Beyond Preference Falsification

it just means that the powerful have the power to shut you up

I’ve been reading Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran for some weeks at the gym. And I’ve mentioned the book in a number of posts: here here here here here.

Kuran uses the issues of race in America, communism in Eastern Europe, and caste in India to make the point that people know that there are certain opinions the rulers say you are not allowed to have. And so people lie about what they believe, beccause if you say something you are not allowed to say it could cost you. Then, all of a sudden, as in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Union broke up, people realize that they can say what they believe. And then Humpty Dumpty has a great fall in what Kuran calls a “preference cascade.”

Kuran also makes a distinction between “hard” and “soft” knowledge:

Hard knowledge is grounded in substantive facts and systematic reasoning. By contrast, soft knowledge is grounded in one or more forms of social proof.

Actually, hard knowledge stops at the scientist proposing a new theory and having it accepted by other scientists. After that it’s all soft knowldege and “experts agree.”

In fact, I would say that the only truths are “private truths.” All statements in public, in particular by politicians and activists, are “public lies” including, in the words of liberal Mary McCarthy about Commie Lilian Hellman, the words “and” and “the.”

The general consensus on public lies is that lies are what the other guys are spouting.

In fact I would say that 97 percent of the time people go with whatever knowledge they have picked up, by reading, by conversation. And they should. The whole point of human speech and its astonishing extension, writing, is that it multiplies by orders of magnitude the knowledge that individuals humans can know. Speech and writing are miraculous.

I say that this going along is particularly true of human women. I find that men occasionally disagree with received knowledge just for kicks. But not women.

So I would say that the extreme case of private knowledge vs. public lies is when a government or other powerful agent wants to go to war. Or wants to lock the place down because COVID.

And the fact is that it usually works. But sometimes it takes a while. In the leadup to World War II it took an actual attack on Pearl Harbor before FDR dared to take the US to war.

But I think the routine use of public lies is merely an expression of political power. Lying and getting away with it means that you have political power. If people are careful not to disagree with the ruling-class Narrative it means that the rulers are sitting in the catbird seat. It feels good for liberals in academia to have the power to exclude far-right conservatives from the professoriate because racism or extremism or something.

The time for anyone in power to worry is when the peasants start to say things they are not allowed to say and get away with it. And, of course, that goes all the way down from national politics to office politics.

Really, the gap between private truth and public lie is a way for experts to measure the power of the rulers.