By Atiq Raja
Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows is deceptively simple in its premise, yet profoundly unsettling in its implications. On the surface, it is a book about psychology, language, and human behavior. Beneath that, it is a mirror reflecting the hidden dynamics of society, revealing how silence, acknowledgment, and shared awareness shape the world around us. At its core lies a deceptively straightforward idea: the gap between what people know privately and what they acknowledge publicly drives power, politeness, politics, and even injustice. Pinker begins with the concept of “common knowledge,” a term that carries more weight than it first appears.
Common knowledge is not simply what many people know; it is what everyone knows that everyone else knows. This distinction is crucial because once a fact reaches this level of shared awareness, it demands action. The moment everyone recognizes that everyone else knows a truth, denials lose their power, excuses become hollow, and social behavior shifts. Entire systems, Pinker argues, persist not because people are ignorant, but because they tacitly collaborate in silence. The book’s most arresting insight lies in the way societies live with obvious wrongs. Corruption, discrimination, abuse, and institutional failure are not invisible; rather, they persist because they are rarely named aloud.
Silence becomes a social contract: leaders can deny responsibility, institutions can avoid accountability, and individuals can preserve their own comfort. This arrangement allows societies to survive, but it also allows injustices to become entrenched. Pinker’s exploration of this tension between unspoken truth and public acknowledgment forces readers to confront the moral cost of quiet complicity. Politeness, too, is reframed in Pinker’s account. Far from mere etiquette or weakness, indirect speech, euphemisms, and avoidance of the obvious are social strategies designed to preserve harmony, relationships, and stability. They allow people to coexist without constant conflict. Yet the very mechanisms that maintain social equilibrium can also shield cruelty and injustice when habitual silence becomes routine.
In other words, politeness is a double-edged sword: it can protect communities, but it can equally protect wrongdoing. Perhaps most striking is Pinker’s treatment of the transformative power of acknowledgment. Whistleblowers, activists, and reformers do not simply reveal secrets—they force society to recognize what has long been understood privately. Once a truth becomes common knowledge, the social rules shift immediately: excuses falter, denials crumble, and moral pressure intensifies. Speaking the truth publicly, when done strategically, is a force multiplier. It changes not only perception but action, and it transforms social dynamics that have previously relied on silence. Pinker also challenges conventional thinking about hypocrisy.
Far from being merely a moral failing, hypocrisy often signals that moral standards exist, even when individuals fail to live up to them. The danger arises when hypocrisy hardens into unbroken silence and no one challenges it. In that context, the moral compass of a society erodes, and the very mechanisms that could enforce accountability lie dormant. The most profound lesson of Pinker’s book, however, is the cost of unspoken truths. Societies do not collapse because people are unaware of what is wrong; they collapse because they refuse to acknowledge it openly. Delayed recognition allows problems to fester, isolates victims, and makes reform exponentially more difficult.
Silence provides short-term comfort but generates long-term harm, allowing inequality, corruption, and injustice to gain momentum unchecked. What Pinker ultimately advocates is not unfiltered honesty at all times, but conscious awareness: an understanding of when silence preserves harmony and when it perpetuates harm. Speaking up is not merely a matter of courage; it is a question of timing, context, and collective awareness. The book challenges each reader to ask a difficult question: what truths do we all know but continue to pretend we do not? Because the moment we say them out loud, the world changes. When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows is more than an exploration of cognition or social behavior; it is a meditation on human responsibility.
(The writer is a rights activist and CEO of AR Trainings and Consultancy, with degrees in Political Science and English Literature, can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
