Message #94149

[Bianca]

Saturn decides what the majority is thinking, even when it isn’t

But the more closely we look at it, the idea of The Majority starts to shift and fluctuate, much like the idea of reality. Like other Saturn-governed concepts, it is less sacrosanct than we are led to believe.

For example, pollsters tell us that only a dinky little third of the American electorate is behind the Bush-Cheney cabal at this point, but one would never know it given the great honking sound and fury emanating from the candidates vying for the GOP torch. This contingent is given a huge amount of airtime, because, of course, the game is rigged; they represent agencies with oodles of money and connections to the seat of power. (3)

What does this scenario have to do with the workings of Saturn?

Skewed media positioning provides its beneficiaries with a patina of gravitas, Saturn’s ultimate prize. The lack of a level playing field of visibility has fed into a fictive construct that not only do most people find these individuals and their scripted sound bites eminently significant, but that most people see these views as normal. The intention is to make the most foolish, off-the-wall public figures achieve an aura of being the voice of majority opinion without it being literally true. (This phenomenon has a counterpart in the financial world. Stock analysts call it the “salience bias:” investors give high-profile information—even when it is obviously flawed—more weight than they give sound, lower-profile information.)

In our last column we described the tendency of individuals in the grip of a Saturn picture to disdain subjecting their story to statistical analysis (for example, the idea that “most marriages last until-death-do-us-part”). The irony here is that the presumption of factuality is exactly what makes their view feel so solid.

But even when such stories are backed up by empirical data, Saturn persuades us to believe that its truisms are not just true; they are more than true. They are common knowledge. There is a sense of psychological weight surrounding Saturnine institutions and viewpoints that would not exist if they were thought to be the beliefs of the minority.



Saturn decides who The Fringe is

Most Americans—whether right- or left-leaning—know that endorsing torture is not a value that the US citizenry as a whole identifies with. If we’re talking about actual majority opinion, it is very improbable that Mitt Romney’s call to double the size of Guantanamo represents mainstream thinking. Moreover, it seems likely that most Americans in their heart of hearts detected the whiff of the nutcase about Sen. McCain changing the lyrics of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” to “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran;” as well as about Mr. Huckabee’s announcement that if all the nation’s aborted fetuses had gone to term, the US wouldn’t need low-cost immigrant labor.

Nonetheless there exists a stubborn collective resistance to seeing these stances for what they are: the unwholesome, bizarre opinions of a fringe wing of an unpopular party. The stagecraft shoring up these gentlemen—the fact that they are given the imprimatur of the headlines day after day, and that big-name reporters analyze, with grave solemnity and dead seriousness, their every word and gesture—is designed to prevent them from being seen as fringe thinkers.

Even were an idea to pop out of one of these speakers’ mouths that was fringe-like in a positive sense—i.e. refreshingly unique—Saturn would have none of it. Saturn does not acquire authority by being original or idiosyncratic. It gets its avoirdupois from the idea that certain things are generally known and accepted. These candidates do not aspire to be seen as brilliant or innovative. They want to be thought of as predictable exponents of What Most People Think. They are running on the Saturn platform.

With perverse irony, the faux-majority thinking trope works its magic all along the political spectrum. Many leftwing Americans buy into this fallacy every bit as much as the cheerleaders of the candidates we are describing. Consider that American progressives—the type of voter who might see Dennis Kucinich as a harbinger of integrity and common sense, for example—even this kind of American, if she watched enough TV, would tend to get snookered by Saturn’s Reality Show. The rules of this show declare that if Kucinich is denied a place in the big debate, he must not be a real candidate. Thus if a voter identifies with him and believes in his authenticity, she must be the fringe thinker.

By this skewed logic, the anti-war contingent, despite being identified by pollsters as the overwhelming majority of the US populace, tend to see themselves as the odd-men-out, as voices in the wilderness, as the weirdos.