Things Everybody Knows

What happens when an idea no longer needs a source?

There is a particular kind of certainty that appears in almost every family, organization, community, and culture.

Nobody remembers learning it.

Nobody can tell you exactly where it came from.

But everybody knows it.

You hear this language all the time.

Everybody knows how he is.

Everybody knows why they left.

Everybody knows that company was in trouble.

Everybody knows what really happened.

Sometimes everybody is right.

But the phrase itself is interesting because it quietly replaces evidence with agreement.

We aren’t being told why something is true.

We’re being told that questioning it would put us outside the group.

Consensus is useful

Human beings depend on shared knowledge.

We couldn’t function otherwise.

If every generation had to independently establish every fact, civilization would continually start over.

We trust maps we didn’t draw, histories we didn’t witness, scientific findings we didn’t personally test, and countless systems we don’t fully understand.

Most of the time, this works remarkably well.

Collective knowledge is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

But collective knowledge and collective belief aren’t quite the same thing.

The difficulty is that from inside a group, they can feel identical.

When everyone around us believes something, the belief acquires weight.

Not necessarily because additional evidence appeared.

Because additional people did.

Agreement feels like independent confirmation

Imagine hearing the same story from five people.

That sounds persuasive.

Five people independently reaching the same conclusion seems considerably stronger than one person making a claim.

But what if all five heard the story from the same person?

Now there aren’t five sources.

There is one source and five repetitions.

Unless we know how the information traveled, consensus can create the appearance of independent confirmation where none exists.

This happens easily because information rarely arrives with a genealogy attached.

People don’t usually say:

“I believe this because Susan told Mark, who told my brother, who told me.”

They say:

“Apparently, this is what happened.”

A few repetitions later:

“This is what happened.”

Eventually:

“Everybody knows.”

The source disappears.

The agreement remains.

Groups have memories

Families may be the easiest place to see this.

Every family seems to have people who occupy certain roles.

The responsible one.

The difficult one.

The successful one.

The selfish one.

The one who always needed rescuing.

These descriptions can persist for decades.

Sometimes they are accurate.

But people change faster than family narratives do.

A person who made terrible decisions at twenty-five may still be described by those decisions at fifty-five. Someone who once needed help may spend the rest of a lifetime being treated as though they still do.

The group remembers the role.

Eventually new members inherit it.

A spouse enters the family already knowing who is difficult.

Children grow up knowing which relative can’t be trusted.

Nobody has to issue instructions.

The story does the work.

Institutions know things too

Organizations develop their own versions of everybody knows.

That department never delivers on time.

Management doesn’t listen.

Headquarters doesn’t understand the field.

That client is impossible.

This is how we’ve always done it.

Some of these beliefs may contain years of accumulated experience.

Others may have begun with circumstances that no longer exist.

But once a belief becomes institutional knowledge, questioning it can become surprisingly difficult.

The new employee who asks why may receive an answer that isn’t really an answer:

“You’ll understand after you’ve been here awhile.”

Perhaps they will.

Or perhaps they’ll simply learn what everyone else already believes.

There is a difference.

Familiarity can impersonate truth

We’ve encountered this throughout this series.

The first version has an advantage.

Confidence can feel like evidence.

Certainty can be borrowed.

Repetition can become memory.

Stories are edited.

All of those forces eventually produce something larger than any individual claim.

They produce an environment.

An idea becomes so familiar that we stop experiencing it as an idea.

It becomes background.

That’s when questioning becomes hardest.

We naturally scrutinize unfamiliar claims.

Familiar ones often pass unnoticed.

We don’t ask for evidence because the belief doesn’t feel as though it requires evidence anymore.

It’s simply part of what we know.

The dissenter has a problem

Imagine being the only person in a room who doubts something everyone else accepts.

You may be wrong.

In fact, if everyone else has independently examined the evidence, the odds may strongly favor them.

But before you can even discuss the evidence, another force appears.

Social pressure.

Do you really want to be the person who asks?

Do you want to sound uninformed?

Difficult?

Naive?

Contrarian?

Sometimes agreement persists because everyone genuinely agrees.

Sometimes it persists because everyone believes everyone else agrees.

Those are very different situations.

Yet from the outside, they look exactly the same.

A room full of nodding heads.

Disbelief isn’t automatically wisdom

There is an obvious danger in thinking about consensus this way.

We can begin treating disagreement itself as evidence of intelligence.

It isn’t.

The person rejecting what everybody knows can be just as uncritical as the person accepting it.

Contrarianism offers its own kind of borrowed certainty.

They believe it, therefore I don’t.

Nothing has actually been examined.

The direction merely changed.

The goal isn’t to distrust consensus.

It is to understand what the consensus is built upon.

Independent evidence?

Shared experience?

Expertise?

Tradition?

One original claim repeated many times?

Those foundations are not equivalent.

A simple question

Perhaps when we encounter something everybody knows, we don’t need to challenge it.

We don’t need to announce skepticism or assume someone is hiding something.

We can simply become curious.

How do we know?

Sometimes the answer will be excellent.

Documents. Evidence. Independent witnesses. Long experience. Careful research.

Good.

Then our confidence has somewhere to stand.

Other times, the answer may be less substantial.

Someone told someone.

We’ve always heard it.

That’s just what people say.

Everybody knows.

And occasionally we may discover that an idea occupying an enormous amount of space rests on surprisingly little.

That doesn’t prove the idea is false.

It tells us something more modest.

We haven’t established that it’s true.

There is a great deal of intellectual freedom in that distinction.

We don’t have to believe everything we’re told.

We don’t have to disbelieve it either.

Sometimes we can simply leave a question open long enough to see what supports the answer.

Because the things everybody knows may be true.

But if they are, there should be a better reason than the fact that everybody knows them.

— Thomas