By The Intrepid in POSIWID — 22 Jan 2026

Look What Got Flattened in the Mail

On Numbers, Portability, and What Survives the Slot

My wife subscribes to the Tate museum's membership magazine. It arrives from London in a protective envelope—or it's supposed to. The last issue emerged from its transatlantic voyage looking like it had been fed through a shredder. Pages torn, spine cracked, corners gnawed by sorting machines on two continents.

The tracking number said delivered. But what crossed our threshold bore only a family resemblance to what the Tate had sent.

This is also how ideas travel.

The Exhibit

Here is a number that circulates: one-third of people are authoritarian.

You'll find it on social media, in opinion columns, in dinner-party explanations of why politics feels so broken. It arrives with the authority of research behind it, a clean ratio that makes the chaos feel legible. One-third. Not a majority, but not a fringe. A permanent feature of the landscape.

The number has a source. It traces back to work by political psychologist Karen Stenner, whose research examines what she calls "authoritarian predisposition"—a latent tendency, partly heritable, that disposes some people toward valuing conformity and obedience over diversity and autonomy.

Stenner's work is careful. In her framework, authoritarian predisposition is latent—dormant until activated by perceived "normative threat," the sense that shared values and social cohesion are under siege. The predisposition is measured indirectly, typically through questions about child-rearing values: Do you prioritize obedience and good manners in children, or independence and curiosity? It's a proxy, not a profession of ideology.

The research appeared in an edited academic volume. It was then summarized in a book chapter, condensed further for a magazine interview, excerpted on social media, and—in the thread that prompted this essay—placed alongside Weimar-era voting statistics and a poll about a specific act of state violence, all as converging evidence for the same underlying truth.

None of these steps are errors. They're translations into different communicative environments, each with its own constraints. But at each stage, the package got smaller.

What Got Lost

Trace what was shed in transit:

"Latent" became "are." A conditional predisposition—dormant, requiring activation—became an identity.

"Can be activated" became "prefer." The mechanism disappeared. Stenner's point is that normative threat produces authoritarian expression—meaning the threatening conditions matter, and might themselves be manufactured. But "one-third prefer authoritarianism" erases the activation step entirely.

"Proxy" became "measurement." Child-rearing values are an indirect indicator. By the time the number circulates, it reads as if researchers simply asked "Do you support authoritarianism?" and one-third said yes.

"Institutionally mediated" vanished. The framework doesn't explain how predisposition translates into political power. That requires separate analysis of electoral systems, coalition dynamics, and institutional leverage. The number can't tell you why a cohesive 30% might govern as though they were 60%—but it gets cited as if it could.

The feedback loop disappeared. If winner-take-all systems reliably produce governance that feels illegitimate to large minorities, they generate normative threat as a structural byproduct. The threat activates the predispositions; the activated predispositions justify institutional hardening; the hardening produces more illegitimacy. The system manufactures the psychology it claims to diagnose. But this recursive dynamic—the most politically actionable part of the analysis—doesn't survive the slot.

What arrived at the destination is simpler: a fixed number describing a stable population segment with essential characteristics that explains why things are the way they are.

That's not what was sent. It's what fit through the envelope slot.

The Slot

Every information system has an envelope slot—a constraint on what it will accept and transmit.

Academic journals accept methodological rigor and appropriate hedging. Popular magazines accept accessibility and narrative arc. Social media accepts brevity, affect, and shareability. Political speech accepts repetition and identity cues.

These aren't failures. They're design specifications. Each slot serves a purpose: peer review ensures scrutiny, journalism enables reach, platforms enable speed. The slot is what makes transmission possible at all.

But the slots are different sizes. When an idea must pass through multiple systems to travel from research to public discourse, it gets re-flattened at every stage. The peer-reviewed paper is too dense for the magazine. The magazine article is too long for the tweet. The tweet is too qualified for the meme. Think of how content must survive being quote-tweeted—ripped from context, reframed by a stranger, forced to make sense without its original scaffolding.

At each compression, something drops away. Usually the same things: conditionality, mechanism, uncertainty, context. What survives is what can pass through the narrowest slot in the chain.

Portability as Lingua Franca

This isn't a story about one careless social media thread. It's a structural feature of how knowledge moves through systems optimized for speed, reach, and engagement.

Consider the incentives at each node:

Researchers benefit from findings that get cited and covered. The quotable result travels further than the methodological caveat.
Journalists need hooks that editors will approve and readers will click. "One-third are authoritarian" is a hook. "A proxy measure suggests latent predispositions that activate under perceived normative threat" is not.
Platforms reward content that gets shared. Shared content compresses well, triggers recognition, confirms or usefully outrages.
Political actors need messages that can be repeated without distortion. Clean numbers repeat cleanly.

At every stage, portability wins. The nuanced version dies in transit; the streamlined version arrives intact.

This creates a systematic bias in public knowledge—toward essentialism over contingency, toward numbers over mechanisms, toward types of people over dynamic processes, toward destiny over design.

The most important truths may be structurally unspeakable in public discourse.

Not because they're suppressed, but because they can't survive transmission. They can be written. They can be published. But they cannot travel. What travels instead are the simplified versions, which then get mistaken for the thing itself.

The Damage Report

"One-third" is not unique. It belongs to a genus of flattened findings:

"3.5%"—Erica Chenoweth's research on nonviolent resistance found that movements achieving active participation from 3.5% of the population have historically succeeded. The research is about campaign dynamics, tactical diversity, and regime response. What circulates is just the number, as if reaching a threshold automatically produces change.

"10,000 hours"—Anders Ericsson studied deliberate practice in elite performers. Malcolm Gladwell's popularization compressed it to a threshold. What got lost: the specificity of "deliberate," the role of coaching, the variation across domains.

"93% of communication is nonverbal"—Albert Mehrabian studied how people interpret feelings from tone and expression in specific experimental conditions. What circulates: a universal claim that words barely matter.

In each case, a careful, bounded finding was flattened into a portable claim. The claim then takes on a life of its own, cited by people who never encountered the original research and wouldn't recognize its actual conclusions.

What the Flattened Version Does

Distortion is not inert. Once the simplified version becomes the object people act on, it feeds back into the world.

Consider "one-third are authoritarian" from different reading positions:

For liberals, the number works as reassurance and warning simultaneously. Reassurance: they're a minority, they can be outvoted. Warning: they're permanent, they won't change. The strategic implications are unclear—outvote them? accommodate them?—but the number feels like understanding.

For the right-leaning, the same number carries different possibilities. It says: you have a base large enough to matter. Your people respond reliably to specific cues. Your preferences are natural, not deviant—even liberal academics acknowledge your numbers. And if normative threat activates the base... well, that's actionable intelligence.

The research intended to explain authoritarian mobilization could function as a manual for it. "Manufacture normative threat, activate the base, leverage institutions" is nearly explicit in the original framework, just read from the other side.

This dual-use property is what makes flattening dangerous, not just epistemically sloppy. Once you explain how power works, you're also teaching people how to wield it. The explanation doesn't stay in the hands of those who share the researcher's normative commitments.

Stenner herself argued for reducing threat salience and accommodating authoritarian-leaning citizens within democratic frameworks. But that recommendation doesn't travel. The number does.

The Myth of the Third

Underneath all of this lies a deeper problem: the "third" may not exist as a coherent entity at all.

Survey research works by asking questions, scoring responses, and sorting scores into bins. The bins are analytical conveniences. They don't exist in the world; they exist in the methodology.

The same individual might express "authoritarian" preferences on one dimension and "non-authoritarian" preferences on another. The survey aggregates responses into a score; the analyst sorts scores into categories; the categories get named. But the person thus classified isn't walking around with a unified worldview. They're a bundle of responses shaped by mood, context, and question wording.

Actual political coalitions are messier still: single-issue voters, tribal loyalists, material-interest voters, negative partisans voting against rather than for, ideologues, and people who showed up because someone drove them to the polls. Calling this "a third" with shared "dispositions" imposes coherence on chaos.

The "middle third" is even more fictitious—a residual category for everyone who didn't sort cleanly. It includes moderates, non-participants, cross-pressured voters, and people whose views don't map onto the axis being measured at all.

The tidy thirds make politics feel like a board game with knowable pieces. Actual politics is more like weather—patterned, somewhat predictable in aggregate, chaotic at the level where action happens.

Reading Flattened Knowledge as Flattened

The answer is probably not "stop flattening." The envelope slot exists because transmission requires it.

But there might be value in developing a different kind of literacy—not just in claims, but in what claims had to shed to circulate.

When you encounter a portable number, you might ask:

What was this measuring, and how directly?
What conditions or mechanisms got stripped away?
What institutional story would connect this finding to political outcomes?
Who else might read this, and what would it tell them?

This doesn't require dismissing the research. Stenner's work illuminates something real about how certain dispositions can be activated. The problem isn't the research; it's the unacknowledged transformation it undergoes in transit.

The package that arrived is not the package that was sent. Knowing that won't reassemble the shredded pages. But it might prevent us from mistaking confetti for a document.

Coda: The System and the Psychology

There's a final irony worth naming.

The "one-third" framing implies that a fixed segment of the population has a psychological tendency that explains political outcomes. But Stenner's own model suggests something more unsettling: the authoritarian response is activated by normative threat, and normative threat can be manufactured.

If a political system reliably produces governance that feels illegitimate to large minorities—because winner-take-all structures translate pluralities into sweeping authority—then the system itself generates the threat that activates the psychology that the system then points to as the problem.

What looks like psychological destiny may be design failure.

That's not a reassurance. Design failures are hard to fix, especially when the beneficiaries have veto power over changes. But it does shift the question from "what's wrong with those people" to "what is the system doing to all of us."

The number can't ask that question. It can only be cited, repeated, and flattened further.

What arrives is what survives the slot. And what survives the slot is what we learn to call knowledge.