The thing that stops this process from fully sliding down the “slippery slope” towards speaking truth to power unconditionally is that there is a countervailing force: the penalty the coalition pays for its honesty. In the real world, there is not a simple dichotomy between the coalition and the rest of the world. Rather there are many coalitions, all competing for favor and resources. At the same time, the power is not omnipotent—there is a certain level of truth that it is willing to tolerate, simply because it doesn’t have the ability to enforce its ideological line strictly enough to police everyone. This power, of course, varies from place to place. As a result, we get a variety of equilibria, depending on how tolerant the power is. A free, open, democratic society will have a certain threshold for how much truth it is willing to tolerate (when that truth is against “conventional wisdom”). An authoritarian society will have a much different threshold.
The thing that stops this process from fully sliding down the “slippery slope” towards speaking truth to power unconditionally is that there is a countervailing force: the penalty the coalition pays for its honesty. In the real world, there is not a simple dichotomy between the coalition and the rest of the world. Rather there are many coalitions, all competing for favor and resources. At the same time, the power is not omnipotent—there is a certain level of truth that it is willing to tolerate, simply because it doesn’t have the ability to enforce its ideological line strictly enough to police everyone. This power, of course, varies from place to place. As a result, we get a variety of equilibria, depending on how tolerant the power is. A free, open, democratic society will have a certain threshold for how much truth it is willing to tolerate (when that truth is against “conventional wisdom”). An authoritarian society will have a much different threshold.