People don’t often “form” their opinions but rather regularly “choose” them from among a smorgasbord of ready-made, prepackaged propaganda and demagoguery. Formerly members of the clerisy were the midwives to culture, but in the modern consumerist society the guiding lights and formative influences have been overhauled by the marketer and salesmen who shape society by creating the feelings of burning need for their products. The marketer tells the consumer that there is nothing he can’t have and the politicians assures him that there is nothing he doesn't have a right to, or worse, there is nothing he not entitled to.
The modern entertainer works in concert with marketer and demagogue by creating a pop culture of coolness that the common man cannot resist. This seductive false reality of entertainment is ubiquitous, imposing, and replete with product placement. It presents new norms based on conformity to consumerism and political correctness rather than on the prior ideal of conforming one’s soul and action with the transcendent moral order and the winnowed wisdom of the ages.
We have liberated people from their faith, families, communities and their morality by baiting the trap with their own desires but we have thereby created not men-in-full but rather fragmented, alienated hollowmen. Like smashing the fishbowl to free the fish, we have exiled man from what enables his fullest life.
When people are absolutely free to do as they wish, they typical just imitate their fellows. Sir Roger Scruton once intoned that :
"Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this "living down," which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind―and with it our kindness."