What is concensus “in practice?”
In informal reasoning, appeals to consensus often operate as shorthand for justified belief: if many informed people hold a view, the view gains plausibility, and without such heuristics, coordinated life in complex societies would be impossible. But this sensible shortcut can mutate. Thus, we have the concept of a “practical” concesus - the concensus view, a system of beliefs, of values, that dominates a particular social dynamic such as education methods, hiring practices and similar. This need not be the same as “majority view,” rather it is the view that practically dominates a social or political dynamic.
Of real importantnce is that when practical consensus becomes a marker of moral legitimacy rather than provisional agreement, it ceases to function as a tool of inquiry and begins to act as a filter of belonging.
Consensus as legitimacy structure
My aim here is to examine how this transformation occurs—and how, under certain conditions, legitimacy structures become not protective, but punitive. What we often call consensus is probably better understood as a perceived legitimacy structure, htat is, a framework of trust, authority, and shared sense-making that enables coordinated decision-making under uncertainty. It appears necessary for the normal functioning of societies, particularly in moments that demand broad behavioural alignment: vaccination campaigns, water fluoridation, responses to pandemics, or public restrictions on movement. In such cases, the absence of a perceived legitimate framework leads not simply to disagreement, but to fragmentation and paralysis.
Legitimacy structures, however, are not inherently stable. When challenged, they are often defended not with reason, but with moral urgency, identity panic, and, at times, retributive force. Yet the phenomenon we are describing does not arise from consensus in the abstract, but from the way legitimacy structures, once activated, allow certain individuals or institutions to enforce exclusion or punishment in the name of moral order. Our aim is not to claim that consensus reshapes identity. Rather, we are examining how legitimacy structures, under certain circumstances, become weaponised. They create the emotional and social conditions in which some feel empowered to seek retribution, and others remain silent, complicit, or afraid. Membership in a consensus, especially a prestigious or moralised one, tends to inflate a subtle arrogance: the eye-roll, the sigh, the sanctimonious dismissal of doubters not just as wrong, but as lesser beings.
Five deep forces seem drive this transformation.
Social proof bias leads us to believe that if everyone accepts something, it must be true.
Status signalling makes being "on the right side" feel prestigious.
Cognitive laziness encourages dismissal of dissent to avoid the labour of reconsideration.
Moral self-flattery turns agreement into virtue.
In-group rituals like eye-rolling and shaming strengthen bonds while silencing doubt. Left unchecked, these forces turn consensus from a means of orientation into a wall against imagination.
The perverse reaction of trusting dissent
The opposite extreme carries its own pathology. Not every contrarian is a Galileo. Some are merely reflexive doubters, addicted to negation for its own sake. They confuse rebellion with reason and often drown in the noise of their own cleverness.
As a side note, if one must choose, it is the contrarians one should invite to the lunch table. They keep the wine flowing, the arguments alive, and the possibility open that the world might still surprise us. If there is no contrarian at the lunch table and the the Pauillac is arriving, be them!
Consensus is not bad. Uncritical consensus is. Suppressive consensus is worse. The moment a consensus demands obedience rather than participation, it begins to rot. Healthy consensus tolerates dissent. Sick consensus punishes it. This distinction matters because many who invoke consensus in public discourse do not understand the evidence they cite. They rely on third- and fourth-hand trust, often as a form of identity or social positioning rather than grounded conviction.
Handling vocal concensus
The louder the consensus sounds, the more carefully one must ask who truly understands, and who is simply echoing. For some, this trust becomes a form of vicarious moral elevation. They do not possess expertise, but they identify with it. Their sense of being right derives not from understanding but from emotional alignment with the perceived prestige of the scientific or moral class. It is not so much proximity to expertise as the performance of loyalty to it. What is defended in these moments is not truth, but the self-image attached to being among the righteous.
The rage against dissent is inversely proportional to the inner security of the consensus. Strong truths can withstand scrutiny. They survive examination. Weak paradigms, by contrast, demand silence because they cannot survive exposure. The more defensive the response, the more fragile the foundation. The rage against dissent is not simply a reaction to disagreement. It is the eruption of existential shame. When dissenters speak, they do not merely offer an alternative view; they force a searing glimpse of personal weakness, of complicity, cowardice, blindness.
Disagreement alone is often tolerated. What provokes rage is the threat that dissent might matter, that it might spread, fracture consensus, or destabilise the emotional scaffolding on which both group and self rely. The pain is immediate and overwhelming. It is experienced not as an intellectual challenge but as a betrayal, an assault on the self. When that fragile emotional order feels exposed, rage follows, not with counterargument, but with moral outrage.
Argument is replaced by judgment; persuasion is replaced by purification. The dissenter becomes a threat not to belief, but to belonging. The dissenter becomes not merely a voice to counter but a living symbol of unbearable humiliation. It is not the argument that must be punished; it is the reminder, the mirror, the wound. Pain must be inflicted, not to correct the world, but to silence the anxiety that dissent, if left unpunished, might grow and destroy the fragile illusion of certainty.
Group pathologies do not merely coexist with individual emotional reactions; they cultivate and amplify them. When consensus hardens into sacred identity, it grants individuals permission, even obligation, even instinct, to retaliate against dissenters.
What might otherwise be a private wound or unspoken insecurity becomes reframed as righteous anger. The group provides the moral theatre; the individual plays out the revenge drama within it. In this way, group pathology and personal pathology fuse into a self-reinforcing system, where doubt becomes betrayal and anger masquerades as virtue. The rage directed at dissenters is not an expression of strength. It is the visible eruption of private humiliation and existential fear. The wound, shame, self-doubt, anxiety, finds a target.
This is not institutional censorship or bureaucratic containment. It is personal revenge, disguised as moral defence.
Of course, not all public retribution is aimed at dissent. Some is directed at those who violate social codes in more symbolic ways, by making an awkward joke, choosing the wrong moment, or failing to perform the required reverence. These are not cases of heresy. They are cases of sacrilege. The rage they provoke comes not from disagreement, but from discomfort, and the desire to cleanse, punish, or distance the source of it. What enables that rage is not the presence of an argument, but the moral permission granted by an activated legitimacy structure: one that is either being agitated for change or held in place by the silent fear of those who do not resist it.
This dynamic does not manifest everywhere. Most dissent, in most domains, is ignored, absorbed, or merely debated. But in areas where legitimacy structures are emotionally charged, where the narrative in question is not just believed, but moralised, the pattern changes. Public health, identity politics, institutional norms, environmentalism, and crisis governance often become zones of heightened sensitivity. The sesiticty arises in part beocmes personal freedoms are at stake. In these spaces, the legitimacy structure is not merely a framework for reasoning, it is a boundary of belonging. And when it is challenged, what follows is not debate but containment, not disagreement but retribution. The most violent reactions are reserved not for disagreement, but for dissent that threatens to matter, the kind that gathers attention, that plants doubt, that might crack the edifice if allowed to grow.
History does not flatter the defenders of comfortable consensus. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible remains one of the most resonant portraits of this pattern. What it shows us, through allegory, is not simply superstition or hysteria, but how legitimacy structures can become morally self-consuming. The Salem trials were not about evidence; they were about performance and belonging. So too with McCarthyism, of course Miller’s actual subject, where silence became complicity, and accusation replaced inquiry.
These moments endure not because they are exceptional, but because they are perennial. The mechanics of fear, shame, and righteous punishment do not belong to history. They live under the skin of modern institutions. The cost of dissent has always been high. The cost of silencing it has always been higher.
Some of these concerns echo those raised by Douglas Murray in The Madness of Crowds, where he describes how social and institutional structures become captured by emotional orthodoxies. But the pathologies go further. We can do more than to catalogue ideological excess, we can expose the emotional machinery beneath it: how group legitimacy enables individual neurosis, how performance replaces argument, and how even minor challenges to belonging can provoke disproportionate retribution. The psychology of moralised legitimacy is not just political; it is intrapersonal. And unless we understand its structure, we remain vulnerable to its repetition, in any age.
Leveraging a noirmative “bogeyman.”
Every moralised legitimacy structure depends, sooner or later, on the invention of a bogeyman. In Salem, it was witchcraft; in McCarthy’s America, communist infiltration; in today’s moralised discourses, it may be systemic oppression, coded supremacy, or cultural betrayal. The specific language changes, but the emotional function remains the same. The bogeyman provides the narrative coherence that justifies moral aggression. It gives fear an object, shame a vector, and outrage a purpose. Without a transgressor to cleanse, the structure loses energy. Without purification, it loses control. However, as we all bogeyman, they often diaappear udner scrutiny and this scrutiny is often then at the heart of the pathology.
Combating pathological Conensus
If these are the dangers, what is the discipline?
First: self-awareness. The impulse to punish dissent lives in each of us. Recognising it, naming it, and refusing to act on it is the beginning of any serious intellectual life.
Second: reverence for hearing. Hearing does not mean agreement. It means refusing to punish the speaker for the discomfort they cause. *
Third: humility. Being wrong is not a sin. It is the normal condition of human thought. The test is not how often we are right, but how well we recover when we are not.
Finally: design for dissent. In our institutions, our communities, and our private minds, we must create structures not to entrench consensus, but to sustain disagreement without collapse. Truth needs air. And courage needs discipline. Without both, even the freest societies slowly die. This design for dissent is captured of course in the wonderful amendments ot thee United States Constuition called the Bill of Rights, and perhaps all htinking nations need its eqiuvalent.
Consensus, when healthy, helps us act in a world we do not fully understand. It gives us bridges, vaccines, physical theories, and cures—all of them provisional, partial, stitched together by the risk-taking of fallible minds. But when consensus grows rigid, when doubt is treated as betrayal, when dissent is punished rather than answered, it ceases to be a guide and becomes a muzzle. The danger is not to speech. The danger is to hearing. I am a free speech absolutist not because I trust every speaker, but because I trust no one to decide what I may hear. I want to hear the cranks, the rebels, the heretics—because buried among them, occasionally, is the improbable truth. Free speech is not a luxury.