Transcript

In a perfect world, our public selves, the way I behave, the way I speak, the things I do are the same as our private selves. At its best public opinion holds a mirror to us, and it reflects exactly who we are. What collective illusions due to that relationship is turning into a funhouse of mirrors, which is fatal to free society. Collective illusions are situations where most people in a group go along with a view they don't agree with, because they incorrectly believe that most people agree with it. It's not just that we're misreading a few people it is that the majority thinks the majority believes something that they don't. We are all part of creating and sustaining the illusion.

We've known about collective illusions for over 100 years. But here's the thing, our cultural and technological conditions have changed to make creating and sustaining collective illusions so easy that they've just proliferated at a scale we've never seen before in history, we have found them almost everywhere we look from the kind of lives we want to live to the country, we want to live in the way we want to treat each other, and even what we expect out of our institutions.