Todd Rose graduated from high school, sort of, with a GPA of 0.9. Somehow, he went out to become a professor at Harvard, and today, he runs the most consequential think tank in America. Populace specializes in private opinion polling, and their work today is more important than ever. Why? Because the extent to which we’re being manipulated online is worse than you think. Much, much worse. Hundreds of millions of bots, (literally) have infected every social platform, and led to a long list of “collective illusions” that have reinforced to a “manufactured consensus” around myriad issues that are tearing us apart. In short, we’ve been turned against one another, by an enemy that’s determined to see our county collapse from the inside out. According to Todd, the most serious, manufactured consensuses plaguing Americans revolve around societal values, political polarization, and interpersonal trust. For instance, Americans widely believe that society fundamentally prioritizes wealth, status, luxury, and fame. But in private polling, individual Americans overwhelmingly rank personal fulfillment, being a good parent, character, and doing work with a positive impact at the top of their personal values. Because people chase what they think others value, they pursue hollow benchmarks of fame and money, inadvertently teaching their children to do the same. Likewise, the overwhelming public consensus suggests that Americans are fiercely divided over cultural, institutional, and political issues. But data from Populace (and I mean, LOTS of data) reveals that roughly 90% of Americans actually agree on the vast majority of controversial issues. Our brains use a deeply flawed shortcut that assumes the loudest voices are the majority. Because a tiny fraction of extreme users dominates most social media platforms, and because foreign bot armies, (mostly from China,) have weaponized these divides to an unprecedented level, we are awash in false consensuses. Which leads us to self-silence out of fear. According to Todd, the largest collective illusion in society today concerns mutual trustworthiness. In truth, the vast majority of Americans privately believe that they are trustworthy and value integrity. However, they simultaneously believe that most other Americans are dishonest and do not value trust at all. This manufactured mismatch causes people to treat their neighbors with a level of suspicion that oftentimes, isn’t warranted. It also leads people to fall in line with all sorts agendas that are not in fact, nearly as popular as they assume them to be. Defund the Police, for instance, or Black Lives Matter, (no kidding), or the current panic around data centers, or the resistance to nuclear power, or much of the public pressure around cancel culture, DEI, ESG, and lots of other issues that never really had the support that people thought. Bottom line, school boards, corporations, and politicians implement policies that almost nobody actually wants, driven entirely by the fear of opposing a false majority that doesn’t really exist. For me, Todd’s research does two things. It encourages tolerance and offers hope, because it proves we’re not really as divided as we seem. But it also encourages brutal honesty, even if it means getting thrown out of your own club. I’d be curious to know what it inspires in you. Our whole conversation is here: bit.ly/TWIHI495ToddRose A short clip is below. His latest initiative, Be The People, is also worth a look. bit.ly/4yv9gAD