The Public Opinion Detectors

Miscellany

The master no longer says: ‘You shall think as I do or you shall die’; he says: ‘You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property and all your power; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.’

–De Tocqueville

Thirty years ago Walter Lippman had already noted that the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements and that a revolution was taking place in the techniques of this manufacture. By now the techniques for creating consent have been so completely “improved,” that the question may seriously be raised: how genuine are the answers any public opinion poll can obtain?

The manipulation of public opinion is obvious enough, but its extent is hardly recognized. It has developed with the same speed as the mass communication industries themselves. The newspapers, magazines, radio, television and movies incessantly implant a pattern of thought into the minds of their customers and create a climate of feeling in which the ready-made opinions they deliver can thrive the most. Today, in consequence, it is quite possible to imagine a quasitotalitarian society in which the means of communication largely replace force as the apparatus of compulsion.

Opposition to established public opinion becomes increasingly difficult. The few means for expressing dissident ideas are as to the big communication industries as handicraft to automation. Moreover, people resent the very idea of disagreement. In his isolation and insecurity, modern man clings all the more to accepted opinions. To share the opinion of the nation” is to feel at least a measure of security. We approach the condition described by de Tocqueville in the passage at the head of this article: melt are unable or unwilling to take upon themselves the hardship of living as “strangers among their people.” They adapt themselves to the opinions they think they ought to have. Looking ahead, De Tocqueville drew a gloomy picture of the citizen in a modern democracy:

“Not only does he mistrust his strength, but he even doubts of his right; and he is very near acknowledging that he is in the wrong, when the greater number of his countrymen asserts that he is so. The majority do not need to force him; they convince him.”

Despite this manipulation of public opinion, the assumption is widely accepted that the better we can explore majority opinions the more perfect will be our democratic order. If a machine could be invented scientifically to register all opinions and announce the majority opinion in each case—a Public Opinion Detector—many people would acclaim such an invention as the greatest success of our democracy.

This Public Opinion Detector would turn out to be a close relation to the lie detector about which Murray Hausknecht wrote, in a recent DISSENT, that it stem...