Introduction
Several strands in the series of blog posts appear to converge on a common question. Blog posts 96 through 104 explored the role of the facilitator in participatory settings. One recurring observation was that identical procedures could produce very different outcomes. Students sometimes remained formal, cautious, and detached. At other times they opened up, became curious, and engaged with one another in unexpected ways. The difference often seemed related not to the procedure itself but to the facilitator’s presence, passion, ethical care, and willingness to genuinely engage.
Blog posts 129 and and 130 approached a different problem. They proposed that contemporary societies contain multiple mechanisms that appear to strengthen ontology hardening. Partial dislocation increases dependence on continuity systems. Continuity systems become invisible and experienced as normality itself. Affective polarization encourages disagreement to be interpreted as threat. Digital technologies increasingly amplify activation, conflict, status anxieties, and symbolic distinctions.
Blog post 131 nevertheless suggested that meaningful coexistence remains possible because human beings possess a degree of leeway: the capacity to encounter an ontology they do not share without immediately experiencing it as a threat. Blog post 132 proposed that curiosity can activate this leeway and that sustained engagement may sometimes lead to a relational space resembling the Japanese concept of ma. Blog post 133 added a further possibility. Contemporary ontologies may be both hardened and unfinished. They are defended, yet never fully complete. This unfinished quality may help explain why leeway remains possible despite the many forces that seem to work against it.
Taken together, these observations raise a question: If leeway exists, what opens it?
What does not seem to open leeway
A first answer may emerge indirectly. If blog posts 129 through 133 are correct, then many contemporary responses to polarization appearineffective. The standard response to disagreement is often to provide more information, more facts, better arguments, stronger evidence, more sophisticated narratives, or more effective communication strategies.
Sometimes these interventions work. Research discussed elsewhere in the blog posts suggests that people are capable of updating beliefs and improving their factual accuracy. Human beings are not sealed inside their ontologies. Yet this observation does not fully resolve the puzzle.
People frequently encounter accurate information and reject it. They encounter carefully constructed arguments and become defensive. They encounter polished narratives and experience them as manipulative. The response often appears disproportionate to the content itself.
Perhaps the issue is not accuracy. Perhaps the issue is that facts, arguments, and narratives can lose their visible connection to lived reality. When this happens, they may increasingly appear as attempts to manage ontologies from the outside. The result is not curiosity but defense. Not leeway but resistance. This possibility may help explain why institutional communication, strategic communication, political messaging, and counternarratives often produce disappointing results. The problem may not be that they are wrong. The problem may be that they no longer appear connected to reality as experienced by those receiving them.
Belief-speaking revisited
This possibility casts a different light on blog post 30. The discussion there focused on belief-speaking as a pathology. Detached from shared reality, belief-speaking can contribute to populism, democratic norm violations, and the replacement of evidence by conviction. Yet blog posts 131 through 133 suggested that belief-speaking may also reveal something important. Human beings seem capable of appreciating interpretations that emerge from lived experience, even when they disagree with those interpretations.
People often listen to another person’s experience and think: “I would not draw the same conclusion.” Yet they simultaneously understand how the conclusion emerged. This appears to create a temporary opening. The opening does not arise because the listener agrees. It arises because the listener recognizes a connection between experience and interpretation. Perhaps what opens leeway is not agreement but perceived contact with reality.
This would explain why people are capable of enjoying works of fiction, be they films, novels, or games, or works of non-fiction from other eras or geographies that offer representations of an unfamiliar reality without rejecting their otherness.
Facilitators
The classroom observations discussed in blog posts 96 through 104 may point in the same direction. Students often appeared more willing to engage when facilitators demonstrated passion, ethical care, vulnerability, and genuine curiosity. The effect cannot be reduced to expertise. Nor can it be reduced to neutrality. Facilitators seemed capable of opening a space that remained closed under otherwise similar conditions.
One possible interpretation is that students responded to signs of lived engagement. The facilitator appeared connected to something beyond procedure. Not necessarily objective truth. Not necessarily authority. Something that felt real. If this interpretation is correct, then the facilitator was not merely transmitting information. The facilitator was functioning as a mediator of reality.
The problem of mediation
At this point another difficulty appears. Most reality is encountered indirectly. People rarely witness political events, scientific discoveries, social developments, or distant conflicts themselves. They rely on journalists, experts, institutions, politicians, teachers, witnesses, activists, writers, influencers, artists, and countless other intermediaries.
The question therefore becomes more complicated. If leeway is opened by perceived contact with reality, how do people recognize such contact when reality itself is mediated? The answer cannot simply be authenticity and sincerity as the markers of honesty, as was suggested in blog post 30. Honesty is difficult to verify.
People rarely know whether a politician is honest. They rarely know whether an influencer is honest. They rarely know whether a witness is honest. What people encounter are appearances of honesty, authenticity, and sincerity. Or perhaps more precisely: appearances of connection to lived reality.
This creates a profound ambiguity. The same opening that allows ethical encounter can also allow manipulation.
What appears real
This ambiguity would explain why contemporary societies often interpret the phenomenon as gullibility. It seems as if individuals easily fall for epistemic manipulation. Yet the attraction may not primarily be about narratives. Nor may it primarily depend on what information is presented. If contemporary identities remain unfinished, as proposed in blog post 133, then they may remain unusually sensitive to expressions that appear connected to reality. The attraction is not necessarily to truth, expertise, ideology, or authenticity as such. It may be to what appears real.
This would help explain why individuals sometimes trust charismatic outsiders more than institutions, experiential narratives more than statistics, witnesses more than experts, and influencers more than formal authorities. The issue may not primarily be the content being communicated. The issue may be the perception that the communication remains connected to lived reality.
Reality and the sacred
This raises a final question. Why should perceived contact with reality possess such power?
One possible answer is that reality itself increasingly performs a function once occupied by more traditional sacred frameworks. Many inherited sources of orientation have weakened. Religious certainty, stable identities, shared narratives, and institutional trust have become more fragile. Yet the need for orientation remains.
Perhaps reality increasingly functions as the highest remaining reference point available to individuals navigating fragmented social worlds. Not reality as certainty. Not reality as truth. But reality as the possibility that something exists beyond our personal ontologies. Maybe in our fluid times, reality is the closest to sacredness that we can get. Maybe, reality is the last element that universally matters to us.
If so, the intensity of contemporary conflicts becomes easier to understand. People may not simply be defending opinions. They may be defending what they experience as their connection to reality itself.
A tentative conclusion
The question posed at the beginning of this blog post was simple. What opens leeway? A speculative answer appears to emerge from the blog posts. Leeway does not seem to open primarily through facts, arguments, narratives, or ideology when these have become detached from lived reality. Nor does it seem to open through agreement.
Instead, leeway appears to open when people encounter signs that another person, institution, or narrative remains connected to reality as lived and experienced. This opening is neither inherently democratic nor inherently anti-democratic. It can lead toward dialogue, participation, ethical care, and democratic renewal. It can also lead toward manipulation, extremism, conspiracy thinking, and authoritarianism. The opening itself appears neutral.
This may explain why the democratic challenge is larger than combating misinformation or constructing better counternarratives. Perhaps the deeper challenge is preserving environments in which reality can still be encountered through others without immediately being absorbed into competing ontologies. In that sense, the question may not be how to persuade people. The question may be how to keep reality visible enough for leeway to remain possible.