Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Straight from the Heart

Feature-world crisis

Listening to the Voice of Humanity

Steven Kull

Part-6

But this is not what people perceive as occurring. Asked how much their country is governed to the will of the people the mean response was 4.6. in every country a majority-on average 73%-said that their country should be governed according to the will of the people more than it is.

What then can be done to increase the influence of the aggregated consciousness of the people? The first step is simply to give the people a greater voice.

Some have argued what is key here is for individuals to step forward and organize themselves into organizations that put forward key ideas and concerns about what needs to happen. This is doubtlessly an important part of the process by which new ideas and concerns are developed and disseminated into society.

However, no individual or group can speak for the society as a whole. To give voice to the whole of society we must go back to the method that the ancient Greeks used to develop the first democratic government. They created their government by selecting people by lot from the whole of the citizenry. In modern vernacular we call it random sampling.

This is the essence of public opinion polls. When a sample, randomly selected from the general public, is asked questions in a clear and unbiased fashion this can provide a useful way to discern the dominant tendency in the public as a whole.

People around the world also want government leaders to pay attention to polls. Even when presented the counter argument that government leaders “should not pay attention to public opinion polls because this will distract them from deciding what they think is right,” in all 18 nations polled majorities said that government leaders “should pay attention to public opinion polls.”

Some people express discomfort with polls. They hear that wording questions differently will produce different results and are afraid that polls are used to misrepresent the public for political ends. This, no doubt, sometimes occurs.

But there are means to address this problem. When public opinion researchers take many different poll results, some of them seemingly contradictory, and analyze the wording carefully, they are generally able to see that there is a reason the public responds differently to different questions. The public’s attitudes are complex and, like the blind men encountering an elephant, each poll finding elucidates one aspect of the whole.  However, in putting them all together there usually a discernible coherent voice.

Another approach that I have found effective in discerning the voice of the public is to take the majority position in numerous polls and to imagine that one ‘person’ had taken all these positions. I have even tried writing out a kind of interview with this collective-

Rather than just having an occasional poll or citizen jury, there could be a large ongoing representative sample ready to give input to the government, a Citizen Advisory Pane.

‘person’ where the answers to a series of questions are all majority positions from different polls. Interestingly this ‘person’ is remarkably reasonable and nuanced. Such an ‘interview’ with the American public can be found at pipa.org/articles/RBI_all.htm.

To be continued…

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