Many are the works of genius that would have been incinerated if a roll of opinion had been called.

I am sure you have had the experience of making up your own mind and then discovering, on the evening news of the same day,  that only 23.6 percent of people agree with you. Ought you to be depressed or disconcerted by this alarmingly exact dissection of the collective brain? Only if you believe that a squadron of undertalented but overpaid pseudo-scientists have truly and verifiably arrived at this conclusion.

The first thing to notice, surely, is that these voyages into the ocean of the public mind are chartered and commissioned by wealthy and powerful organizations, who do not waste their money satisfying mere curiosity.  The tactics are the same as those of market research; the point is not to interpret the world but to change it.  A tendency to favor one product over another is something not to be passively discovered and observed but to be nurtured, encouraged and exploited.

From Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens

HKO comments:

An idea is neither right or wrong or good or bad based on a percent of people who agree with it.  Nor is a man ‘honest’ or ‘smart’ just because a majority of the people think he is.

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