Understanding The Concept of The 'Public' as a Ruthless Creature

At the individual level, everyone demonstrates a sense of personal loyalty. People are careful with their particulars. Great care is taken to maintain a high personal sense of order and a collected posture before the preying world.

The part of the society that is outside your loyal circle is a strange creature known as the public. It is an ecosystem that works with or without you. It has no loyalties and cares very little for the individual.

The Johari window concept comes in handy in understanding the public.

The concept has four areas: what is known to you and the public, what is known to you but hidden from the public, what is known of you to the public but unknown to you that they know, and what is unknown to both you and the public.

Anything about you that is known to the public regardless of your consent, is beyond your control. The creature that is the public will happily join in the painting competition and richly add to the mural that eventually portrays you in bad or good light. Underdogs win sympathy. Top dogs attract the public's wrath when unfairness is noted.

So, if your circles have people who are openly or secretly jealous of you, then anything about you that can pull you down, will find its way into the public arena through them. When they are a part of the public creature, they are merciless, emotionless, and senseless.

The challenge is that by nature, man is a social being. You need another person to get an agenda of yours going. So, there is no public-proof approach to working things out but to employ written and signed agreements on important things.

But if you hang around energetic public spewing types, get ready to cut links or know when to say or do what.

Success may come from closely guarded secrets such as Coca-Cola's formula on coke, an all-time favorite drink. It has transcended generations and has remained financially potent to date. It has enjoyed the public's confidence whilst the formula is shrouded in mystery.

Some men in man caves and some women in gossip clubs are sworn to secrecy, so long as it benefits them. A foolish woman will enumerate the positive but rare qualities of a spouse or companion to a crowd quite eager to secretly partake in and enjoy the said attributes, for they have come from a dependable source albeit naive.

The foolish man will similarly sing praises and soon realize that there is no honour among thieves.

The point here is regulate what becomes public and what remains with you, for the creature named the public can break your heart. The public hurts but it has no heart when its ruthless mode is turned on.

But again, if you want your products and services to get known, you must go public. If you have quality products, the public has what we call "word-of-mouth" advertising. And like a rumour, the word travels faster than what is delivered through a millipede. The spoken word is legless but outdoes the one hundred legs of the millipede. It borrows limbs and mouths from the public to get to intended destinations.

The public is like a fire. Bask in it from a safe distance lest you get burned or frozen. And before you go public, always remember that it is a dalliance with a creature that allows anything going through it to develop a life of its own.

If you are not good at damage control, learn from those that experience bad publicity severally. I know of a university that was in the press for all the good reasons and they employed some naive people because things couldn't get that bad.

One day, a rehearsal of an emergency situation went bad and the creature called the public took turns at them. They failed at damage control for lack of speed. They failed to get ahead of the public. Yet, another university that was always in the news for all the wrong reasons kept admitting students annually, simply because, they had answers to all the bad things people had to say about them. Their damage control muscle was well-developed and crushed any kind of negativity towards it.

People now attend programs on public policy, public relations and administration just so that the creature is approached using trained hands.

The creature named the 'public' is not intelligent enough to regularly surmount untruths. It does not employ the same high levels harnessed by individuals. If anything, those regarded as individually intelligent, often get lost in the public's collective stupidity and go-ahead to add wood in the fire even when it is unfair to do so.

The irony here is that the intelligence networks use the public to gather such intelligence for productive national use.

The security networks are not as intelligent without the public. The same intelligence gathered may be sold at a handsome price to a willing user as the creature called the public keeps spewing more content.

Learn to share jokes with the public but suck in as much as possible. You will be a better person.