Consensual Reality

Consensual Reality and Successful Deception

A deception attempt is successful when it leads the target to accept that a false reality is actually consensual—for example, when the target believes that he or she knows something that the deceiver knows, but which the deceiver actually knows to be a fabrication. Social conflict and competitions frequently produce examples of how consensual realities can be deceptive.

As Sun Tzu observed in the 4th century b.c.e., “All warfare is based on deception,” and in order to deceive, parties to a conflict attempt to make their adversary adopt erroneous beliefs about capabilities, strategies, and geographical location. A competitor may feign weakness when in a position of strength (a “slow play” in poker), or may feign strength when in a position of weakness (bluffing). Whether or not one is successful depends, in part, on the target “falling for” the desired reality. It also depends, in part, on not falling for the adversary's desired reality.

In more everyday circumstances, consensual realities are often implicitly assumed and unquestioned. Marxist theory describes the prevalence of false consciousness, in which people unknowingly accept false beliefs that undermine or hide their material self- and group interests. However, these false realities are eventually uncovered, and people may act to change the false bases of reality. In popular culture, when the hero in the film The Matrix discovered that his assumed reality was actually a computer simulation, he and his team staged a revolution to overthrow the purveyors of [Page 199]the false reality. Similarly, civil rights movements are frequently motivated by the observation that a society's consensual realities—for example, that blacks are not equal to whites, or that gays are not equal to straights—are in fact lies that much of society assumes as truth.

These examples highlight a critical feature of consensual realities: Although people often remain unsuspicious about their reality, when the seeds of suspicion are sown—that is, when people come to believe that there is more to their reality than meets the eye—people may be motivated to establish the truth. When so motivated, the consensual realities that operate in the background can be detected and deceptive realities can be exposed. Attempts to discover the consensual realities held by one's adversaries have led to very creative and notable solutions.

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