Private Truths, Public Lies

In American Greatness, Stephen Soukup discusses the collapse of one of Europe’s ugliest and most corrupt regimes. Some 135 years later, 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.”

Misrepresenting What You Know and What You Prefer

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.

Special Forms of Lying

Kuran, clearly describes the act of falsifying knowledge and preference as “special forms of lying,” amounting to “misrepresenting what you know and what you prefer” in order to maintain a specific social order and one’s place in it.

These special forms of lying are, according to Kuran, “an innate human response to the dangers of being ostracized, to being cut off from friendships and privileges that are critical to survival,” necessary because “we are born with a need for social acceptance.”

Stephen Soutupp puts it more bluntly: “People tend to lie about what they believe in public—on matters great and small—to avoid offending others or drawing unwanted scrutiny to themselves. This is how social order is maintained.”

In his writings in Public Truths, Public Lies, Kuran gives readers three examples of knowledge falsification and preference falsification and the consequent distortion of social conditions:

• the Indian caste system
• American unanimity on the merit of affirmative action
• Communism in Eastern Europe

Inarguably, notes Soukup, the most famous of these and the most reaffirming of Tocqueville’s observations, is the maintenance and sudden collapse of Communism.
During the entirety of the Communist regime’s existence, writes Soutup, “the people of Eastern Europe engaged in knowledge and preference falsification.” They privately detested the regime by putting on brave (regime-supportive) faces. They justified, rightly so, their actions for fear of the repercussions of doing otherwise.

This behavior “distorted” social conditions by creating the (false) perception that the communist governments were stable and popular. How could they not be, after all, when everyone said, over and over, at the top of their voices, that they love the government? In this way, the regime only had to do part of the work of maintaining public order and obedience, while the people themselves did the rest. They all unwittingly convinced one another that the regime was legitimate because they supported it, even as they secretly loathed it and even as it had practically no legitimacy at all.

To Soukup, this calls to mind Vaclav Havel’s famous greengrocer (from his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless”), which Soukup hands to readers.

Havel’s greengrocer puts a “Workers of the World, Unite!” sign in his window, not because he is a party supporter or a regime enthusiast, but because he justifiably fears the consequences if he does not. He “lies” publicly so that the regime will not single him out for reprisal. Given that all the other shopkeepers do the same, they create a “panorama” of allegiance by agreeing to live “within a lie.”

What happens when knowledge and preference falsification are overtaken by reality?

Well, notes Soukup, something unexpected happened to shatter the public façade.

Something sparks a recognition among the people that they are not alone in harboring private doubts about and antipathy for the regime. Havel argues that this realization enables people to “live in truth,” a truth that becomes a “bacteriological weapon” that, in time, infects the body of the regime and destroys it. Kuran, by contrast, called this a “preference cascade,” in which one person, then two, then three, then thousands of people embrace their “private truths,” forcing the entire social structure to collapse upon itself.

Shareholder-ism

Soukup confesses that he believes we are in the middle of the throes of a social and commercial revolution. For much of the last two decades, he writes, big American businesses have operated under the watchful eye and imposing fist of an authoritarian regime. In general terms, that regime can be called ESG or stakeholderism or, as I called it in my book, “woke capital.”

More specifically, one of the chief enforcers of the regime is an organization called the Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the nation’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve LGBTQ+ equality.”

The truth, however, is quite different, writes Soukup.

The HBC is a pressure group that harasses corporations, forcing them through social coercions, to align with its aggressively leftist agenda and, in so doing, to waste shareholder resources on overtly political endeavors.

The primary tool of the HRC’s social coercion mechanism, writes Soukup in his book, is something called “the Corporate Equality Index, which it uses to keep tabs on companies’ behavior toward, treatment of, and support for LGBTQ individuals, exclusively in terms that the HRC determines based on its ideology and agenda.”

“The Corporate Equality Index has become an enormous concern for companies that desperately want to avoid the label ‘homophobic’ and thus do everything they can to appease and ally with HBC.”

”LGBTQ individuals, exclusively in terms that the HRC determines based on its ideology and agenda.”

That appeasement usually equates to donating to HRC as corporate sponsors and, more ubiquitously, doing everything possible to get a score of 100 on the CEI, which requires, among other things, providing medical benefits for transgender “treatment.” Every major company in the country (and even some in other countries) participates in the CEI annually, hoping to grovel enough to win the regime’s blessing.

Or they did until recently, continues Soukup. About 18 months ago, a colleague of Soukup’s started an aggressive campaign pressuring companies with left-wing social agendas but with right-leaning consumer bases to reconsider their positions, to get out of politics, and to get back into the business of making money, in other words, “get back to business.” Read below what happened after Robby Starbuck’s urging:

Tractor Supply became the first major company to agree to amend its DEI policies, including dropping out of HRC’s odious index. In other words, Tractor Supply became the first shopkeeper to take down its sign, the first scared citizen to rebuke its public lies and express its private truths. And soon, others followed: John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s, Ford… and now, well, most of the companies in the Fortune 500.

The regime has not completely collapsed, but it is wobbling.

According to The 1792 Exchange, in addition to the above cascade, the HRC lost 27 corporate sponsors between December 2024 and December 2025 and, as a result, had to lay off 20% of its staff. Interestingly, this year, the Human Rights Campaign made its corporate index much less intrusive and much easier to navigate. One supposes this means that the powers that be at the HRC think that “moderating” is the way to win back support. I, on the other hand, think it means that they’ve never read The Old Regime and the Revolution, specifically the following passage from Book III, Chapter 4, known as “the Tocqueville Paradox”: “The regime that a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately preceded it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous time for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform.”

As Soukup prays, May the history repeat itself. And soon.