The Majority Is Always Wrong

Robert Fulford once said this to me. Sorry; that sounds like name-dropping. I do not know Robert Fulford, and if I ran into him I’m sure he would not remember me. But I did meet him once, and he did say something like that to me. He said he chose articles for Saturday Night magazine on the principle that “if everyone knows something is so, it probably isn’t.”

One of the wisest things anyone has ever said, at least in my presence.

It actually stands to reason. Something that everyone knows to be true is ipso facto something that few people have examined closely for a while.

And when a thing is considered beyond debate, there is most often a political reason for this. Truths must struggle to be accepted. Comfortable lies meet no such resistance, indeed are commonly coddled far away from all questioning.

Democracy accordingly has its limits, and one of its more unfortunate limits is that it promotes the fallacy, as Pope Benedict has pointed out, that truth and right can be determined by popular vote.

Of course they cannot: the few are far more often right than the many. The average layman is rarely the best authority on any subject. If popular opinion were the measure of truth, then Jesus and Socrates were vicious criminals worthy of execution, and AdolfHitler was the savior. Galileo and Columbus? A couple of crackpots.

Democracy is valuable in the running of a state, because it acts as a check and balance on the small group actually exercising power: in extremis, the popular will can vote them out. Much more direct than that, and you get—as America's founding fathers were well aware—mob rule. Hitler was popularly elected. So were Huey Long and the segregationists of the US South.

For Catholics, there are three great temptations we, traditionally, must avoid: the world, the flesh, and the devil. “The world” here, I am quite certain, means the social world, the popular consensus. When we are talking about kids, we call it “peer pressure,” and know it is a bad thing. It is just as bad a thing among adults.

Much of the Bible is about the importance of the good man standing alone against society. This is the story of Noah, of Lot, of Joseph, of Jesus, and of John the Baptist. It is the archetypal story of all the prophets. And of the Buddha, and of Hui Neng, of Qu Yuan, and of Confucius, too.

The average person is not moral. To be moral, it is necessary to be an eccentric. Perhaps not all eccentrics are moral, but all moral people are eccentrics. Accordingly, any eccentric is worthy, prima facie, of our respect. And we should be suspicious of any force that seeks conformity.