORNIA CHAPTER I PUBLIC OPINION The will of the people shall be the law of the land. This is the fundamental assumption of democracy. And nowhere more than in the United States has this assumption been accepted and revered. Nowhere, until recently, has public opinion held greater sway. It behooves us, therefore, to pay some attention to this force which like the current from a mighty dynamo drives on the wheels of state. Is this ruler of mankind the quintessence of pure reason or is it a great compound of passion, prejudice and weakness? Is it the wisdom of the masses or is it their folly as well? This is a grave question. That public opinion has often been right, more often, perhaps, than the opinion of any ruling clique or class, the history of both Great Britain and the United States would seem to indicate. But is it always and infallibly right, or is it more often wrong? At a time when the world is crushed beneath the burden of a great war, a war acquiesced in and supported by public opinion in all the countries concerned, one hesitates to answer with an unqualified affirmative. When public opinion but recently arrived at a conclusion that made possible a catastrophe without parallel in the world's history, it would seem that somewhere, somehow, an element of irrationality must have crept in. Whence came the element of irrationality? Or rather, since we are not concerned with the historical question, what factors tend to distort the judgment of whole nations? What are the difficulties in the way of the formation of a rational public opinion? Among the difficulties that stand in the way of the formation of such an opinion are (1) certain personal defects common to the great mass of humanity, (2) the existence of numerous and powerful propaganda agencies, and (3) certain defects or limitations seemingly inherent in the daily press. A rational judgment can be made only on the basis of facts. Nine tenths of court procedure is devoted to their discovery. The chief work of the scientist, without which all his other work is impossible, is their ascertainment. The main purpose of the credit and research bureaus of great banking institutions is their collection. Facts, facts, facts-without these, nothing. And yet facts are among the hardest things in the world to ferret out. Especially is this true in the field of public affairs, for to practically every public question the individual brings a set of preconceived ideas, a bundle of prejudices, a bias. These ideas are not the result of the study of a given situation; the situation is usually studied in the light of these ideas. That each of us possesses these biases becomes apparent upon a moment's reflection. Two incidents will serve to illustrate. An election for the office of comptroller is occurring in your city. It comes out that one candidate is a Roman Catholic, and the other is not. What is the effect of that piece of information upon your thinking? The fact is that a man's religion could have no possible bearing upon his fitness to hold the particular office in question. And yet has not the knowledge concerning his religion consciously or unconsciously affected your processes of thought? If you are a Roman Catholic, are you not more kindly disposed toward him? If you are a subscriber to the "Menace," do you not feel doubtful about him? A headline comes out in the morning paper: "Miners strike; coal famine feared." is your reaction? If you are a member of the middle class, is not your inclination, with little or no investigation of the particular case, to place the blame on the miners and hope "they get what is coming to them"? If you are a member of a labor union that has just finished a severe strike, does not your sympathy go out to the miners? Does not your conversation consist primarily in “damning the interests"? What Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, will have to admit that our thinking is very often colored by an emotional reaction. We will have to admit that very frequently we fail to suspend judgment long enough to ascertain the facts on the basis of which alone a really rational judgment can be reached, and that we make up our minds on the basis of our preconceptions. In part these preconceptions come to us with our early training; in part they are the results of our environment. What matters is not that they develop within us but that at no time do we analyse and weigh them in order to separate the truth from the falsehood. Instead, we act upon them blindly and frequently build for ourselves conceptions of the world at considerable variance with reality. Such was the process of thought of those who in the middle ages insisted that the earth was flat; such is the process of thought of many at the present day. Worst of all we pass on these erroneous pictures of the world to our children and they become in many cases the basis of action for succeeding generations. Our failure to analyse these "stereotypes," these conceptions of the world built upon fancy rather than fact, the product of the emotions rather than reason, is readily understood. In the first place, it is easier to accept than to analyse, and man is by nature intellectually lazy. In the second place, these stereotypes make the world seem a more comfortable place. They are a defence of our position in society. When we accept them we know what's what. We feel at home in the world. We fit in. If we once began to analyse our opinions, who knows what might happen? Some of them might be false, and that would hurt our pride. There might be some questions to which we could find no answer, upon which we would have to suspend judgment, and that would be very annoying indeed. Not until we are willing to adopt the same attitude |