TWO FOXES AND A CHICKEN

Two foxes and a chicken were deciding what to eat. But to keep it fair, they decided to vote. Can you guess what they had to eat?

That’s right – a big bowl of democracy, the juicy crowning jewel of civilization; gold-plated freedom handed deliciously to the masses, with a side of rice and a wedge of lemon, and everybody clapped.

Democracy is amazing, it makes truth relative and simplifies an entire population to a single voiceless vibe. A wonderful way to take something complicated and wrap it in a procedure so polite, so refined, that even the condemned find themselves apologising for being eaten.

Votes feel grown-up, civilised, clicky pens and nodding heads and the ceremonial raising of hands, like a pagan ritual we’re all in on. They tidy up disagreement, package it in statistics, file it under “closure.”

But truth? Truth doesn’t show up to these meetings. Truth is at home with its feet on the table, chain-smoking despair. A vote doesn’t find truth, it finds preference. Pizza or pasta. Red or blue. Door A or B. The problem begins when we pretend the vote doesn’t just tell us what the room wants – but what the world is.

Consensus isn’t a microscope, it’s a mirror, held really really far away. And what it reflects is not the planet spinning in empirical reality, but the claustrophobic orbit of social gravity.

The Solomon Asch experiment, conducted in the 1950s, demonstrated how social pressure can lead individuals to conform to group opinions, even when they know those opinions are incorrect. Asch put one real participant in a room with several others who were actors. Everyone was shown a simple line-judgement task – the correct answer was obvious. Then the actors began giving the wrong answer, confidently and unanimously, again and again. The real participant answered last, and when the actors lied, the subject folded like sincerity at a job interview.

Because standing alone is expensive, not in money, but in ridicule, in silence, in the heavy sighs and raised brows of rooms that finds comfort in unity, not honesty.

Humans don’t typically crave truth, but they fundamentally crave belonging. We don’t walk into a room to say what we think, we walk in to see what’s safe to think. We perform, we reduce, we dilute our thoughts to something sippable. We learn what truths are allowed, and which come with a social invoice stapled to the face.

And slowly – almost poetically – reality stops being real. It becomes whatever gets the most likes. Familiarity breeds comfort, confidence fakes competence, simplicity travels, nuance hitches a ride but falls off somewhere around paragraph two.

The modern world is a megaphone pointed directly at your insecurities. And the loudest lie, if wrapped in punchlines and retweets, will always outpace the careful truth that comes with footnotes.

This isn’t a new worry, either. Plato had a version of it long before anyone could tally votes on a pivot-table. In The Republic, he uses the “Ship of State” image: a ship needs navigation – knowledge, skill, discipline – but the crew fights for the helm through persuasion and force, treating actual competence like an optional detail. It’s a metaphor for what happens when a group confuses popularity with ability, or agreement with understanding.

You don’t have to accept Plato’s broader conclusions to steal the useful warning, – procedure can select the persuasive over the competent, and the confident over the correct, and once a group gets used to doing that, it doesn’t just make one bad call, it builds a habit, a culture, a default setting.

People start to speak in ways that win, rather than ways that are true. They pre-edit themselves. They aim for applause, not accuracy. They learn to frame reality in whatever format the room rewards, – simpler, sharper, more certain, more emotional, more aligned, until eventually, the lie becomes the map, and anyone pointing to the coastline is called a heretic.

At that point, the room can “decide” that the map is correct, even if the coastline disagrees. The room can “decide” the obvious line is the wrong length, because everyone else is saying it with a straight face. The room can “decide” that a single pig-in-blanket is an acceptable portion size for a Christmas dinner, and somehow I’m wrong! Sorry, anyway, but yes, by all means, vote – if what you need is a sandwich.

But don’t confuse agreement for truth, or confidence for competence, or applause for accuracy. And don’t assume that a fair-looking procedure automatically protects the most vulnerable voice in the room – especially when there’s feathers all over the floor…