[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 18, 2006]

Murphy's Law says that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.  Misapplying this leads to "If an opinion can be wrong, it will be wrong."  (Maybe this is because motorheaded Americans equate "being" with "going.")  In the United States, anyone can think what he wants, and although it would be nice if his opinions were "informed," requiring informed opinions would discriminate against the stup—  er, that is, the "differently intelligenced" folks who can't seem to get the hang of distinguishing what's reasonable from what isn't.  Giving one person's opinion more weight than another's is "judgmental" and therefore "discriminatory."  I know that's silly, but there are those who believe it. 

What about another misapplication of a famous law, Newton's third law of motion, which says that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction?   For every opinion, there is an equal but opposite opinion.  How many people have died because they didn’t really have a proper feel for Newton's laws?  Or for the effects of combining equal but opposite opinions, which, we have learned the hard way, really do not cancel each other out (unless we're lawmakers looking for PAC money)?

Speaking of the value of opinions:

It used to be that when someone was engaged in a discussion or argument, one of the participants would rudely dismiss the other with his trump argument:  "Well, that's YOUR opinion!"  I have noticed recently a significant change in the way people say this.  I am hearing more frequently the stress on the last word:  "Well, that's your OPINION!"  What allowed this approach to become successful as a debate tool was the discovery that reasonable people could differ.  Two reasonable people could have different opinions, perhaps even opposite opinions, about the same thing.  From that discovery, someone inferred a corollary, albeit incorrect, that having a different opinion did not necessarily mean you were wrong.  Anyone can form an opinion about anything at all.  Some people might have more insight or intelligence than others, so their opinions might be seen has having more value.  But that was viewed by some social engineer as being discriminatory against people who were born with below-average ability to put thoughts together or people who, for whatever reason, simply did not want to put thoughts together. 

In a free society, I am told, anyone can think what he wants.  There is no requirement that what he thinks requires some rational basis.  So with no "gold standard" to back up our intellectual currency (ideas and opinions), they cannot be valued.  If they cannot be valued objectively, then they might as well have no value at all.  What happens is that your ideas have great value to you, and other people's ideas have NO value to you.  Ideas and opinions are no longer media of exchange, and everyone is free to think what he wants.  Because ideas govern actions, and therefore actions can be seen as the ultimate expression of ideas, people think their own actions are a form of constitutionally protected free speech.  "I can ignore whatever another man has to say because, as a mere person, he cannot know anything that cannot be proven to be objective truth, so all he can have is an opinion about it, an opinion based on his perception of it.  Because it is his opinion it does not have to be my opinion, and because it is opinion, its relationship to the truth, if there is such a thing, is pure chance, and to the extent it does not make sense to what I want to be my own opinion, it should be ignored."  This is a sad state of affairs.

The devaluing of opinions has led to a rule of thumb for politicians:  Perception is reality.  This means that the truth in one person's eyes is what he thinks it is.  If enough people perceive the truth this way, then the politician's job security depends on giving people what they [think they] want, and therefore it is a waste of the politician's time to try to convince them that they really want something else, even if the politician has been able to see the truth!  If the sailor in the crow's nest yells "Iceberg!" it might not be what the passengers or the crew wants to hear.  They can ignore his warning in the hope that he might be wrong, but they usually don't ignore him, because his position in the crow's nest qualifies him as an expert.  If his opinion is about something that immediately threatens their lives and about which they can know nothing themselves, then they might be more inclined to believe him.  If his iceberg announcement were about which kind of lettuce made the best salad, the passengers would be more inclined to ignore him.

The attachment of value to opinions grows the closer a society perceives itself to extinction.  It's like that last gallon of fuel that is treasured and conserved if that's all one has left.

Strange to say, after all the foregoing, many people still hunger to know what other people think.  Perhaps this is because they have become conditioned to distrust their own ability to think, thanks to the liberal leftist popular media practice of dismissing any thought that doesn't fit on a bumper sticker.  Apparently they are willing to listen to the opinions of just about anyone who is better than they are:  They listen to Bono's thoughts on third-world debt relief because he's a rock star.  They listen to Barbara Streisand bash Republicans because she's a good singer.  They listen to Janeane Garafolo when she's not funny because there was once a time when she was.  On the other hand, people listen to conservative talk radio because of the ideas they hear, not necessarily because the commentators used to be something else.  Unless, of course, its because they used to be Democrats, like Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Charles Krauthammer, and David Horowitz.  Being liberal means never having to say you're sensible.