"What a man dares to accomplish with his hands and with his own strength of will;
this alone gives glory"
Homer

By Andrés Mata Osorio

Few people have the courage to be continual hardcore non-conformists. Do you? Or any one you know? Closed totalitarian socialist governments always wage war on the strong and dissenting individual. They attempt to regiment all of the society. If they succeed for a time they can convert millions of ex-serfs into slaves of the state as Stalin did in the 1930's after killing millions in the process of eliminating the Kulak farmers as a class. This is certainly an atrocity that serves the ends of state social engineering, and may fulfill political aims for a time of crisis. But wrecking the life of one outstanding individual, a potential Galileo, Marlowe, Raleigh or Darwin is a capital disaster for all time to the race. Remember what the Soviet Union tried to do to the writer Solzhenitsyn when the state controlled writer's union denied him access to typing paper. Think of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the physicist Andre Zachkaroff locked in their single room apartments for years under house arrest. Under the conditions of totalitarian rule no one can think of his home as his castle. These men upheld the hope of the sovereignty and the liberty of the individual mind respectively producing new novels, symphonies, and secreted letters of protest against the nuclear proliferation of the arms race in the latter half of the Cold War.

Remember how the Nazi Holocaust drove Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig to suicide.
Happily for the world, the German national socialists also drove the best physicists into exile, or else the nightmare of a nuclear tipped V-2 may have changed the outcome of the Second World War.

In a closed totalitarian and socialist state, it is the duty of everyman to submerge his identity in the collective. But individualism still survives and will survive until the end of the human species. Every reflective person must sense that even the most basic sort of co-operation quickly reaches its limit- and that all the vital business of the world must be done by single individuals operating ultimately under the compulsion of their own egos.
 
Our own biology indicates the ultimate reality of the individual: his unique constituent DNA identity. Thus, the average, the bell curve, the stereotype, and the statistical mean are all quantitative illusions that serve to mask the ultimate reality: the individual. Public opinion itself is an illusion, an ever changing and evanescent mosaic of individual and subjective appraisals. As Margaret Thatcher famously stated, society does not exist, only individuals do. Public opinion is the ever changing collective hallucination of pollsters and state planners.

As H.L. Mencken noted, the worst governments pretend to be the most moral. One composed of cynics tend to be tolerant and humane. When true religious or political fanatics are on top there is often no limit to oppression. Furthermore during wars or times of deep political polarization, the relativity of all moral ideas is proved anew. Again following Mencken, whatever the enemy does however gallant or reasonable, is denounced as immoral, and what the true single party loyalists do, however brutal and dishonorable, is praised as heroic in the cause of the greater good. In the meantime time is often wasted in dealing with pragmatic solutions to real problems. This becomes all the more if the government primarily demands loyalty rather than operational competence from its representatives. In this polarized environment, all effort is put in by both sides in trying to shape the perspectives of the media in a vain attempt to control or to shape public opinion. 

Even regimes that possessed the hegemonic ideological domination of all the media fell by means of individuals assessing on their own the reality of their perceived situation. There are thus some empirical questions about how effective controls of the media actually are in shaping public opinion. For example, Eastern European societies under the thumb of single national Communist parties were subjected to forty years of totalitarian socialist rule, continual propaganda, and rigidly controlled mass media, but the people in these countries ditched the Communists with hardly a second thought when they discovered that the Red Army would not invade them. In August of 1991, the Russians themselves gave up their own system for a more open and plural society with only two accidental deaths.

How did this happen?

These rapid political transformations take place because thinking individuals are the ultimate seat of all sovereignty, and individuals ultimately may hide their true opinions for a while in a spiral of silence and then make them manifest later all at once.

The spiral of silence is a theory that seeks to explain the often rapid changes that do occur in the statistical measure of public opinion. The theory was developed by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the founder of the Allensbach Institute in Germany. She follows the thinking of past philosophers such as John Locke, David Hume and James Madison in asserting that public opinion exerts a kind of stabilizing force that helps holds society together and can control people's political decisions and attitudes. The phrase "spiral of silence" refers to how people tend to remain silent when they feel their views are in the minority.  Noelle-Neumann blames the spiral of silence on the fear of isolation. In other words, most people who feel that they are in the minority keep quiet because they feel the ridicule of the majority. Noelle-Neumann states that the spiral of silence is exacerbated by the psychological trait that we often tend to underestimate the number of people who share our views and overestimate the number of people who oppose them

Everyone has been in the position where their opinion is in the minority. How do you react? According to Noelle-Neumann's theory, most people would willingly fall into the spiral of silence when faced with a perceived disagreement with public opinion, and all the more so in the face of an imposed government orthodoxy and authority. The theory of the spiral of silence was conceived in the late 1970's and thus does not address the fact that the internet and other new communication technologies definitely empower non-conformist individuals of all ideological persuasions and thus may help some of them to brake out of their silence and locate other like minded individuals.

And we live in a polarized world where even in a functioning democracy a President can publicly denounce the editor of a major newspaper as a traitor to his country. Beware of twisting my words, you, evil-minded trapped by the spiral of silence. I am not talking about Venezuela. I am obviously referring to the stated opinions of George W. Bush with regard to a Mr. Keller, the current editor of The New York Times. A vigilant press is a pain in the neck for everyone, except for the victims of the abuse of authority.

However, when those in the spiral of silence begin to sense that the opinions held by them have a chance of becoming part of a new consensus, then a formerly silent multitude will have the courage to express their true opinion en masse for the first time often all at once. The spiral of silence helps to explain how public opinion can change massively and rapidly. The concept explains the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Eastern Block, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, as well as the speed with which the two halves of Germany were reunited. 

Remember, the statistics, the averages, the polls are all momentary illusions. What really exists are only individuals who must face a complex reality and come to terms with it in their own way. Selling a newspaper involves participating in a daily plebiscite.  A newspaper or a medium that does not reflect the realities on the street will not be believed by the only social reality that ultimately exists: the individual. The selling of ideology requires deep pockets and ultimately fails if no pragmatic betterment to society is achieved.

Since the individual is the only ultimate reality, El Universal has chosen to commemorate its ninety-ninth anniversary with a celebration of as many unique Venezuelan individuals who wished to share the narratives of their lives with us so as to give others the courage to dream, to hope and to plan their own escape out of the dark spiral of silence and into the noisy sunlight of excellence and achievement.