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Several years ago, I did some lecturing at a university in Moscow. One of my Russian colleagues had been involved in the dissident student movement in the 1980s, and talked a lot about how bad the regime was and how much most people hated it. I was curious about how, if it was so unpopular, the Soviet system managed to survive for so long. “Brute force?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was the fact that people pretended to support the government out of fear, giving everyone else the impression that they were alone in their private opinion, so they stayed silent. But eventually, the dissidents helped people figure out that hating the system was actually the majority view—at which point, the jig was up for the Kremlin.”
What had kept the U.S.S.R. population in chains for so long was what the author and scientist Todd Rose has termed a “collective illusion,” precisely this phenomenon of people holding an opinion that is widely shared but that they believe is theirs alone—thus staying silent from fear of persecution or rejection. In his writing and through the work of a think tank that he co-founded, called Populace, Rose has shown that this illusion affects not only people living under a dictatorship but also those in any society that demands a certain kind of cultural conformity. We even have our own version of it in parts of America today. Although no one would confuse the modern-day United States with the old Soviet Union, the dynamics of collective illusion are harming both our democracy and our individual well-being. Here is how to know if you are falling prey to a collective illusion—and how to break free from it without fear.
One way to find evidence of collective illusions is to ask people about the social pressure they may face to stay silent on their true point of view. As scholars at Populace point out in a recently published survey, this pressure is pervasive in the U.S., where 58 percent of people in a sampling of more than 19,000 citizens said they believed that “most people cannot share their honest opinions about sensitive topics in society today,” and 61 percent admitted to self-silencing.
Because of this pressure, people are routinely giving what they perceive to be more acceptable opinions in their social circles than those they truly possess. Take, for example, the Populace report’s findings about the controversial topic of “gender and diversity quotas” in executive positions within business. The demographic group in America most likely to publicly agree with this form of progressive action—showing 48 percent approval—is Gen Z, young people who have come of age in the past decade, when these ideas became more mainstream. But do these young adults truly agree with these kinds of DEI policies? When asked in the Populace survey what they privately believe, only 15 percent of them say they do—the same percentage as Baby Boomers. In other words, nearly 69 percent of Gen Zers who say that they agree publicly with such quotas are hiding their true feelings.
Or consider the question of whether we live in a mostly fair society. This issue has become a political football of late; older, more right-leaning Americans argue that we do, and younger, more left-leaning people say that we don’t. Populace finds that 62 percent of people from the Silent Generation (those born before 1946) publicly agree with the statement (compared with just 32 percent of Gen Zers), as do 50 percent of Republicans (versus 32 percent of Democrats). Privately, however, the rates of agreement among those in the survey are just 6 percent of older Americans and 11 percent of Republicans. In other words, Americans of all ages are now much more doubtful about whether they live in a fair society than they like to admit in public.
Everyone accepts a degree of “going along to get along” to make community life run smoothly, but the phenomenon being tracked here goes well beyond that. Rose and his colleagues see in these findings a threat to our society, insofar as self-silencing and collective illusions indicate a tyranny of the minority that suppresses citizens’ perception of the truth and free expression. The problem surpasses this, however. Collective illusions also exacerbate the negative well-being trends that I have previously documented. Saying one thing when you believe another is bad for your happiness. As researchers have long shown, this dissonance can induce psychological discomfort when it cannot be resolved. No surprise, then, that such dissonance is a common side effect of social anxiety and also associated with symptoms of depression. It creates a sense of dishonesty and inauthenticity: a gap between collective illusion and individual disillusion, you might say. This is what George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” identified in his novel 1984, in which people are dehumanized by being forced to accede to two contradictory ideas—in this case, one thought and the other stated.
Why don’t people just say what they think and fix the dissonance? That’s not so easy. To part ways with what you believe or fear is the majority opinion, especially in a community such as a political group, means risking social exclusion, which is scary and painful. Experiments demonstrating this phenomenon have involved subjecting humans to fMRI brain scans while they play a multiperson game from which they are suddenly excluded. This exiling experience stimulated the subjects’ anterior cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that processes emotional pain. When people go along with an opinion they disagree with but think is popular, they are in a catch-22 of inviting pain through cognitive dissonance by trying to avoid the pain of social rejection.
The way out of the collective-illusion catch-22 is to conquer the fear of rejection from stating your true opinion. The best guide to this that I have encountered comes from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of this magazine who helped formulate its motto, “Of no party or clique.” His 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” about which I have written before, is a handbook for breaking free of collective illusions. Here’s my three-part summary.
1. Stop lying.
Self-censorship creates a pattern of personal dishonesty. It’s one thing to refrain from saying something you think out of politeness; it is another thing entirely to say something you don’t think for the sake of self-advancement or out of fear. This, according to Emerson, is a self-betrayal. “Check this lying hospitality and lying affection,” he counsels. “Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.” For Emerson, to voluntarily utter a lie just to fit in is like choosing to live in a prison: True happiness requires freedom in the form of honesty, come what may. To those who might not like hearing your contrary opinion, Emerson offers this counsel: “If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.”
2. Reframe your independence.
Contradicting the majority is, of course, difficult and frightening. Emerson’s answer to this fear is to see it in a new way: “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Your evolutionary tendency is to see the act of breaking from the group in terms of rejection and isolation, both of which are painful and scary. They evoke the image of one cast out of the tribe and wandering alone and defenseless. Nonsense, Emerson says. Recast rejection as going your own way, and isolation as benign solitude from the deafening chorus of agreement with what is popular but wrong. Make ideological independence your personal brand and hold your head high.
3. Just walk away.
This advice might sound as if Emerson is advocating that you stomp off with your middle finger in the air. If you are a normal person, that sounds like a terrible way to behave—and fortunately, such defiance is not necessary. All that you need to become independent in your ideas is to separate your attention and energy from the source of acceptable but, in your mind, incorrect views. “If you are noble, I will love you,” he writes, but “if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.” If, for example, your friends are, in your private opinion, spouting nonsense, you don’t have to refute or condemn them. Just quietly stop listening to them, and get some new friends.
To strengthen democracy and improve your happiness, here is the question I would ask you to consider: Which of your private opinions are different from what you tell others? They shouldn’t be hard to find. After all, as the Populace report bluntly states, “every single demographic group is misrepresenting their true opinions on multiple sensitive issues.”
Next, make a list of your unpopular opinions and an Emersonian plan to quietly declare your independence from what you believe is the erroneous mainstream or socially sanctioned view. In some cases, you will find that this seeming consensus wasn’t mainstream at all but a collective illusion, and you might just be the one to break it. In other cases, you will find that you truly are in the minority, and will walk alone. So be it.
The post An Emersonian Guide to Ridding Yourself of Collective Illusions appeared first on The Atlantic.
