In recent years, as Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd has become popular among readers, Chinese-language society has seen a wave of stigmatizing “the masses.” People seem to have found, in Le Bon’s arguments that lack logical continuity and empirical support, a justification for “controlling” public opinion. Following the method of looking for evidence after deciding on a conclusion, a series of “crimes” by mass opinion have been made public. Thus the claim that “public opinion eats people” has itself been accepted by “public opinion,” producing a strange scene of self-disarmament.
In fact, public opinion is not free of wrongdoing, and snowflakes are not entirely just. China has old sayings such as “three people make a tiger” and “the mouths of the crowd can melt metal.” With the spread of mobile internet, the original sin of public opinion has been amplified as never before. The “three people” and “many mouths” that once operated only in communities of acquaintances have turned into a destructive avalanche.
But we must recognize that the injustice of a snowflake can only be established within a specific case. To discuss whether snowflakes are just on a more general level, we must break free from the limits of individual cases and discover the deeper reasons why public opinion commits wrongdoing.
Looking across repeated storms of public opinion on Chinese social media, it is not hard to see three inborn “original sins” of mass opinion: plurality, volatility, and destructiveness.
Plurality means the natural diversity of mass opinion caused by differences in social background, values, and individual experience. But public opinion that is merely plural is not destructive like an avalanche. On the contrary, it can promote public discussion of social events, deepen people’s understanding through confrontation with different views, and ease conflicts caused by individual differences. In this sense, the plurality of mass opinion is the basis of its neutrality. It is not an original sin, but rather an original good.
Therefore, avalanches mainly arise from the other two original sins: volatility and destructiveness. Volatility refers to the way the mainstream position of public opinion swings back and forth as information about an event is disclosed. Because the public often invests emotion in its positions and views, whether that emotion comes from empathy for the parties involved or identification with a shared public understanding, every reversal of the mainstream position intensifies anger toward the perceived villain. In this process of emotional accumulation, the destructiveness of public opinion grows.
If the final target of public opinion is the correct villain, then public opinion has done a satisfying good deed. If the target is the wrong villain, then the tragedy of “three people make a tiger” unfolds and the avalanche occurs.
Judging whether an outcome meets the standard of justice requires a long passage of time. That conflicts with the naturally short attention span of the public. In addition, the standard of justice itself is plural. So abstractly discussing whether a snowflake is just is meaningless. To reduce the chance that public opinion causes avalanches, we must start with its volatility and destructiveness. Without expecting public opinion to do good, we should at least make it do less harm.
The volatility of public opinion comes from delays or falsehoods in information disclosure. Therefore, improving the speed and credibility of information disclosure is the best way to reduce reversals. A healthy society cannot function without independent and free news media. Such media can provide an effective channel for vulnerable groups to speak, relieving accumulated resentment caused by blocked information flow. They can also disclose timely and accurate information about public events, preventing public opinion from swinging back and forth because of asymmetry of information.
In other words, credible news media can act as a lubricant for mass opinion, reducing its volatility and destructiveness as much as possible and dissolving avalanches before they form.
Today, there are two opposite views of the social role of mass opinion. One view holds that its three original sins mean it can only lead to avalanche-like verbal violence and is therefore unjust. The other view holds that when public remedies fail, public opinion can spontaneously uphold justice and is therefore just.
The former demonizes mass opinion while ignoring the deeper causes that lead to or intensify its wrongdoing. The latter is too idealistic and gives public opinion a mission it should not bear. Both views ignore, or selectively ignore, the importance of news media: the former ignores the media’s role in guiding and restraining public opinion; the latter ignores the media’s role in supervising and checking public power.
The Chinese internet is full of low-quality rumors and online violence against all kinds of groups. People seem to have gradually drifted away from the internet’s original purpose of connecting people. One reason for this is the loss of credibility and independence among formal media. Vulnerable groups have lost effective channels to speak. The public has lost reliable sources of information. People live constantly in fear and anxiety. Anger and hostility spread, and the villains who repeatedly appear in social events, whether they are truly villains or not, become outlets for release.
So arguing over “whether snowflakes are just” is only scratching an itch through a boot. The real problem is like the elephant in the room. Smart people all know it is there; they simply refuse to say it aloud.