For the purposes of this hypothetical, let’s assume my alternate career as a SuperScientist is coming along nicely. Let’s further assume that my project, the Opiniontron 9000, has also been completed and is functioning far better than expected.
The Opiniontron 9000 allows the user to bend the very fabric of reality to erase opinions they don’t like or vehemently disagree with. The user’s opinions are declared correct in all ways, and opinions they don’t like are simply wrong and always will be.
As part of the calibration process, the Opiniontron 9000 has made it so that all opinions differing from yours have automatically been declared wrong on the following subjects:
Religion
Firearms
Local/National politics
Social justice issues including but not limited to gay marriage, abortion and animal rights
Even better, thanks to its reality bending nature, the Opiniontron 9000 has managed to create an alternate reality for you with these opinions - thus, super religious folks aren’t forcing militant atheists to shut up or face a righteous smiting, for example. In your reality, all the dissenting opinions on Major Issues People Argue About A Lot have simply ceased to exist.
However, to make the best use of its processing power, the Opiniontron 9000 now requires you to manually select opinions to be declared authoritively correct. Dissenting opinions may not disappear, but they will be regarded by most people as Wrong; your view will be the prevailing one.
So: What’s your first choice? Which dissenting opinion are you declaring to be completely wrong?
My opinions are based on what the prevailing majority thinks. As M. Twain observed, “If I discover that the majority agrees with me, I rethink my position.”
So the Opiniontron 9000 already exists for me. I use national polls to indicate to me the majority view, which is then automatically dismissed.
You see, the majority of people believe what they have been persuaded to believe, and the truth needs no persuasion, so popular belief must be wrong.
Once, in college, we did an experiment: every student in the class (Philosophy, I believe it was) had the right to remove one word from the dictionary. The word was stricken from any human usage, ever. As might be expected, the first few choices were the ugliest racial and religious slurs. But once those were gone, a few wags started gaming it up. The word “truth” got banned, and, before the end, the word “the.” A die-hard General Semanticist nixed “is.” It was a mess.
Within the boundaries of laws that protect consensual behavior - that is, willing participation among people of the age and mental capacity to make informed decisions - people are free to do whatever they want with their own bodies.
Secondary to this absolutely correct opinion, all attempts to legislate sexual morality and bodily autonomy should be met with derision and a Taser.
Its so hard to choose just one!