How to Beat the Tyranny of What ‘Everyone Knows’
How can we better understand what is ‘common knowledge’, asked free speech hero Lord Young recently? Toby cites Steven Pinker’s new book, When Everyone Know That Everyone Knows…, in which he presents an understanding of how tyrants manage to stave off popular revolt in spite of widespread discontent by distorting what is understood to be common knowledge. Pinker uses the famous example of Václav Havel, the great Czech dissident, who cited a greengrocer displaying a sign in his shop window saying “Workers of the World Unite”, even though his faith in Marxism has long since lapsed. This act caused others to assume they’re alone in dissenting from communist dogma and so the tyranny continues.
Consider almost any apparently current ‘common knowledge’ today – Net Zero, critical race theory, trans, ‘diversity is our strength’ – and you will find instead a minority concern elevated to ‘common knowledge’ with the dictatorial overlord shouting down those who dare speak against it. This is most acutely felt within academia and certain corporates, but all of us at some point will have self-censored for fear our opinions are not common knowledge when in fact they probably are. If as a society we can succeed in getting a proper handle on ‘common knowledge’ we will greatly improve our country and our sense of ease within it.
Lord Young continues: “I think there’s a great deal in this [Pinker’s assessment] and I wish I knew what the solution was, apart from defending those brave academics who find themselves being targeted by their pitchfork-wielding colleagues.” Unlike our dear leader Lord Young, I do think there are other solutions to this issue. It’s not easy, but unless we are honest about what we think and what ‘common knowledge’ is, infinite nonsense will continue to be dumped on us, with the majority thinking the majority want it, when actually the majority don’t. And frankly I’ve had enough of it all and I can confidently say you have too.
1 Share our own ‘common knowledge’
There is no getting around it, but all of us have to practice saying what we think at work and at play. It is not good enough leaving it to Lord Young to defend those brave enough to speak out. If more of us had spoken up earlier, a lot of garbage could have been swerved. We can do so thoughtfully and politely, but as Douglas Murray says, “Come in the water’s warm.” I cannot convey how exhilarating it is, politely disagreeing with someone else’s complacent ‘common knowledge’. They generally fold and don’t argue back – please give it a go!
2 Avoid wearing or using regime imagery
We don’t yet live in a tyranny so it’s still possible not to wear rainbow lanyards, use pro-nouns in your email, silly symbols in your X bio, or any of the other figurative ‘Workers of the World Unite’ signage. If you’re worried about overweaning members of the HR department, do it anyway because – guess what – many of them will not believe in it either.
3 Understand the power of propaganda in distorting ‘common knowledge’
James Holland, the World War Two historian, spoke powerfully in a podcast with Lex Fridman about the effective menace of propaganda:
And for all the modernity of the world in which we live in today, most people believe what they’re told repeatedly. … They still do. If you just repeat, repeat, repeat over and over again, people will believe it.
Laura Dodsworth is very good on how to recognise and resist the power of manipulation. Understanding that an issue has been forced on people by propaganda makes it much easier to speak against those ideas that are misunderstood to be ‘common knowledge’. We English are polite creatures and don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; understanding that people’s views around contentious issues are not actually self-generated but imposed by propaganda takes away that worry of inflicting a social sting.
4 Step outside the historical determinism a.k.a. ‘right side of history’ view of the world
We can blame those Marxist historians for all of this ‘right side of history’ bunkum. It’s the trite way of saying that humans have no sense of individual agency and we are all at the mercy of great historical progressive tides, therefore our voices don’t matter. Eric Hobsbawn erroneously wrote:
The French Revolution was not made by conspiracies, nor by the deliberate acts of individuals, however prominent. It was the result of a long chain of circumstances, economic, social and political, which made its outbreak, if not its precise form, inevitable.
I’m not sure Trump or Musk would agree with that view of history. Indeed, we are all beings with free will. History is directed by those men and women who act, who speak, who write, who persuade. Whether in a family, boardroom or shop floor setting, please speak up and you will no doubt find others who agree.
5 Cultivate free association
Once you’ve experienced the exhilaration that comes from meeting a like-minded person, you just want more of it. Václav Benda, another Czech dissident, wrote:
Free association is the only way to restore the broken tissue of society, to reweave the fabric of human solidarity that the regime has torn apart; it is the antidote to the atomisation and isolation that totalitarianism imposes.
I interpret this to mean essentially: let’s do more of meeting likeminded people in the pub. There are terrific events run by, say, the Spectator and UnHerd, but generally they are the ‘elites’ talking to the audience. Let’s generate events whereby the audience can talk and connect with each other. Why not start at home, invite some mates over and just say what you think? That way ‘common knowledge’ will be more readily understood.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
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“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
Charles MacKay (1814-1889), Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
I meet up annually with a group of old university friends. I have spoken up on several topics, in fact pretty much every contentious topic since Brexit, including President Trump, covid lockdowns, masks and vaccines, the demonisation of straight white men, net zero and most recently illegal immigration and the aliens flooding over our borders. My old friends are mostly a mixture of teachers, HR managers and middle managers in blue chip companies. Needless to say my views are not welcome. I know that we will drift apart sooner rather than later and that is ok. But I never fail to be astonished by the uniformity of their views, until I remind myself that they are all avid consumers of the BBC and the Guardian.
If it’s any consolation my old colleague was a staunch Remainer and I was always a staunch Brexiteer. He has now come around to seeing how Brexit was the right way to vote considering how the limitations of the EU have become even more obvious since then.
Yes, I bet they love diversity, a very limited version of course, what they hate is diversity of thought. I had a similar experience about 10 years ago, I found that in the company of certain people I would be involved in discussion on certain issues and thought that I’d acquitted myself quite well, then one day I realised that I’d become a demon in their eyes, I found myself continuing conversations with new acquaintances a few days later, they had clearly been primed to deal with me. I tested them out on various subjects and days later the same thing happened. Clearly they had been talking behind my back. I stopped mixing with them. So now I rarely bother with such people but the lesson to me was that these people are ideologically conditioned so any counter argument simply does not work on them, in fact I’ve come to believe that it is impossible to change their views because to do so would mean them challenging their own viewpoint and therefore their ideology. This is why they have so many contradictions. I think Ian McGilchrist explains the process quite well in his book The master and his Emissary, the… Read more »
Yes, one of them (the HR manager) told us with a straight face and without a hint of irony that her job was to deliver a skilled, diverse workforce for her employers. Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll have a look.
It’s a long read, 616 pages, there is another that comes in two volumes, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 1600 pages. Both are very important works but are expensive. But it’s widely covered on YouTube and McGilchrist has his own channel. He has been interviewed at length on the subject and you may come across a video dealing with the problem lefties seem to have. He also deals with the problems in society and the way we have been trained to think.
Located it thanks. On my list👍.
Spot on BB. I engage all ages, both men and women, on the golf course, in the local cafe and the GP’s waiting room, and I find that the most open minded and prepared to discuss current topics are the ones who are not on social media, do not listen to the BBC and particularly the Met Office.
Engage with all and sundry at every opportunity and you will find it fascinating to discover who thinks what and why; but to do so, I find that you need to have some clear examples of the facts to lay a foundation for the discussion. It is the lack of understanding of facts and statistics that indicates to me that the level of core education has fallen and the indoctrination of false premise from the BBC and popular press produces the apathetic outcomes that we see in elections.
The quality of competence in our politicians in all parties only strengthen my view that ‘feelings’ (wokeness), lack of work ethic and diminishing educational standards are at the bottom of this depressing state of affairs.
I have exactly the same problem with my ex work colleagues to a man/woman they have been well indoctrinated in the propaganda of the BBC and the rest of the MSM. I fact one of them even told me “I think you’ve been dropped on your head during covid”. They really don’t want to know I think it’s the ostrich effect.
In Rationality Pinker says that he berated two colleagues during COVID for saying that it didn’t grow exponentially. Of course his colleagues were right given the prior art since 1840. So much for common knowledge.
I have just started reading Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty”. In the first 30 pages he explains that we all depend on huge amounts of knowledge we don’t have ourselves and we don’t even realise. His point is that in civilised society all sorts of practices and knowledge have evolved.
Some were once known but now forgotten. Others were never appreciated even when first they evolved.
On the Hobsbawm point I suspect he was right. What changed was Marx and the Communists conspired to force the issue. Despite their claimed confidence in the inevitability of revolt by the proletariat the Communist elites could not wait so they pre-empted it.
Having seen Communism very publicly shown a failure when the USSR collapsed the Marxist left accelerated in the west the Frankfurt school techniques they had been practicing since the 1930s. They used money from fools such as Gates and Siris and from left leaning charities to promote our current troublesome fads: MMGW, Net Zero, wokery and they opportunistically kept on Covid.
how does that sound.
I think that is correct. I would add that this ideology was developed when poverty and authoritarian governance was the way things were done. They fail to see that in a modern society where people can have almost whatever they want with a relatively small amount of effort it has become redundant and even destructive. Humanity is on the verge of creating a society where poverty can be eradicated, the only thing getting in the way is, paradoxically, socialism. Their ideas are so out of date it is now criminally insane to continue in such a way.
I had this fear until a Damascene moment in early 2021. I thought I must be a sociopath as I just couldn’t see Covid as the extinction event that everyone else around me who started weirdly body swerving and masking up did. It had to be me who was a selfish, heartless prick because practically 100% of the media and all around me bought into the story and the horrific measures brought in to counter what to me was just a bad flu. Google searches didn’t show anyone who agreed with me (plenty prepared to ridicule me). Then one day in London I happened upon thousands of anti-lockdown protesters. They came in all races, both sexes young and old. They informed me that I was very far from alone. It was such a weight lifted. Oddly later on, a BBC report described the demonstration as “a hundred or so far right conspiracy theorists” along with displaying footage of Union Jack clad young men throwing missiles at the police. I stayed with the protest for two hours and saw nothing of this. The atmosphere was friendly if a little apprehensive as a few members had been subjected to unprovoked baton charges… Read more »
Gary Neville, Emily Maitless, Jeremy Vine, the list goes on…
It’s a great help to have lots of people on sites like this largely agree with what you say, it’s a great confidence boost to know there’s plenty of like minded people out there. However when it comes to trying to make a small contribution towards bringing about positive change it’s much better to have one person who disagrees with you stop and think for a minute about what you’ve just said than getting 100 likes in an “echo chamber”.
The missing component is fear of losing your job if you don’t march under their banner “Save the Planet”. Main villains Whitehall mandarins running the departments of education and health. A simple Google search under Carbon Emissions Policy of…(choose any ministry or department) will show their diktats no one is prepared to challenge.
I didn’t discover the old Lockdown Sceptics until well into 2021. I did however slug it out incognito on a scientific platform frequented by lockdown true-believers…
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/variants-and-vaccines
…Scroll past the article down to the third comment, “London Calling,” by Edward R Murrow III and click “see more”. Bit of a period piece, I suppose. To whet the appetite:
This is London. I am standing on a rooftop overlooking London and at the moment everything is quiet.
Over to my left is the great Dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Once the devout worshippers are inside St Paul’s, the daily service nowadays invariably begins with the newly normal traditional chant of HANDS, FACE, SPACE, uttered in unison by the entire congregation, continues with the newly re-worded Lord’s Prayer that begins, “Our Father who art in heaven, lead us this day out of our daily spread…” and ends with a rendition of Bunyan’s timeless hymn, “Onward Christian Self Isolators.”
My entire family – that is my 2 children and their spouses -have well-paid jobs that rely on “what everybody knows”. Two in UK Universities, the others live in the USA working for the UN and the other for WindFarms. My teenage grandsons in Schools being no doubt taught the ideologies of the day – the planet is dying and you can choose what sex you want to be.
I cannot open a discussion with them that involves my true feeling about Mass Immigration, Trans Issues or Net Zero. The 2 in the US have had the future of their jobs hugely impacted by Trump. I think DJT’s views on the Climate Scam and Wind Farms in particular are spot on.
I can envisage a major pile-on at the Christmas table should I tell them my true feelings….. so I intend, yet again, to keep schtum…. I wish things were different but things have changed since 2020 and now these subjects are largely avoided. Cowardly I know, but I have no confidence that I would be able to make a good argument with them against these lies on which their entire existence depends.
It is a sad state of affairs when people feel they cannot speak freely.
I had a major discussion with my daughter about the trans issue. It was heated, and I would have preferred if we had been aligned, but we continue to love each other. Had a lovely day out with her yesterday.
i do feel the need to occasionally voice my views. Where else are they going to hear these views? And I just hope the alternative view filters through in some way. I don’t expect to change their mind instantly.
I do wish there was some sort of playbook as to how to discuss subjects with family. Maybe asking questions is the way forward?
That’s exactly how I feel when I get together with my old friends. And President Trump appears to be a particularly contentious. It’s like walking on eggshells the entire time. And then there is the issue that we are all guests in someone’s house and I certainly don’t want to offend the hosts or be disagreeable. But still…
I found the principle of ‘Live not by Lies’ lifted a big burden off me when I realised there was nothing I could do about all the scandemic nonsense.
And they know that exchanging views down the pub or on WhatsApp might reveal the real truth so are making it illegal via spurious hate legislation. What next?
“.. let’s do more of meeting likeminded people in the pub”’. … Let’s generate events whereby the audience can talk and connect with each other. Why not start at home, invite some mates over and just say what you think? That way ‘common knowledge’ will be more readily understood.”
In my local area in Surrey, we do just that. Its easy to organise and word soon spreads. We have a weekly coffee morning with attendance regularly reaching 25 or so out of a total pool of 50 likeminded folk. In the milder months we have a weekly Saturday outdoor drinks gathering. Also we hold other social events like walks, pub evenings etc and an annual big garden party. We spread ideas, discuss current events and generally keep ourselves sane.
Being able to speak one’s mind in a ‘safe space‘ like this is an excellent antidote to the onslaught of nonsense we are bombarded with on a daily basis, and a real tonic. I strongly recommend DS readers/commenters try something similar.
First of all we need to stop 30+ pubs a week closing. Also Joanna I don’t mean to sound a clever clogs but have you ever heard of A Stand in the Park more commonly known as ASITP? Or perhaps it’s too conspiracy theory oriented for you? Except the fact that most if not all the so called conspiracy theories that I heard at my local ASITP over the last 4-5 years have come true! They are a brilliant community highly recommended. Some have even branched out with their own newspaper “Bedford Matters” again highly recommended although I’m sure there are others.