Eye to Eye contact (body language) signals and establishes common knowledge necessary for coordination; a subordinate knowingly not looking into his Master's eyes establishes a common pretense (that the subordinate does not know and defers knowledge to the Master) or in China, hands in front or to the side signifies acceptance of subordinate roles, hands behind back with eye contact signals rejection of subordinate role The panopticon surveillance state of the Master signals his dominance. The Master's Gaze demands the PC subordinate's routinized/ expected behaviour provided the Subjects cannot escape his gaze through Anonymity. All are means of "coordination" of social relations. Hence the need to signal status and then linguistically "coordinate" roles and responsibilities of Dominance, Communality, or Reciprocity. Doubt in a subordinate triggers the thoughts necessary to linguistically circumvent the conventional power structure through "indirect" questioning language. A dominant person linguistically negotiating a "communality or reciprocity" relationship requires a commonly understood rhetorical pretense (plausible deniability). Acta non verba.
Common knowledge can fuel mobs, manias, or change regimes.
Key pointsBefore boarding a flight to South Africa in 2013, Justine Sacco sent a sardonic joke to her 170 Twitter followers: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding—I’m white!” By the time her plane landed, she was the number-one trending topic worldwide, fired from her job, and branded a racist by millions of strangers.
- Common knowledge is not just when everyone knows something. It’s when everyone knows that everyone knows.
- Common knowledge arises through repetition, salience, visible norms, and shared signals.
- Self-censorship, preference falsification, and pluralistic ignorance prevent common knowledge.
- Common knowledge coordinates behavior, whether for destroying reputations or toppling regimes.
What happened wasn’t simply outrage at bad humor. It was the sudden creation of “common knowledge.”
What Is Common Knowledge?
As Steven Pinker argues in his newest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life, “It’s not enough that everyone knows something; it becomes common knowledge only when everyone knows that everyone knows it, and everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on.”
That recursive certainty transforms diffuse awareness into coordinated action. And “the dynamic of punitive mobbing,” as Pinker notes, “is a recurrent vulnerability of human societies.”
“The leap is not from ignorance to knowledge,” Pinker explains, “but from private knowledge to common knowledge.” In other words, from what everyone knows but everyone doesn’t know that everyone knows it, to what everyone knows that everyone knows.
The former is often marked by self-censoring, preference falsification and pluralistic ignorance. Self-censoring happens when fear of speaking freely results in staying silent. Preference falsification is professing to hold opinions one doesn’t hold out of fear of repercussions. Pluralistic ignorance, Pinker explains, is “when people misinterpret others’ public conformity as private conviction, and so each mistakenly thinks they are alone in their doubts.”
In other words, when everyone knows something but no one knows that everyone knows, it breeds distortion. Pinker notes, for example, that many college students drink more than they would like, assuming that it’s what their peers want. What they don’t know is that many others are also merely going along. They all mistake each other's compliance for enthusiasm. The result is a widely disliked norm sustained by the false belief that everyone else endorses it.
The Emperor's New Clothes
The most familiar example of the difference between “what everyone knows” and “common knowledge” comes from the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes: A vain emperor is tricked by swindlers who claim to make beautiful clothes from cloth that only the intelligent can see. Not wanting to appear stupid, he and his ministers pretend to see the nonexistent garments (preference falsification), and when the emperor parades nude through the city, his subjects, not knowing whether others can see something they can’t, keep silent about his nakedness (they self-censor). Eventually, a child blurts out the obvious truth.
“When the little boy said the emperor was naked,” Pinker elaborates in a recent TED Talk, “he wasn’t telling them anything that they didn’t already know.” Nonetheless, he created the condition for everyone to know that everyone else knew, too. In that instant, the illusion—the pluralistic ignorance—collapsed into common knowledge.
Common knowledge doesn’t always come from dramatic moments, however. Pinker notes it can also build more gradually, through repetition, salience, visible norms, and incremental disclosures. National anthems before a sporting event, for example, everyone standing for a minute of silence, and a universally recognized symbol like the peace sign, each creates the sense that “we all know this, and we all know that we all know it.” That allows people to coordinate their behavior.
Manias and Mistrust
Lionel Shriver’s newest book, Mania: A novel, dramatizes the power of suppressing common knowledge. Set in an alternate reality dominated by a campaign called the “Mental Parity Movement,” the government enforces the view that intelligence differences do not exist. Terms like “stupid,” “dumb,” and “idiot” are illegal. TV shows like The Big Bang Theory, which imply that intelligence is admirable, are canceled. Any test that could illustrate cognitive differences is banned.
The protagonist, Pearson Converse, opposes the Mental Parity orthodoxy, but when she refuses to engage in self-censorship and preference falsification, the result is personal and professional ruin. Shriver’s chilling story illustrates how, without common knowledge, one person’s public dissent is easily crushed, even when the consensus is broad.
Common knowledge was why, in Communist Czechoslovakia, a man was arrested for distributing pamphlets that were completely blank. “Everyone knew what they meant,” Pinker tells us: “Everyone hates the system but no one can say so.” The power of that demonstration came from common knowledge. And the heavy-handed response was an attempt to repress it.
Courage and Coordination
A deciding factor in whether common knowledge forms is whether too many people are afraid to reveal what they really think. What enabled the collapse of communism was the willingness to risk the consequences of speaking freely. As people began to understand that there were more like-minded others than they’d thought, they signaled to others with small, symbolic acts, like wearing jeans (as a symbol of the West) or sharing Samizdat (self-published dissident literature).
When self-censorship, preference falsification, and pluralistic ignorance were supplanted by common knowledge, the illusion was shattered and the communist system was dismantled.
For good or for ill, common knowledge allows us to coordinate our behavior. This makes common knowledge both dangerous and indispensable. Outrage mobs form when condemnation becomes visible, but they are swiftly dispensed with when enough people have the courage to defend the accused. And the same recursive awareness that destroyed Justine Sacco’s reputation also toppled communist regimes.
Which way the world tilts sometimes depends on whether enough people are willing to publicly say what everyone knows.
References
- Pinker, S. (2025). When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. New York, NY: Scribner.
- Steven Pinker's 2025 TED Talk
- Shriver, L. (2024). Mania: A novel. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers.
On the Epistemological Nature of Recursively Infinite Thoughts (aka- Common Knowledge) which Establish and Maintain All Social Relationships
(aka - Likely "why" the Left resorted to "Lawfare" against Norm-violator Trump... to maintain the Post-WWII "International Rules-based Order/ Consensus" pretense)
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"To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment."
- Nietzsche- "The Gay Science" (#110) (1882).
Staring, Glaring, Blushing, Laughter, and Crying - Non-Verbal Common Knowledge Signifiers.
Social Coordination Absent "Common Knowledge"
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