Introduction
Blog post 91 explored how personal ontologies emerge from lived experience. Experiences become interpretations. Interpretations become patterns. Patterns gradually become assumptions about how reality works. Biases such as confirmation bias and naïve realism help stabilize these assumptions, while social groups reinforce them further.
Blog posts 129 and 130 proposed that several characteristics of contemporary societies may strengthen this process. Partial dislocation increases dependence on continuity systems. Continuity systems increasingly become invisible and experienced as normality itself. Affective polarization encourages disagreement to be interpreted as a threat. Identity fragmentation makes continuity more fragile and therefore more valuable. Digital systems increasingly optimize for captivation by amplifying activation, conflict, status anxieties, and symbolic distinctions.
Taken together, these mechanisms appear to point in the same direction. They increase the likelihood that personal ontologies become hardened, continuity systems become defensive, and alternative interpretations of reality become difficult to appreciate.
If human beings naturally develop personal ontologies, naturally defend them, and many characteristics of contemporary societies further reinforce these tendencies, how is meaningful coexistence possible at all? Put differently, if the move from implicit cruelty to explicit cruelty discussed in blog post 129 is not inevitable, what still creates room for coexistence?
Belief-speaking
The answer might be hidden in a concept introduced much earlier in the blog posts. Blog post 30 discussed the distinction between fact-speaking and belief-speaking. Following Lewandowsky, belief-speaking was presented as a form of discourse in which honesty derives primarily from authenticity, sincerity, and consistency with personal experience rather than from correspondence with observable facts.
The focus of blog post 30 was on the pathological consequences of belief-speaking. Detached from shared reality, belief-speaking can contribute to populism, democratic norm violations, and the replacement of evidence by personal conviction.
Yet perhaps this is not the entire story. Belief-speaking may point toward a more fundamental human capacity. Human beings seem remarkably capable of appreciating ontologies that emerge from lived experience, even when those ontologies differ from their own. People regularly listen to stories, testimonies, and experiences that they have never personally lived. They often remain unconvinced by the conclusions drawn from those experiences while nevertheless appreciating how those conclusions emerged. In other words, people appear capable of recognizing coherence between experience and interpretation even when they do not share either.
This capacity seems important. If personal ontologies naturally emerge from lived experience, and if meaningful coexistence remains possible despite those ontologies, then the ability to appreciate experience-based interpretations may be one of the mechanisms that makes coexistence possible in the first place.
At the same time, the same mechanism appears capable of becoming pathological. An ontology expressed as an interpretation of experience may remain open to dialogue. An ontology expressed as reality itself may become difficult to distinguish from naïve realism. The same capacity that allows people to appreciate another person’s lived reality may also allow them to mistake personal reality for universal reality. Belief-speaking therefore appears capable of both connecting and disconnecting.
Fact-speaking
While belief-speaking can become detached from shared reality, the same happen to fact-speaking, as is demonstrated by the undemocratic liberalism current (see: blog posts 4 and 19 for instance).
Blog post 30 largely presented fact-speaking as the democratic corrective to the dangers of belief-speaking. Fact-speaking anchors discourse in evidence, observable reality, accountability, and reasoned argument. These functions remain indispensable.
Yet fact-speaking also appears vulnerable to a pathology of its own. The problem is not that the facts become incorrect. The problem is that facts may gradually become detached from lived experience. When this occurs, the correspondence between statements and data remains intact, while the correspondence between statements and how people experience reality begins to weaken. Institutional realities, policy frameworks, indicators, metrics, procedures, and expert interpretations may remain internally coherent and empirically supported. Yet they may increasingly fail to resonate with the experiences through which people navigate everyday life.
Under such conditions, fact-speaking can begin to resemble a mirror image of pathological belief-speaking. Belief-speaking detached from shared reality universalizes personal experience. Fact-speaking detached from shared reality universalizes institutional interpretation. In both cases, a particular ontology gradually comes to present itself as reality itself.
The difference lies not in the existence of naïve realism, but in where the naïve realism resides. One locates reality within personal experience. The other locates reality within institutional abstraction. Both appear capable of undermining democratic discourse. One does so by dismissing evidence that is not personally experienced. The other by dismissing statistically irrelevant experience. Both reduce the space in which alternative interpretations can be meaningfully encountered.
Leeway
If both belief-speaking and fact-speaking can strengthen democratic discourse and undermine it, then the question becomes what determines the difference. Why do some encounters with alternative ontologies generate curiosity and even ethical care while others generate defensiveness? Why do some experiences broaden understanding while others harden existing assumptions? Why do some disagreements become opportunities for learning while others become sources of hostility?
The distinction does not appear to lie in the mere existence of personal ontologies. Blog post 91 suggested that personal ontologies are unavoidable. Nor does it appear to lie in the existence of continuity systems. As blog post 130 argued, human beings require continuity and cannot function without it.
The question therefore may not be whether people possess ontologies, but how they relate to them. Perhaps human beings possess a degree of leeway.
The term is used here speculatively. Not as a stable personality trait or moral virtue, but as a capacity that appears to emerge under certain conditions and disappear under others. Leeway describes the possibility that individuals can encounter an ontology they do not share without immediately experiencing it as a threat. It is the capacity to recognize that another person’s interpretation may emerge coherently from their lived experience, even when one disagrees with the interpretation itself.
This possibility appears to be present in both belief-speaking and fact-speaking. Belief-speaking works because people are capable of appreciating the relationship between another person’s experience and their interpretation of that experience. Fact-speaking works because people are capable of appreciating the relationship between evidence and the conclusions drawn from it. In both cases, the listener grants a degree of leeway. The listener seems to temporarily suspend the assumption that their own ontology exhausts reality.
This does not require agreement. It does not require abandoning convictions. It does not require accepting another ontology as correct. It merely requires recognizing that reality may appear differently from another position within it. Yet the same leeway appears fragile. When personal ontologies become experienced as reality itself, leeway contracts. When continuity systems become invisible to themselves, leeway contracts. When personal experience is universalized, leeway contracts. When institutional abstractions are universalized, leeway contracts. Under such conditions, alternative interpretations increasingly cease to appear as interpretations. They appear instead as errors, threats, irrationalities, misinformation, ignorance, violations, ideology, or bad faith.
As was indicated in blog posts 129 and 130, the central challenge may not be fragmentation itself. Human societies have always contained competing interpretations of reality. The challenge may be avoiding hardened or even weaponized fragmentation, preserving the leeway that allows interpretations to encounter one another before defensiveness becomes hostility, and before implicit cruelty becomes explicit cruelty.
Democratic design
If leeway emerges under some conditions and contracts under others, then the question becomes whether social and democratic arrangements matter. If contemporary societies increasingly strengthen defensiveness through partial dislocation, continuity-system hardening, affective polarization, and captivation, then perhaps democratic innovation should not focus exclusively on better information, stronger narratives, or more sophisticated persuasion. It should maybe instead focus on creating conditions under which leeway remains possible.
Interdemocracy
This is what Interdemocracy aims to achieve: provide a setting in which leeway can emerge and be sustained. This is the “inter” in “interdemocracy”, inspired by the Japanese concept of „ma”: a space between positions rather than a position itself.
The objective is not agreement, consensus, or the replacement of one ontology by another. Nor is it the suspension of convictions. Rather, it is the temporary suspension of the assumption that one’s own ontology exhausts reality.
Such a suspension creates room for belief-speaking and fact-speaking to function as democratic resources rather than democratic pathologies. Experiences can be expressed without automatically becoming universal truths. Evidence can be introduced without automatically becoming institutional dogma. Ontologies can encounter one another without immediately becoming mutually exclusive.
Interdemocracy therefore can be understood as an attempt to preserve leeway long enough for people to hear the Other before defensiveness closes them up again and implicit cruelty takes over.