Humanity is not served by the idea of "the public." Individual freedoms require free individuals, who are not part of a colossal "public" that is formless, and ignorant. There is no public. There is only YOU. And Me. Him. And Her. And the World we live in. I can't speak for the public anymore than I can speak for God. If someone claims that he speaks for either, then he is a fraud, and should be opposed by all intelligent individuals. The two maxims of the universe are "think for yourself" and "speak for yourself," and if what you say matches reality, if you give voice to the facts on the ground, to verifiable evidence, then you stand in the right, if you don't, and you just make shit up, as the President of the United States does, then you are either lying, or ignorant, in which case, you should not be listened to, and you should not speak.
19th century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard called the public in his book "Two Ages: A Literary Review," a "phantom," a "monstrous abstraction," an "all-encompassing something that is nothing, a mirage." Kierkegaard:
"Only in a passionless age but reflective age can this phantom develop with the aid of the press, when the press itself becomes a phantom. There is no such thing as a public in spirited, passionate, tumultuous times, even when a people wants to actualize the idea of the barren desert, destroying and demoralizing everything. There are parties, and there is concretion. In such times the press will take on the character of a concretion in relation to the division."Kierkegaard said that in the absence of real civil life there magically arises a "phantom" public, which is largely manufactured by the press. The ancients, he said, were not under the illusion that a "public" exists. Kierkegaard:
"The public is a concept that simply could not have appeared in antiquity, because the people were obliged to come forward en masse in corpore [as a whole] in the situation of action, were obliged to bear the responsibility for what was done by individuals in their midst, while in turn the individual was obliged to be present in person as the one specifically involved and had to submit to the summary court for approval or disapproval. Only when there is no strong communal life to give substance to the concretion will the press create this abstraction "the public," made of unsubstantial individuals who are never united or never can be united in the simultaneity of any situation or organization and yet are claimed to be a whole. The public is a corps, outnumbering all the people together, but this corps can never be called for inspection; indeed, it cannot even have so much as a single representative, because it is itself an abstraction."In the run up to war we often hear about public opinion polls, and different sects of people claim that the public is on their side, but if public opinion can be molded, and directed, then how can a war be justified just because large pockets of the "public," believe the war is good? The use of mass propaganda in the last century, and in this one has made the public not something to worship, but something to loathe. If governments, and the media can manage public opinion, then we should not follow or trust public opinion, and if we are honest individuals, we should not look to polls to form our own judgments about anything, especially something as destructive as war. "Public opinion," said Kierkegaard, "is an inorganic something, an abstraction." In the case of modern war, wherein the chief victims are individuals, the fraud of public opinion has proven to be lethal, and anti-human.
"The modern state," wrote Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, "fabricates the opinions which it later respectfully collects under the name of public opinion."
