The underlying thesis is that in societies where people don't feel safe expressing themselves they will have, but not exhibit, their political preferences. This can lead to preference cascades ripping through a society, when through subtle signaling or even osmosis individual learn they are not alone and feel freer and freer to express themselves.
It is the political version of Hemingway's dialogue on the money problems of one of the characters in The Sun Also Rises:
“How Did You Go Bankrupt?”
“Two Ways. Gradually and Then Suddenly.”
This is supposed to be the reason the American CIA was caught flat-footed by the rapidity of the collapse of the Soviet empire and Eastern European communist governments, exemplified by the Berlin Wall coming down.
I don't know if this is the case, I'll have to read the book.
From the Harvard University Press:
Private Truths, Public LiesThe Social Consequences of Preference FalsificationPreference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies, Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.
A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.
In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.
Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India’s caste system.
This seems related to Vaclav Havel's essay on the greengrocer in communist Czechoslovakia that we've visited previously, "The Power of the Powerless".
That sets the stage. The next phase is when more and more people see that others think as they do.
Also from Harvard University Press:
Private Truths and Public Lies in Egypt
....Kuran’s insight and its relation to explaining social and political change is that the prevalence of preference falsification means that there are always people simmering behind public choices with which they privately disagree. When the conditions regulating public expression shift, there can be a swift and massive recalibration of “public lies.” The following comes from a chapter of Kuran’s book titled “Unforeseen Political Revolutions”:
Where the status quo owes its stability to preference falsification, there are people waiting for an opportunity, and perhaps others who can easily be induced, to stand up for change. Some eye-opening event or an apparent shift in social pressures may cause public opposition to swell. The public preferences of individuals are interdependent, so a jump in public opposition may be self-augmenting. Under the right conditions, every jump will galvanize further jumps.
The potential for change is not fully observable. We can never know exactly how a given event will be interpreted; whether a new technology will alter the balance of political power; or what it would take to turn public opinion against the status quo. Such predictive limitations imply that shifts in public opinion, especially large shifts, may catch everyone by surprise. Yet an unforseen shift in public opinion may subsequently be explained with ease. The shift will bring into the open long-suppressed grievances and draw attention to factors that have made people cease supporting the status quo.
Kuran’s model introduces something called a “threshold sequence,” which can be understood as a statistical model for what are popularly referred to as “tipping points.”....
If this is the case it appears to be one way to battle totalitarians and other power freaks who have internalized Alinsky and whose most potent tool to keep people in line is to isolate them.
From Rules for Radicals, seventh chapter: Tactics:
Rules for Radicals #13 (longer version)
The thirteenth rule: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
(short version)
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
I'm no political theorist so as I say, I'll have to read the book.
