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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.