Revolutions happen when a dissident says enough is enough

Next year is the 30th anniversary of the publication of a book that explains much about how we’ve arrived at where we are.

It helps explain why so few people spoke out against Covid lockdowns, and why after 70% of Australians told pollsters they’d vote for the Voice to Parliament only 39.9% did so.

The book I’m talking about is Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification by Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American academic currently a professor of economics and political science at Duke University in the United States. It’s a work that makes a powerful argument for the freedom to speak your mind. When you have that freedom, revolutions happen.

This is how the first chapter begins:

Imagine that a person in a position to alter your career invites you to a party at his home.  When you arrive at the party, the talk of the moment seems to be about the living room’s pale neutral colours, the latest trend in interior decoration.  The look does not appeal to you, but you would rather not say so, lest your host be hurt.  Feeling pressured to say something, you compliment his ‘sophisticated taste.’  A while later you find yourself in a conversation on wasteful development projects in Latin America.  Someone pompously asserts that under socialism there would be no waste.  Although you find the claim preposterous, you let it go unchallenged, to avoid sparking a divisive debate.

With the advancing hour, you get bored and start itching to leave.  A voice inside objects that it would be imprudent to be the first to make a move.  So you stay on, hoping that somebody else will comment on the late hour and signal a readiness to depart, giving you an opportunity to slip out without becoming the focus of attention.  At long last someone stands up to leave, and to your secret delight, the party unravels.  Thanking your host for a ‘marvellous evening,’ you head out the door, grateful that it was not you who initiated the exodus.

Your evening contained several instances of preference falsification, the act of misrepresenting one’s genuine wants under perceived social pressures.  In admiring the bland décor, remaining silent on Latin America, delaying your departure, and stating that you had a delightful time, you conveyed impressions at odds with your private thoughts and desires, at least partly to avoid disapproval.

Sometimes preference falsification is necessary for people to co-exist.  Telling people exactly what you think of them is not the route to harmonious relationships.  The question is when do you choose to lie and when you don’t

When you chose to keep silent on Latin America, you deprived your fellow guests of your personal knowledge.  Have you spoken up, you might have influenced how some guests think, or will think, about Latin American development.  They might have spread your thoughts to others, thus helping to increase pressure for viable reforms.

I’d previously heard of Kuran but I didn’t start following his work until he was mentioned last year in The Wall Street Journal as one of the few university professors willing to speak out about the moral cowardice of college administrators in the wake of the anti-Semitic protests on campuses.

Kuran said this about what’s happening:

US universities did not go off track after October 7, or as encampments started going up on campuses across the nation.  Events since October 7 have merely exposed the discriminatory practices of universities.  It has become as clear as daylight that the feelings of some identity groups matter less than those of others; that campus speech codes are meant to protest some groups from micro-annoyances while expecting other groups to live with mega-threats; and that the allowable campus protests depend on what is being protested.

That applies to Australian universities too.  (My colleague at the Institute of Public Affairs, Bella d’Abrera has just released research on the number of teaching and research staff at Australia’s eight elite universities compared to their administrative staff.  57% of the 116,000 employees at those universities work in administration.  Bureaucrats, not intellectual leaders, now run universities.)

Kuran grew up in Turkey, then studied at Stanford University and taught at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and the University of Southern California.  Private Truths, ironically enough published by Harvard University Press, is part textbook, part statistical explanation of why people lie, and part history of how freedom is won.  Kuran explains how communism in Eastern Europe, which had endured for decades and which, from the outside, appeared impregnable, collapsed in a matter of weeks.  In essence, regimes built on lies collapse when someone is brave enough to tell the truth.  Such regimes can exist only because individuals ‘falsify their preferences’, i.e. say things and do things they don’t believe in.  They do so to fit in or because it’s easier or to gain some sort of advantage or out of fear.

Citizens of communist societies understood that, when under attack from authorities, they could not count on friends, not even on close friends with similar private views.  In Poland’s relatively relaxed decade of the 1980s, a schoolteacher who criticized her headmistress in a faculty meeting received no support from her colleagues.  Yet later she learned that they were ‘very glad that the headmistress had heard the truth.’

Describing the Soviet Union under Stalin, Leszek Kolakowski observes that a common requirement for survival was talebearing.  People earned the right to be left alone and to join the privileged ruling class by spying on, and destroying, their neighbours, friends, and co-workers.  Multitudes thus ‘became accessories to crime for the sake of personal advancement.’  At a later date, about 20,000 secret police officers and 150,000 informers were on the payroll of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior.  Additionally, several hundred thousand people spied regularly on their acquaintances without pay.  In total, up to 5 percent of the population served the regime as paid or unpaid informants…

Propaganda went hand in hand with efforts to regulate public discourse.  Under communism, observes a Hungarian sociologist, ‘traditional social networks, local, professional, cultural, religious, and – to some extent – even family networks, were destroyed by sword and fire.

A complementary obstacle was censorship.  Scholarship was tightly regulated, with punishments meted out to researchers who departed from official canons… Nor were journalists and other writers permitted to discuss censorship itself.

Preference falsification produces policies the public would reject in a vote taken by secret ballot.  Another consequence is that ‘to conceal our private preferences successfully we must hide the knowledge on which they rest.’ We must reinforce our preference falsification through knowledge falsification.  In doing so, ‘we distort, corrupt, and impoverish the knowledge in the public domain.  We conceal from others facts we know to be true and expose them to ones we consider false.’  Kuran tells of what happened to Ivan Khudenko, who in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s operated a farm in Kazakhstan growing alfalfa using a form of private enterprise.

The experiment was a huge economic success. Yet the farm was declared a capitalist failure and shut down, and Khudenko was arrested in 1973.  Shortly after his trial, he died in prison.

Not that communist rule did away with all forms of public protest.  Newspapers received complaints about shabby housing, about the neglected graves of famous poets, and about the poor upkeep of neighbourhood playgrounds.  Yet protesters tended to stay within a Party-defined zone of acceptability.  They generally refrained from probing too deeply into issues and avoided challenging communism itself.  A schoolteacher writing furious letters about a defective appliance would stay clear of blaming the system that produces useless appliances.

Reading this, I was reminded of Noam Chomsky’s comment:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views.  That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Eventually, those living a lie cannot tell the difference between the lie and the truth, and it’s for someone else to reveal reality.

Outsiders’ minds have not been conditioned by local sensitivities.  They are also freer from the pressures that make insiders engage in preference falsification.  Thus the most penetrating account of Soviet communism, 1984, was written by an Englishman who had never set foot in a communist country.

Kuran is a member of the advisory council of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).  FIRE is the organisation that intervened in Elon Musk’s still continuing court case against the efforts of Julie Inman Grant, the Australian government’s eSafety Commissioner to impose a global ban on X displaying the video of the alleged terrorist attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney.  In Private Truths, Kuran says this about higher education.

In an education manual distributed by the American Sociological Association, a Brandeis professor asserts that ‘it is not open to debate whether a white student is racist…He/she simply is.’  To hold that an assert is ‘not open to debate’ is to say that dissenters who speak up deserve punishment and vilification.

For all the concern about racist speech, hardly any effort is made to regulate demeaning characterisations of whites.  Under current conditions on American campuses, much can be said that offends whites, without fear of punishment.

Like the double standards in college admissions, those in speech and behaviour have been justified in the name of racial harmony and integration.  On the whole, however, they are probably promoting discord and segregation.

There’s nothing inevitable about history.  Small events can have an enormous impact, chance plays a role, and individuals make a difference.  Revolutions happen when a ‘nonconformist, or pioneer, or innovator, or dissident, or misfit’ dares to say ‘enough is enough’.

Every culture exalts historical figures who have suffered for holding to their beliefs, resisting subordination, or opposing authority.  A recurring theme in the epics of the Turkish novelist Yasar Kemal is that of an outlaw whom peasants revere as a dauntless fighter against oppressive conditions they themselves cannot resist.  Likewise, the hero of a Hollywood Western is typically a free-willed man who stands apart from the crowd and refuses to accept injustice.

A basic reason we consider uncompromising independence a heroic trait is that it is the exception in human history, not the rule.

Recommended Watching and Listening and an End of the Financial Year special request:

• Talking of dissidents, if you haven’t yet watched Climate: The Movie do so while you can. It’s difficult to find on YouTube (which proves the point of the film.) Featuring some of the world’s best climate scientists and physicists, including Professor Dick Lindzen, Professor Ross McKitrick, Dr Willie Soon, Professor Steven Koonin, Professor Will Happer, Nobel Prize winner Dr John Clauser, Dr Sallie Baliunas, and Dr Roy Spencer, it’s an accessible and fascinating introduction to the science and economics of climate change and the corruption to scientific enquiry.
• Still on the subject of dissidents, the Institute of Public Affairs this week released the video of Professor Jay Bhattacharya’s speech on his visit to Melbourne on ‘The devastating consequences of COVID lockdowns‘.
• If you’d like to learn more about Kuran and his work, his discussion last year on ‘The Seen and the Unseen‘, India’s most popular weekly podcast, is fascinating (although you probably won’t be able to listen to it in one sitting – it’s just over five hours long).   And I learned a lot from Kuran’s conversation a few months ago on the ‘Political History of the Middle East’ (it’s an hour).
• Lastly – a request.  The research and the voice of the Institute of the Institute of Public Affairs have never been more important to the future of Australia.  For more than 80 years, the IPA has fought for the Australian way of life.  If you’d like to make a tax deductible donation to the IPA’s 2024 End of Financial Year Appeal to support its research, you can do so here.