christopherhildreth

Oscar Wilde is quoted as saying, “Everything popular is wrong”. I tend to think he was correct. The context we find ourselves in today’s world exists on the ebb and flow of popular thought. Information overload has helped to destabilize the prediction process of the masses. Where once we could statistically predict certain outcomes of certain situations, now we are hit with a sharp shift in the population’s attitude about a given issue or occurrence.

We saw early on in the Presidential primary coverage that exit polls and projected winners were going to be far more difficult to decipher than had previously been thought.

It seemed the country’s collective psyche was transforming right in front of us. Things we had been told were so by statisticians were proven wrong, and in an instant our perception of candidates and their ability to lead changed. Those who were the front runners and the supposed party candidates suddenly found themselves gasping for footing amid a flood of popular anxiety.

Is “everything popular…wrong”? In many cases it seems so, but we cannot be against something because everyone else is for it. We must be people who examine issues and look at the substance of a debate. We must weigh the information we have in front of us objectively.

Will we make mistakes? Most certainly, but they will be mistakes made not because we did not have courage enough to pour over decisions, but mistakes made for incomplete or inaccurate information. Our decisions define us as both people and as a nation. When we choose based on what we ourselves know and believe, we step into a realm that has been paved for us and trod over by many generations before. If we choose based on the tabloids, we take the sacrifice of those generations for granted and cheapen the cause of liberty in our age.

This entry was posted on February 15, 2008 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Cultural Ideas, Influence. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.