Virality Is Proof That My Opinion Was Wrong
I have very few simple rules that turn out to be right - majority of the time. One of them is when I post something that goes viral. If no one is critiquing it, I get scared. If the majority agrees with it, I get scared. I begin to think there’s a huge possibility that I am wrong. So I go back and try to write a counter-argument to it. And in most cases, I tend to agree more with the counter-argument.
But when I post something and no one likes, comments, shares, retweets it, or very few do. I know that I am starting to make sense. I am producing something more authentic, something novel and something that has a possibility of creating a new dimension. Whenever the majority takes my opinion to be right, I know it is highly possible that opinion I shared was trash, wrong, and should be challenged.
If I share a business idea and every friend tells me it’s superb, it is going to work out; I get scared. Because then I begin to know it won’t. That’s how I save myself from crashes.
The majority is rarely right, that’s why democracy rarely works. New ideas, ideas that turned out to be true, that changed the world were ideas that the majority did not hold to be true. For example today, so many people think crypto currencies is not a good idea, it’s going to fail and that for me, that makes me want to invest even more in it. But if every organization, government and corporations too it on the first time it was introduced, then I would have distanced myself very far from it. Whenever anything goes viral the moment it comes out, it is time for me to stop, think and reflect. Surely something must be wrong somewhere.
In Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen writes: “The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools?”
And that my friend is to why virality scares me. Populism can give birth to even more wrong ideas as second-order derivatives of a past piece that went viral. And when that starts to happen, you lose the freedom of thought, to say what needs to be said not the opinions that everyone wants to hear. When something goes viral, it’s because it touched people’s emotions, massaged their egos and it’s something they wanted to hear. That is recipe for disaster. Forgive my silly rules.
DON'T FORGET TO UP VOTE PLEASE.
