The Power of Popular Opinion

I think that question number 80 from The Fountainhead Socratic Seminar is both significant and applicable to American society today. The question asks about the play No Skin Off Your Nose that Wynand and Dominique went to see, which left them both perturbed. The play was portrayed to be hilariously awful, as if written by a child. The disturbing part for both Dominique and Wynand, however, was that the rest of the audience thoroughly enjoyed it. They all laughed at the same parts, were delighted with the script, and praised it highly afterward. The question asks what the danger is in such a play. Knowing, as the reader does, that Ellsworth Toohey is the original advocate of that play, everything falls into place. Toohey has a reputation for manipulation. He delights in controlling public opinion, even to the point of brainwash. In fact, this play had been first presented in a society of writers that Toohey sponsored. When he realized how bad the script was, Ellsworth made it his personal mission to make the play a success, by posting raving reviews about it in his newspaper column. Because the public esteemed his opinion, they all felt obliged to go see this terrific play, but more than that, they felt obliged to like it. One was not seen as intellectual or ‘in the know’ if they had not enjoyed and gleaned some deeper meaning from this play, which in reality was just gibberish.

This idea of opinion manipulation reminded me very much of our society today. We often talk highly of a person, TV show, movie, or book because someone respectable or a large number of people have already done so. A great example of this happened a few weeks ago when I turned on the TV and discovered that the popular reality show Amish Mafia was on. While I do not have a particular personal interest in anything concerning either the Amish or the Mafia, I felt like I had to watch this show, purely because so I would be in the know, since many people had been talking about it. In reality, the show is terrible. The acting is poor and the plot line is transparent. But saying so takes guts, since so many people are avid followers of it. This is my problem with today’s society. Everyone has become so worried about what others think that they are afraid to have their own opinion on anything. There are a multitude of people who are content to adopt someone else’s opinion to avoid the conflict that comes when their ideas do not agree with those of others. And so, just like Toohey was able to convince a whole city full of people to enjoy a terrible play, celebrities, politicians, writers and scholars decide what movies, books, and TV shows the public will talk about today. My thought is this: what if, for once, we dared to have a different opinion from those around us? What if we liked something unpopular? The world might just change for the better.