发表于 2025年10月10日
Several years ago, I did some lecturing at a university in Moscow. One of my Russian colleagues had been involved in the dissident student movement in the 1980s, and talked a lot about how bad the regime was and how much most people hated it. I was curious about how, if it was so unpopular, the Soviet system managed to survive for so long. “Brute force?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was the fact that people pretended to support the government out of fear, giving everyone else the impression that they were alone in their private opinion, so they stayed silent. But eventually, the dissidents helped people figure out that hating the system was actually the majority view—at which point, the jig was up for the Kremlin.”
What had kept the U.S.S.R. population in chains for so long was what the author and scientist Todd Rose has termed a “collective illusion,” precisely this phenomenon of people holding an opinion that is widely shared but that they believe is theirs alone—thus staying silent from fear of persecution or rejection. In his writing and through the work of a think tank that he co-founded, called Populace, Rose has shown that this illusion affects not only people living under a dictatorship but also those in any society that demands a certain kind of cultural conformity. We even have our own version of it in parts of America today. Although no one would confuse the modern-day United States with the old Soviet Union, the dynamics of collective illusion are harming both our democracy and our individual well-being. Here is how to know if you are falling prey to a collective illusion—and how to break free from it without fear.
One way to find evidence of collective illusions is to ask people about the social pressure they may face to stay silent on their true point of view. As scholars at Populace point out in a recently published survey, this pressure is pervasive in the U.S., where 58 percent of people in a sampling of more than 19,000 citizens said they believed that “most people cannot share their honest opinions about sensitive topics in society today,” and 61 percent admitted to self-silencing.
Because of this pressure, people are routinely giving what they perceive to be more acceptable opinions in their social circles than those they truly possess. Take, for example, the Populace report’s findings about the controversial topic of “gender and diversity quotas” in executive positions within business. The demographic group in America most likely to publicly agree with this form of progressive action—showing 48 percent approval—is Gen Z, young people who have come of age in the past decade, when these ideas became more mainstream. But do these young adults truly agree with these kinds of DEI policies? When asked in the Populace survey what they privately believe, only 15 percent of them say they do—the same percentage as Baby Boomers. In other words, nearly 69 percent of Gen Zers who say that they agree publicly with such quotas are hiding their true feelings.
Or consider the question of whether we live in a mostly fair society. This issue has become a political football of late; older, more right-leaning Americans argue that we do, and younger, more left-leaning people say that we don’t. Populace finds that 62 percent of people from the Silent Generation (those born before 1946) publicly agree with the statement (compared with just 32 percent of Gen Zers), as do 50 percent of Republicans (versus 32 percent of Democrats). Privately, however, the rates of agreement among those in the survey are just 6 percent of older Americans and 11 percent of Republicans. In other words, Americans of all ages are now much more doubtful about whether they live in a fair society than they like to admit in public.
Everyone accepts a degree of “going along to get along” to make community life run smoothly, but the phenomenon being tracked here goes well beyond that. Rose and his colleagues see in these findings a threat to our society, insofar as self-silencing and collective illusions indicate a tyranny of the minority that suppresses citizens’ perception of the truth and free expression. The problem surpasses this, however. Collective illusions also exacerbate the negative well-being trends that I have previously documented. Saying one thing when you believe another is bad for your happiness. As researchers have long shown, this dissonance can induce psychological discomfort when it cannot be resolved. No surprise, then, that such dissonance is a common side effect of social anxiety and also associated with symptoms of depression. It creates a sense of dishonesty and inauthenticity: a gap between collective illusion and individual disillusion, you might say. This is what George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” identified in his novel 1984, in which people are dehumanized by being forced to accede to two contradictory ideas—in this case, one thought and the other stated.
Why don’t people just say what they think and fix the dissonance? That’s not so easy. To part ways with what you believe or fear is the majority opinion, especially in a community such as a political group, means risking social exclusion, which is scary and painful. Experiments demonstrating this phenomenon have involved subjecting humans to fMRI brain scans while they play a multiperson game from which they are suddenly excluded. This exiling experience stimulated the subjects’ anterior cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that processes emotional pain. When people go along with an opinion they disagree with but think is popular, they are in a catch-22 of inviting pain through cognitive dissonance by trying to avoid the pain of social rejection.
The way out of the collective-illusion catch-22 is to conquer the fear of rejection from stating your true opinion. The best guide to this that I have encountered comes from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of this magazine who helped formulate its motto, “Of no party or clique.” His 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” about which I have written before, is a handbook for breaking free of collective illusions. Here’s my three-part summary.
**1. Stop lying.**
Self-censorship creates a pattern of personal dishonesty. It’s one thing to refrain from saying something you think out of politeness; it is another thing entirely to say something you don’t think for the sake of self-advancement or out of fear. This, according to Emerson, is a self-betrayal. “Check this lying hospitality and lying affection,” he counsels. “Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.” For Emerson, to voluntarily utter a lie just to fit in is like choosing to live in a prison: True happiness requires freedom in the form of honesty, come what may. To those who might not like hearing your contrary opinion, Emerson offers this counsel: “If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.”
**2. Reframe your independence.**
Contradicting the majority is, of course, difficult and frightening. Emerson’s answer to this fear is to see it in a new way: “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Your evolutionary tendency is to see the act of breaking from the group in terms of rejection and isolation, both of which are painful and scary. They evoke the image of one cast out of the tribe and wandering alone and defenseless. Nonsense, Emerson says. Recast rejection as going your own way, and isolation as benign solitude from the deafening chorus of agreement with what is popular but wrong. Make ideological independence your personal brand and hold your head high.
**3. Just walk away.**
This advice might sound as if Emerson is advocating that you stomp off with your middle finger in the air. If you are a normal person, that sounds like a terrible way to behave—and fortunately, such defiance is not necessary. All that you need to become independent in your ideas is to separate your attention and energy from the source of acceptable but, in your mind, incorrect views. “If you are noble, I will love you,” he writes, but “if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.” If, for example, your friends are, in your private opinion, spouting nonsense, you don’t have to refute or condemn them. Just quietly stop listening to them, and get some new friends.
To strengthen democracy and improve your happiness, here is the question I would ask you to consider: Which of your private opinions are different from what you tell others? They shouldn’t be hard to find. After all, as the Populace report bluntly states, “every single demographic group is misrepresenting their true opinions on multiple sensitive issues.”
Next, make a list of your unpopular opinions and an Emersonian plan to quietly declare your independence from what you believe is the erroneous mainstream or socially sanctioned view. In some cases, you will find that this seeming consensus wasn’t mainstream at all but a collective illusion, and you might just be the one to break it. In other cases, you will find that you truly are in the minority, and will walk alone. So be it.
Several years ago, I did some lecturing at a university in Moscow. One of my Russian colleagues had been involved in the dissident student movement in the 1980s, and talked a lot about how bad the regime was and how much most people hated it. I was curious about how, if it was so unpopular, the Soviet system managed to survive for so long. “Brute force?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it was the fact that people pretended to support the government out of fear, giving everyone else the impression that they were alone in their private opinion, so they stayed silent. But eventually, the dissidents helped people figure out that hating the system was actually the majority view—at which point, the jig was up for the Kremlin.”
几年前，我在莫斯科的一所大学做过几次讲座。我的一位俄罗斯同事曾在20世纪80年代参与过异议学生运动，他经常谈到当时的政权有多糟糕，以及大多数人对它的憎恨程度。我很好奇，既然苏联体制如此不得人心，它是如何维系了那么长时间的。我问道：“是靠武力镇压吗？”“不，”他说，“那是因为人们出于恐惧，假装支持政府，这让其他人误以为自己是唯一持有不同意见的人，所以他们都保持了沉默。但最终，那些异议人士帮助人们认识到，憎恨这个体制实际上是大多数人的看法——在那一刻，克里姆林宫的好日子也就到头了。”
What had kept the U.S.S.R. population in chains for so long was what the author and scientist Todd Rose has termed a “collective illusion,” precisely this phenomenon of people holding an opinion that is widely shared but that they believe is theirs alone—thus staying silent from fear of persecution or rejection. In his writing and through the work of a think tank that he co-founded, called Populace, Rose has shown that this illusion affects not only people living under a dictatorship but also those in any society that demands a certain kind of cultural conformity. We even have our own version of it in parts of America today. Although no one would confuse the modern-day United States with the old Soviet Union, the dynamics of collective illusion are harming both our democracy and our individual well-being. Here is how to know if you are falling prey to a collective illusion—and how to break free from it without fear.
长期束缚着苏联人民的，正是作者兼科学家托德·罗斯（Todd Rose）所称的“集体错觉”（collective illusion）。确切地说，这种现象指的是人们持有一种普遍存在的观点，但却误以为只有自己持有——因此，出于害怕受到迫害或排斥而保持沉默。罗斯通过他的著作以及他共同创立的名为“民众”（Populace，一个关注公众观点与社会问题的智库）的智库的工作表明，这种错觉不仅影响着生活在独裁统治下的人们，也影响着任何要求某种文化顺从的社会中的人。甚至在今天的美国部分地区，我们也存在这种现象。尽管没有人会将现代美国与过去的苏联混为一谈，但这种集体错觉的运作方式正在损害我们的民主和个人福祉。以下是如何判断你是否正在成为集体错觉的牺牲品，以及如何毫无畏惧地摆脱它。
One way to find evidence of collective illusions is to ask people about the social pressure they may face to stay silent on their true point of view. As scholars at Populace point out in a recently published survey, this pressure is pervasive in the U.S., where 58 percent of people in a sampling of more than 19,000 citizens said they believed that “most people cannot share their honest opinions about sensitive topics in society today,” and 61 percent admitted to self-silencing.
探究“集体错觉”的一种方法是询问人们可能面临的社会压力，这种压力会让他们对真实观点保持沉默。正如Populace（一家智库）的学者们在近期发布的一项调查中指出的那样，这种压力在美国普遍存在。该项调查对超过19,000名公民进行了抽样，其中58%的人表示他们认为“当今社会，大多数人无法就敏感话题分享自己的真实看法”，61%的人承认自己会选择自我审查、保持沉默。
Because of this pressure, people are routinely giving what they perceive to be more acceptable opinions in their social circles than those they truly possess. Take, for example, the Populace report’s findings about the controversial topic of “gender and diversity quotas” in executive positions within business. The demographic group in America most likely to publicly agree with this form of progressive action—showing 48 percent approval—is Gen Z, young people who have come of age in the past decade, when these ideas became more mainstream. But do these young adults truly agree with these kinds of DEI policies? When asked in the Populace survey what they privately believe, only 15 percent of them say they do—the same percentage as Baby Boomers. In other words, nearly 69 percent of Gen Zers who say that they agree publicly with such quotas are hiding their true feelings.
由于这种压力，人们常常在社交圈中表达他们认为更可接受的观点，而非他们内心真正持有的观点。举个例子，Populace 报告就商业机构高管职位中备受争议的“性别和多元化配额”（gender and diversity quotas）问题，公布了一些调查结果。在美国，最有可能公开支持这种进步性措施（支持率达到 48%）的群体是 Z 世代，这些年轻人是在过去十年间逐渐成熟的，当时这些观念正变得越来越主流。但是，这些年轻人真的认同这类多元化、公平和包容（DEI）政策吗？当 Populace 调查问及他们私下真实的想法时，只有 15% 的人表示他们认同，这一比例与“婴儿潮一代”（Baby Boomers）相同。换句话说，近 69% 公开声称支持这类配额制度的 Z 世代受访者，实际上是在隐藏自己真实的想法。
Or consider the question of whether we live in a mostly fair society. This issue has become a political football of late; older, more right-leaning Americans argue that we do, and younger, more left-leaning people say that we don’t. Populace finds that 62 percent of people from the Silent Generation (those born before 1946) publicly agree with the statement (compared with just 32 percent of Gen Zers), as do 50 percent of Republicans (versus 32 percent of Democrats). Privately, however, the rates of agreement among those in the survey are just 6 percent of older Americans and 11 percent of Republicans. In other words, Americans of all ages are now much more doubtful about whether they live in a fair society than they like to admit in public.
或者，我们来思考一下我们是否生活在一个大致公平的社会这个问题。这个问题近来已经成为了一个政治皮球（即被各方推诿、争论不休的话题）；年长的、政治立场更倾向右翼的美国人认为我们确实如此，而年轻的、政治立场更倾向左翼的人则认为并非如此。智库Populace的研究发现，在公开场合，62%的“沉默一代”（即1946年以前出生的人）同意这一说法（相比之下，“Z世代”只有32%），50%的共和党人也同意（而民主党人只有32%）。然而，私下里，在接受调查的人中，只有6%的年长美国人和11%的共和党人真正同意这一观点。换句话说，如今所有年龄段的美国人，对于他们是否生活在一个公平的社会，比他们在公开场合愿意承认的要怀疑得多。
Everyone accepts a degree of “going along to get along” to make community life run smoothly, but the phenomenon being tracked here goes well beyond that. Rose and his colleagues see in these findings a threat to our society, insofar as self-silencing and collective illusions indicate a tyranny of the minority that suppresses citizens’ perception of the truth and free expression. The problem surpasses this, however. Collective illusions also exacerbate the negative well-being trends that I have previously documented. Saying one thing when you believe another is bad for your happiness. As researchers have long shown, this dissonance can induce psychological discomfort when it cannot be resolved. No surprise, then, that such dissonance is a common side effect of social anxiety and also associated with symptoms of depression. It creates a sense of dishonesty and inauthenticity: a gap between collective illusion and individual disillusion, you might say. This is what George Orwell’s concept of “doublethink” identified in his novel 1984, in which people are dehumanized by being forced to accede to two contradictory ideas—in this case, one thought and the other stated.
每个人都会在一定程度上“随大流、求和睦”，以确保社区生活顺利运行，但我们此处探讨的现象远不止于此。罗斯（Rose）和他的同事们认为，这些发现对我们的社会构成了威胁，因为自我沉默和集体错觉揭示出了一种“少数人的暴政”，它压制了公民对真相的认知和言论自由。然而，问题远不止于此。集体错觉还会加剧我之前记录过的负面幸福感趋势。言不由衷对你的幸福有害。正如研究人员长期以来所表明的，这种认知失调如果无法得到解决，会引发心理不适。因此，这种失调是社交焦虑的常见副作用，也与抑郁症症状相关，这不足为奇。它会制造一种不诚实和不真实感：你可以说，这是一种集体错觉与个人幻灭之间的鸿沟。这正是乔治·奥威尔（George Orwell）在他的小说《1984》中提出的“双重思想”（doublethink）概念所描述的现象，在这种状态下，人们被迫接受两个相互矛盾的观念——内心所想与公开宣称的——从而被剥夺了人性。
Why don’t people just say what they think and fix the dissonance? That’s not so easy. To part ways with what you believe or fear is the majority opinion, especially in a community such as a political group, means risking social exclusion, which is scary and painful. Experiments demonstrating this phenomenon have involved subjecting humans to fMRI brain scans while they play a multiperson game from which they are suddenly excluded. This exiling experience stimulated the subjects’ anterior cingulate cortex, part of the limbic system that processes emotional pain. When people go along with an opinion they disagree with but think is popular, they are in a catch-22 of inviting pain through cognitive dissonance by trying to avoid the pain of social rejection.
为什么人们不直接说出他们的想法，从而解决这种不和谐呢？这可没那么容易。与你认为或担心是大多数人持有的观点相悖，尤其是在政治团体这样的社群中，意味着要冒被社会排斥的风险，这令人恐惧又痛苦。旨在证明这一现象的实验包括：让受试者在进行功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）脑部扫描的同时玩一个多人游戏，然后他们会突然被排除在外。这种被“流放”的经历会刺激受试者的前扣带皮层——大脑边缘系统的一部分，负责处理情感上的痛苦。当人们附和自己不同意但认为很流行的观点时，他们就陷入了一种两难困境：为了避免社会排斥的痛苦，反而通过认知失调招致了痛苦。
The way out of the collective-illusion catch-22 is to conquer the fear of rejection from stating your true opinion. The best guide to this that I have encountered comes from the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, a co-founder of this magazine who helped formulate its motto, “Of no party or clique.” His 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” about which I have written before, is a handbook for breaking free of collective illusions. Here’s my three-part summary.
摆脱“集体错觉”困境的方法，就是战胜因表达真实想法而可能遭到拒绝的恐惧。我所遇到过的、关于如何做到这一点的最佳指引，来自哲学家拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson），他也是本杂志的共同创始人之一，曾协助确立了本杂志的座右铭：“不偏袒任何党派或小团体”。他的1841年散文《论自助》（“Self-Reliance”，关于这篇散文我以前也曾写过），就是一本教我们如何摆脱“集体错觉”的指南。以下是我的三点总结。
**1. Stop lying.**
1. 停止撒谎。
Self-censorship creates a pattern of personal dishonesty. It’s one thing to refrain from saying something you think out of politeness; it is another thing entirely to say something you don’t think for the sake of self-advancement or out of fear. This, according to Emerson, is a self-betrayal. “Check this lying hospitality and lying affection,” he counsels. “Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.” For Emerson, to voluntarily utter a lie just to fit in is like choosing to live in a prison: True happiness requires freedom in the form of honesty, come what may. To those who might not like hearing your contrary opinion, Emerson offers this counsel: “If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.”
自我审查会养成个人不诚实的习惯。出于礼貌而不说出你真实想法是一回事；但为了个人发展或出于恐惧，违心地说出自己不相信的话，这却完全是另一回事。在爱默生看来，这是对自己的背叛。他劝告道：“杜绝这种虚伪的客套和虚假的感情。不要再活在你所交往的那些自欺欺人、也欺骗着你的人的期望中。”对于爱默生而言，仅仅为了融入而自愿撒谎，就如同选择生活在监狱里：真正的幸福需要以诚实为形式的自由，无论结果如何。对于那些可能不喜欢听你不同意见的人，爱默生给出这样的忠告：“如果你能爱我本来的样子，我们都会更快乐。如果你不能，我仍然会努力让自己值得你的爱。”
**2. Reframe your independence.**
2. 重新审视你的独立性。当然，与大多数人意见相左是困难且令人恐惧的。爱默生对这种恐惧的回答是：换个角度看问题。他说：“伟大的人，是在人群之中也能完美而从容地保持独处独立性的人。”从进化的角度来看，我们倾向于将脱离群体的行为视为被排斥和孤立，这两者都令人痛苦和恐惧。它们（排斥和孤立）会让你联想到一个被部落驱逐、孤独无助地流浪的形象。爱默生说：胡说八道。他建议，将“被排斥”重新定义为“走自己的路”，将“孤立”重新定义为“良性的独处”，这种独处让你摆脱了对那些流行但错误观点的震耳欲聋的附和声。让思想独立成为你的个人标志，并昂首挺胸。
Contradicting the majority is, of course, difficult and frightening. Emerson’s answer to this fear is to see it in a new way: “The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Your evolutionary tendency is to see the act of breaking from the group in terms of rejection and isolation, both of which are painful and scary. They evoke the image of one cast out of the tribe and wandering alone and defenseless. Nonsense, Emerson says. Recast rejection as going your own way, and isolation as benign solitude from the deafening chorus of agreement with what is popular but wrong. Make ideological independence your personal brand and hold your head high.
当然，与大多数人意见相悖是困难且令人恐惧的。艾默生（Emerson）对这种恐惧的回应是换个角度来看待它：“真正的伟人，是在人群之中仍能完美从容地保持独善其身者。”我们的天性倾向于将脱离群体的行为视为被排斥和孤立，这两者都令人痛苦和恐惧。这会让人联想到一个人被部落驱逐，独自漂泊，毫无防备。艾默生说，这都是胡说。他建议将排斥重新定义为走自己的路，将孤立视为在那些流行却错误的观点所形成的震耳欲聋的附和声中，一种有益的独处。让思想独立成为你的个人标识，并昂首挺胸。
**3. Just walk away.**
3. 干脆走开。
This advice might sound as if Emerson is advocating that you stomp off with your middle finger in the air. If you are a normal person, that sounds like a terrible way to behave—and fortunately, such defiance is not necessary. All that you need to become independent in your ideas is to separate your attention and energy from the source of acceptable but, in your mind, incorrect views. “If you are noble, I will love you,” he writes, but “if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions.” If, for example, your friends are, in your private opinion, spouting nonsense, you don’t have to refute or condemn them. Just quietly stop listening to them, and get some new friends.
这项建议听起来可能像是爱默生在鼓动你愤然离去，并做出挑衅的姿态。但如果你是一个普通人，这听起来会是一种很糟糕的行为——幸运的是，这种反抗并非必需。你只需要在思想上保持独立，将你的注意力和精力从那些在你看来是可接受却不正确的观点来源中抽离出来。爱默生写道：“如果你是高尚的，我将爱你；如果你不是，我不会用虚伪的关注来伤害你和我自己。”例如，如果你私下认为朋友们在胡说八道，你无需反驳或指责他们。只需悄悄地不再听他们说，然后去结交一些新朋友。
To strengthen democracy and improve your happiness, here is the question I would ask you to consider: Which of your private opinions are different from what you tell others? They shouldn’t be hard to find. After all, as the Populace report bluntly states, “every single demographic group is misrepresenting their true opinions on multiple sensitive issues.”
为了巩固民主并提升你的幸福感，我想请你思考这样一个问题：你有哪些个人真实想法与你公开发表的言论不同？这些想法应该不难找到。毕竟，正如Populace报告直言不讳地指出，“每一个人口群体都在多个敏感问题上歪曲了自己的真实看法。”
Next, make a list of your unpopular opinions and an Emersonian plan to quietly declare your independence from what you believe is the erroneous mainstream or socially sanctioned view. In some cases, you will find that this seeming consensus wasn’t mainstream at all but a collective illusion, and you might just be the one to break it. In other cases, you will find that you truly are in the minority, and will walk alone. So be it.
接下来，列出你那些不随大流的观点，并制定一个爱默生式的计划，悄悄地宣告你将摆脱那些你认为是错误的、或是社会普遍认可的观点所带来的影响。在某些情况下，你会发现这种看似的共识根本不是主流意见，而是一种“集体错觉”，而你可能就是那个打破它的人。在另一些情况下，你会发现你确实是少数派，并将独自前行。那又何妨呢？