Preference Falsification, Marginal Cost, and Cancel Culture

In my earlier post on preference falsification, I argued that a culture of free speech and open debate is a necessary factor for the benefits of free speech to be fully realized. This post expands on that, examining a common fable involving preference falsification, how the dynamics of preference falsification are different in reality than the fable, and how what is commonly called “cancel culture” is a factor that undermines free speech culture and keeps preference falsification in place.

The fable, as you might have already guessed, is The Emperor’s New Clothes. In that fable, people privately hold the belief that the Emperor is naked, but publicly they express the belief that the Emperor is adorned in splendid garments, because they worry that expressing their private belief will make them appear like fools. However, a child eventually breaks this spell by loudly declaring the Emperor is naked. As soon as he does, the rest of the townspeople join in, and everyone realizes the Emperor is in fact truly naked.

In reality, however, a single person accurately declaring their private belief publicly is not sufficient to break the spell of preference falsification. People feel compelled to falsify their beliefs when they think the views they express are widespread — not universal. Take any proposition you care to imagine — call it p. Suppose 90% of people privately don’t accept p. However, people also think that 90% of people do accept p. To the extent that p has been moralized or politicized, there is a strong reason for those who reject p privately to affirm p publicly. A single person here and there who openly rejects p will simply seem like someone in the (assumed) 10% that rejects p.

This is where marginal cost comes in. In the fable, the first person who accurately declares his public belief faces no sanction of any kind — and everyone immediately becomes willing to publicly admit that they, too, believe the Emperor is naked. In a more realistic scenario, as soon as someone says “the Emperor has no clothes!”, the rest of the crowd would still be strongly inclined to openly shun and mock the person who said it. After all, according to what everyone believed, only the foolish would be unable to see the Emperor’s new clothes — and certainly some foolish people exist. So obviously some people would see the Emperor as naked.

A single person declaring the Emperor has no clothes may be nothing more than a fool exposing his own foolishness. Do you immediately join him and risk making yourself look like another fool in the crowd? What if, as soon as that first person declares the Emperor is naked, the crowd immediately mocks them as an unenlightened rube who can’t see the obviously splendid garb adorning the Emperor? Most people, I suspect, would feel the urge to pretend they could see the Emperor’s clothes an join in on the mockery. The marginal cost of being the first person to declare the Emperor naked would be very high.

One of the arguments Musa al-Gharbi makes in his book We Have Never Been Woke is that each “Awokening” is strikingly parallel to the Awokenings that came before. Cancel culture, he points out, was a common feature of the second Great Awokening, although at the time it was described as “trashing.” He quotes from a magazine published in the 1970s describing the practice:

Trashing has reached epidemic proportions…What is “trashing,” this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little?…It is not done to expose disagreements or resolve disputes. It is done to disparage and destroy. The means vary…Whatever methods are used, trashing involves a violation of one’s integrity, a declaration of one’s worthlessness, and an impugning of one’s motives. In effect, what is attacked is not one’s ideas, but one’s self. This attack is accomplished by making you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist. These feelings are reinforced when you are isolated from your friends as they become convinced that their association with you is similarly inimical to the Movement and to themselves. Any support of you will taint them. Eventually all your colleagues join in a chorus of condemnation which cannot be silenced, and you are reduced to a mere parody of yourself.

Whether it’s being mocked by the crowd watching the Emperor’s parade, or being trashed, or being canceled, the cost of accurately revealing one’s private beliefs can be very high, even when that private belief is actually widely held. In my previous post, I mentioned how nearly 90% of students feel pressured to present themselves are more left-wing than they actually are because they believe their social and academic success depends on it.

But while costly, this is also a diminishing marginal cost. As the person most willing to defy the crowd makes their private beliefs publicly known, they make others slightly more willing to do so themselves, because those others feel slightly less alone in their beliefs. This can make someone who was slightly less willing to defy the crowd now willing to do so as well — and so on. Eventually, there is some tipping point where what was hidden private knowledge can all come cascading out as public knowledge, and everyone in the crowed becomes willing to admit that they, too, see the Emperor as naked.

In the absence of a free speech culture, however, this tipping point may never be reached. Suppose there were 1,000 people in the crowd, and the tipping point would come at the 150th person. Once the 150th person says they, too, see the Emperor is naked, suddenly everyone’s true opinion comes out as well. If cancel culture, or trashing, or whatever you prefer to call it, keeps the cost of revealing one’s private preference so high that it remains above the marginal cost that 150th person is willing to pay, the Emperor will remain naked and the majority of the crowd will still continue to falsify their beliefs.

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