Imagine a world without opinions

Each week my hometown newspaper, The Laramie Boomerang, conducts an online opinion poll. It asks the opinion of readers about an important issue of the day. People can log in and let the community know what they think. And many do. A few days later, the newspaper fills us in on what our neighbors think.

What is curious to me are those who take their time to log in to let the community know “I have no opinion on the matter.” Almost every week there are those who want us to know that about them.

Think about it for a moment. These are not folks who are stopped on the street and surprised when a reporter shoves a microphone in their face and, without warning, asks them what they think about an issue.

These folks actually take time to log onto the newspaper’s website. They read the question. They look at the options and intentionally choose to say, “I have no opinion on the matter.”

People like me thrive on opinion. Everyone has an opinion. Right? Opinions are ubiquitous. Plato thought that opinions are the “medium between knowledge and ignorance.” In a democracy, is having one not an expectation? Sharing our opinions and testing them in the public arena is what makes our system work. Right?

Maybe having an opinion on everything is not all it’s cracked up to be.

“Opinion” is a Middle Ages term arising from Latin the “opinionem,” used to refer to conjecture or belief. More helpful is that the word emanates from the stem “opinari,” which connotes thinking, judging, or choosing.

So, those without an opinion are telling the rest of that they choose not to choose.

Still, I’m not sure what to make of these folks. Maybe it’s just their way of yawning or shrugging their shoulders. On the other hand, they’re not saying, “I don’t care.” They are simply admitting that, at this moment, they “have no opinion on the matter.”

Perhaps, however, it is a satirical response. Satire involves the use of irony or exaggeration to expose and criticize the stupidity of others, especially in the context of contemporary politics. That starts to make sense if we consider Gore Vidal’s assertion that public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice.

It would take an intellectual like Vidal with his patrician manner and, what one of his biographers called, “epigrammatic wit” to figure out the motives of those who, in the context of a world where opinions are ubiquitous, claim they have none. Epigrammatic is a definitional description of Vidal’s memorable, satirical sayings, which for the sake of this essay means, it takes a satirist to know one.

Those without an opinion watch quietly as the rest of the world seems to demand opinion of everyone, even though some, as John F. Kennedy observed, enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. So, maybe asserting they have no opinion is a subtle, but satirical way of laughing at the rest of us who have an opinion about everything, whether we know enough to have formed that opinion or not.

Maybe, these respondents who say, “I have no opinion,” are really not saying, “I have no opinion.” Maybe they are judging the rest of us, saying, “Having an opinion on everything is the hobgoblin of ego.” And they don’t want to play that game.

We must ask, “Where would the world be without opinion?” How could we begin to speak of Trump, climate change, pineapple on pizza, or how others should rear their children without those who traffic in opinion. A world without opinion would witness the end of talk radio and cable news. Letter-to-the-editor writers would be idled. Pollsters would go broke. Columnists would be assigned to the ash heap of history.

Voters would be left adrift trying to figure out what they are thinking.

At the end of the day, shouldn’t everyone have an opinion? About that weighty matter, I’m sorry. I have no opinion.