If you're a politician, does everyone agree with your agenda — really?

For representative democracy to work, politicians must "know" and "react to" public opinion, including by "constrain[ing] their behavior to be consistent with" it. However, "elected representatives are more ideologically extreme and maintain a systematically distorted understanding of constituents' policy preferences" and their perceptions of what people think are often biased "in the conservative direction."

The people think what I think: False consensus and unelected elite misperception of public opinion
Alexander C. Furnas, Timothy M. LaPira
First published: 30 January 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12833
Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/3VFVS7.

"More radically, he [Jeffrey Winters] argues that the very idea of democracy challenging oligarchy is not only naive but the opposite of the truth. The lethal talent of the very rich has been an enduring capacity to engineer representative politics to their advantage." (Democracy’s terrible secret: According to the political scientist Jeffrey Winters, representative politics doesn’t restrain oligarchs—it enables them, Matthew d’Ancona, June 10, 2026)

Quotes: Is the world an illusion, and what do we know about it?

Upton Sinclair:

In college, when they were teaching me the theories of the world's leading philosophers, I said to the stout and jolly professor: "Why doesn't someone make a philosophy based on common sense?" Said he: "What do you mean by common sense?" I replied: "The things we all really know are true." That was more than forty years ago; the philosophers called "pragmatists" were already at work, but nobody appeared to know about them in the College of the City of New York, nor later in Columbia University.

Rene Descartes:

Common sense is the best distributed thing in the whole world. Everyone thinks that they are well endowed with it, so that even those who are most difficult to please in every other respect do not usually wish to have more than they already possess.

Clive James:

I am showing them [young people] the way to a necessary failure: the grim but edifying realization that a complete picture of reality is not to be had.

Fernando Pessoa:

There is only one problem: reality, and that is insoluble and alive. What do I know about the difference between a tree and a dream? I can touch the tree; I know I have the dream. What does that really mean?

Upton Sinclair, again:

When Dr. Samuel Johnson kicked a stone, and said he knew it was there, the old fellow wasn't telling us anything except that he was a dogmatist... * * * The difference between myself and the materialist is that I don't know and say so, while he doesn't know but says he does. * * * Let us be ever so proud of our intellect, a portion of our subconscious remains the primitive thing that evolution has made it; and upon that mind we have to depend for the assimilating of our food, the making of new blood, the repair of tissues--yes, even of the mighty cortex, which has explored all the secrets of the universe, but does not know how to build a single cell of its own tissue.

Ralph Minogue:

Humans have always suffered the illusion of knowledge while living the reality of belief.

Sources

Upton Sinclair, What God Means to Me. New York: Ferris Printing Company, 1935. 24.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I

Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. xxv.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 126.

Upton Sinclair, What God Means to Me. New York: Ferris Printing Company, 1935. 15-6, 24, 39.

Ralph Minogue. Responsibility To, Responsibility For. Baltimore: AmErica House, 2000. p 21.

On perception and the unconscious

R. W. Fevre:

"Well, perhaps we can make use of this awareness [of ourselves and our world and how our actions affect the world], but this is not going to be easy because human beings do a lot more things than make sense, and some of these things — pursuing power, money, status, security and so on; or simply taking our ease — can get in the way of making sense.
"

Calvin Luther Martin:

"The words of the magician snaked in and out of my consciousness: 'It has become clear to me that perception has to be understood and recognized as a reciprocal exchange. When we see things we are also being seen by them. When we hear things we are also being heard. Perception is a type of communication that precedes language.'"

Alan Watts:

"There may be no reason to believe that a return to the lost feeling will cost us the sacrifice of the individualized consciousness, for the two are not incompatible. We can see an individual leaf in all its clarity without losing sight of its relation to the tree."


Antonio R. Damasio:

"Some organisms have both behavior and cognition. Some have intelligent actions but no mind. No organism seems to have mind but no action. My view then is that having a mind means that an organism forms neural representations which can become images, be manipulated in a process called thought, and eventually influence behavior by helping predict the future, plan accordingly, and choose the next action."


Jonah Lehrer:

"'The conscious brain may get all the attention,' says Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at NYU. 'But consciousness is a small part of what the brain does, and it's a slave to everything that works beneath it.'"


Norman Mailer:

"Sometimes I think you have to groom the unconscious after you've used it, swab it down, treat it like a prize horse who's a finer animal than you."


G. W. F. Hegel:

"Only when spiritual unity steps beyond this circle of feeling and natural love, and arrives at the consciousness of personality, does that obscure and rigid nucleus emerge in which neither nature nor spirit are open and transparent and where both can become open and transparent only through the further working of that self-conscious will and, indeed, through the long drawn-out cultural process, the goal of which is very remote. For consciousness alone is that which is open, that to which God and anything else can reveal itself."

Sources

R. W. Fevre. The Demoralization of Western Culture: Social Theory and the Dilemmas of Modern Living. London: Continuum, 2000. p 196.

Calvin Luther Martin, In the Spirit of the Earth, p 24

Alan Watts. Nature, Man, and Woman (1958). New York: Vintage Books, 1991. p 8.


Antonio R. Damasio. Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books, 1998. p 90.

Jonah Lehrer. How We Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. p. 23.

Norman Mailer. The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 142.

G. W. F. Hegel. Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Translated by Robert S. Hartman. Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1953. (Originally 1837.) p 74.