""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.""
"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."
People in the Soviet Union often privately hated the regime but pretended to support it out of fear, creating a false impression that dissent was rare. Todd Rose labels this phenomenon a 'collective illusion': widely shared opinions that individuals believe are uniquely theirs, causing silence. Collective illusions can arise in any society that demands cultural conformity and are present in parts of the United States today. These dynamics weaken democratic processes and harm individual well-being. One method to detect collective illusions is to ask people about social pressure to conceal their true views.
Read at The Atlantic
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