Official pretense and private knowledge must diverge for social reality to function

Evidence

Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can. To use one of Žižek’s examples: who was it, for instance, who didn’t know that Really Existing Socialism (RES) was shabby and corrupt? Not any of the people, who were all too aware of its shortcomings; nor any of the government administrators, who couldn’t but know. No, it was the big Other who was the one deemed not to know – who wasn’t allowed to know – the quotidian reality of RES. Yet the distinction between what the big Other knows, i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being ‘merely’ emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows ‘ordinary’ social reality to function. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 95

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Lacan/Zizek’s ‘big Other’ as the virtual consumer of propaganda required to believe even when no individual actually does.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the gap between official fiction and lived knowledge is constitutive of ordinary social reality is genuinely paradigm-level material worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy; Trust fills the gap between formal structures and actual social reality — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2833; Private knowledge can convert public space into semiprivate territory — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 709 (+1 more)

Related

• Social systems require a fictional authority believed to be ignorant (similarity 0.88)
• The pretense the big Other remains ignorant sustains ordinary social reality (similarity 0.86)
• PR and propaganda succeed because the collective fiction is allowed to stay ignorant (similarity 0.83)

Broader Connections

• Power cannot self-realize but depends on societal-structural conditions for legitimacy #expands (0.78)
• Trust fills the gap between formal structures and actual social reality #complicates (0.78) — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 2833
• Private knowledge can convert public space into semiprivate territory #exemplifies (0.72) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 709
• Scholarly theoretical lenses can actively conceal social reality rather than reveal it #contradicts (0.72) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3491