People can fabricate whatever they want. They can call a leading newspaper a child kidnapping ring. But reputation refers to something else - there is truth and people do tend strongly toward it; people make functional (not optimal) decisions as a group - that's how democratic self-governent has worked far, far better than any other form of government.

It's philosophical theory that human judgment could be just completely arbitrary and that all these arbitrary opinions have equal weight. But it's cheap theory - not good enough for the first day of philosophy class - and transparently wrong, and has nothing to do with reality. We (you included) make imperfect but not random judgments all day every day, using many skills and inputs.

> that was a freudian slip, right?

Your assertion isn't about Freudian slips.