If we revisit the example of the “quick public opinion shift” on same sex marriage — which was basically an implausible idea 15 years ago — we might ask: why did the activist push for it became so fast and furious? Couldn’t the idea withstand real public discourse and stand on its own merits without extreme public shaming of anyone who had doubts? Couldn’t it have come about through the legislative process without an activist judge overturning the referendum results of an entire state? Or Supreme Court justices claiming that those opposed were filled with “animus?”
The answer is a resounding “No.” In a previous post, I mentioned how availability cascades — opinion cascades, particularly on ideas that seem implausible — rely on a great deal of propaganda and agitation, through political correctness. They are very fragile things. The survival of such opinion cascades requires a lot of tweaking and teasing and discipline and balancing acts by those pushing them, including activists, politicians, celebrities, academics, media moguls. This is the way you get masses mobilized to pretend they’re impressed with a naked emperor’s new clothes. It’s all about conditioning.
The process has a limited life span, and must be applied to public policy before the window of opportunity closes. Polls actually showed that public opinion for same sex marriage had already peaked by the time the Supreme Court made it a done deal in the Obergefell decision last year. But we can’t really know what people believe when the environment for free speech on such an issue is so hostile that most who disagree would be loath to express it.
You may recall how Brendan Eich was forced to resign as CEO of Mozilla, essentially for a thought crime. When activists discovered that Eich had made a private donation to the Proposition 8 referendum in California to preserve the legal definition of marriage as one-man and one-woman, they “outed” him and set him up for a virtual public hanging. The point was not only to get him to recant — which, to his credit, he did not do — but to warn the public that free exchange of ideas on this issue was forbidden.
Through propaganda and agitation, you get behavior modification on a mass scale. Yesterday it was same sex marriage. Today it is transgenderism. Tomorrow? It could be absolutely anything at all.
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