In 1856, Alexis de Tocqueville—perhaps best known as the documentarian of Democracy in America—published his keen and biting analysis of French society’s experiments in popular governance, The Old Regime and the Revolution. Among the most important observations made therein is Tocqueville’s conclusion that the French monarchy’s collapse came not when conditions in the country were at their worst, most oppressive and insufferable, but rather, when they were improving. Privately, the French Third Estate (the common people) hated the First and Second Estates (the clergy and the nobility, respectively) for decades before the Revolution. The Third Estate nevertheless maintained its public deference, largely because that was simply the way things were done; that’s the way people were expected to behave, whether or not they believed it was right or just or fair. As Tocqueville put it, “It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution…Feudalism at the height of its power had not inspired Frenchmen with so much hatred as it did on the eve of its eclipse.”
Roughly 135 years after Tocqueville wrote about the collapse of one of Europe’s ugliest and most corrupt regimes, Timur Kuran, a brilliant Turkish-American economist, offered his own analysis of private truths, public lies, and their effect on revolutionary sentiment in authoritarian regimes. In a series of articles and then in his classic book, fittingly enough titled Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Kuran introduced the twin concepts of knowledge falsification and preference falsification—which explain the rise and persistence of social conditions that enable the prolongation of corrupt and oppressive regimes—and the related idea of a preference cascade—which explains the process of social change, up to and including revolution.
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