The Spiral of Silence

And the Countess of the WPATH Files: Mia Hughes

“We may not feel sympathy for man’s social nature, but we should try to understand it so as not to be unfair to the people who go along with the crowd.” - Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion - Our Social Skin

By

James Pew

In the spring of 1980 while teaching as a visiting professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, attended a ballet by Gian Carlo Menotti, at the International House on campus. She would later write, “The last thing I expected when I went to the performance was to be given a lesson in public opinion.” Indeed, she later mused that the title of the ballet could easily have been “Public Opinion.”

The ballet was called The Unicorn, the Gorgon, and the Manticore; or, The Three Sundays of a Poet. The narrative hinges on a strange man who lives outside of town in a castle on a hill. He comes into town on Sundays. The townspeople are confused and somewhat annoyed by his bizarre ideas and behaviour. They laugh at him, but keep their distance.

On the first of three particular Sundays, the man is seen leading a unicorn by a chain. The townspeople shake their heads and avoid him. However, when the Count and Countess of the town are later seen leading their own unicorn by a chain, it doesn’t take long before the whole town has unicorns.

On another Sunday the man appears in town with a gorgon. The townspeople ask him about his unicorn. The man replies that he was bored of the unicorn so he grilled and ate it. The townspeople are shocked, but when they notice that the Count and Countess have also replaced their unicorn with a gorgon, it doesn’t take long for envy to inspire the entire town to follow suit. Gorgons become the new fad.

On the third Sunday, the strange man from the castle on the hill outside of town, shows up with a manticore and tells the townspeople he killed his gorgon. Again, shock turns to envy, as the townspeople take note of the Count and Countesses new found propensity for manticores. As if someone flipped a switch, the town becomes enraptured with manticores.

Some time passes. The man no longer visits the town. The townspeople grow suspicious and become convinced that the man has also killed his manticore. They decide to go to the man’s castle and investigate. Upon entering the castle they discover the man dying in the presence of his unicorn, gorgon, and manticore.

Noelle-Neumann explains, “the unicorn represents the dreams of his youth, the gorgon his middle age, and the manticore his old age.” Since the townspeople had taken up and discarded the strange man's ideas so easily, they were just passing whims. However, for the strange man “they represented the essence of his life.” The strange man, poet that he was, is a mystery worth contemplating, while the townspeople are portrayed as shallow, and with fleeting interests.

Not surprisingly, the audience, and the critics who later wrote about the ballet, seem to have been the most sympathetic to the poet (the strange man). “The poet represents our image of man as strong, independent, imaginative,” while the Count and Countess were seen as “superficial trend-setters,” and the audience was least impressed with the townspeople who most assumed were faddish followers.

“Those we despise most, however, are the people who go along with the crowd, first making fun of a person because he is different from them but then absorbing any new fashion and finally giving themselves the air of moral authority.” 

However, Noelle-Neumann explains that this is only one point of view, “it is the way strange people from the castle, loners, artists, and scholars have always felt.” She feels that by taking the side of the poet, “we deny our own social nature.” We take for granted the necessary effort required on the part of townspeople (and even influencers, like the Count and Countess) to keep and cultivate a cohesive social fabric in any given community.

According to Noelle-Neumann: 

“We act as if being in possession of a common rich historical and cultural tradition and of institutions protected by the law did not require a constant effort of adjustment and even ‘conformity’ if that possession is to be kept alive and if we are to remain capable of acting and making decisions on a community level.”

This is an indication that people do not want to recognize or accept our social nature (and responsibility), “which forces us to conform.” Noelle-Neumann feels that there has been a lack of interest in exploring conformity - like that of the townspeople - and why it “is vital if a social community is to survive.” The word fashion is assumed to be a negative. The unicorn, gorgon, and manticore were a metaphor for keeping up with trendy fashions and fads. This led Noelle-Neumann to conclude, “we act as if unaware of our social nature.”

Imitation has long been rationalized as the desire to learn. However, “the motive of not wanting to be isolated, to be on the fringes, seems to be much stronger.” Quoting Tocqueville, Noelle-Neumann adds, people “dread isolation more than error.” In other words, our social nature includes a deep fear of seclusion and rejection, so much so that when people are confronted with something they know to be morally wrong, they will often remain silent if “the consensus as to what constitutes good taste and the morally correct opinion speaks against them.”

Noelle-Neumann referred to this phenomenon as the “spiral of silence.” However, her interpretation is nuanced:

“I side with the Count and the Countess because the poet’s ideas would never have been disseminated without them; they are the moderators, the opinion leaders society needs, much as journalists often are today. And the townspeople, the people who go along with the crowd—what do we know about their feelings, their dreams? What do we know about what they are like inside? In public, they don’t want to suffer isolation; not one person in ten thousand is callous enough not to care if the social environment withholds its approval, states John Locke. How could you continue to walk around with a unicorn if no one else were walking around with a unicorn anymore? Let’s try to imagine a society that consists strictly of loners, of strange men from the castle. A society such a this, lacking either social nature or the fear of isolation, is plainly an impossibility. We may not feel sympathy for man’s social nature, but we should try to understand it so as not to be unfair to the people who go along with the crowd.”

However, let’s also try to imagine a society without loners, poets, or “strange men.” In 2024, the crowd, or at least the appearance of a crowd, has been convinced to go along with something sold to them as kindness. Gender affirming care for minors is not kind. And it is not a fashionable manticore to be led around on a chain. It is a medical crime. Its victims are children, and its perpetrators are “medical experts” with bizarre ideas concerning irreversible, dangerous, and experimental medical procedures the townspeople privately deem morally unacceptable, while publicly remaining silent. However, this is slowly changing, for in Canada, our townspeople are good people.

There is a purpose for poets and strange men. Popular Counts and Countesses play their role as well. But public opinion is ultimately determined by the townspeople. 

In July of last year, independent Canadian journalist - both a “strange woman” from outside the woke Conformity Township, and the journalistic Countess who wrote the WPATH files - Mia Hughes, published an incredibly poignant and timely thread to X which outlined Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence,” applying it to the trans-affirming craze and crimes against children.

With Mia’s permission I reproduce that thread below:

Image from A Special Place in Hell Substack

The Spiral of Silence - A Thread by Mia Hughes

In a week when Keir Starmer said a woman is an adult human female, the New Statesmen published a Dawkins essay about sex being binary and Andrew Neil cottoned on that child sex changes aren’t such a great idea, it’s safe to say that the spell has lifted/1

At least in the UK, it’s growing ever more possible to state the obvious - that men are not, and can never be women, and that children deserve the right to grow up healthy and whole. But how did we end up in a place where such obvious truths were unsayable?/2

Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence theory is one explanation. It states that people influence each other's willingness to express opinions. When individuals observe that their opinions align with the majority, they become more confident in voicing their stance./3

Conversely, those with unpopular opinions tend to be silent for fear of ostracism. This creates a spiral in which those with the approved opinion get louder, and those with opposing views become increasingly afraid to speak./4

When the trans rights movement made naming reality a crime, and swiftly punished anyone who dared oppose the atrocious medical experiment of transing kids, a climate of fear spread through society resulting in a spiral of silence./5

The media played an important role. Through cowardly one-sided reporting, and a steadfast refusal to investigate the scandal of pediatric medical transition, the mainstream media created the illusion that support for the deranged body-mutilation cult was widespread./6

But only a minuscule fraction of people are true believers. Hardly anyone actually believes “transwomen” are women. Almost no one truly believes there’s such a thing as a lesbian with a penis. Barely anyone supports amputating healthy body parts from distressed, confused teens./7

And yet, because of the actions of a tiny few, because of the aggression and viciousness of trans activists, the spiral of silence was fortified, meaning people stood by and allowed gay, lesbian, and autistic adolescents to sacrifice their health in the name of a poisonous lie./8

Thousands of small acts of courage over the years, as well as a few enormous ones such as that of JK Rowling, have broken the spiral of silence and brought about this day where, at least in the UK, the unsayable has finally become sayable./9

But I’ll never understand those who looked the other way while one of the greatest crimes humanity has ever committed destroyed the lives of vulnerable young people, those who tuned out the grief, anger and despair of the parents watching the destruction of their child’s body./10

The spiral of silence is still going strong here in Canada, but at last, there are glimmers of hope that it will soon be broken. With every Canadian who finds the courage to speak, we edge closer to restoring sanity and ending this medical atrocity./end

___

Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read Refuting Gender Theory: a Disenchantment

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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