It is not foolish to believe that any social and political order which effectively uses power, and which sustains a culture that means something to the people who live in it, must involve opacity, mystification, and large-scale deception. Reasonable people can believe . . . that human beings cannot live together effectively, at least on any culturally ambitious scale, if they understood fully what they are doing. It is not necessarily foolish to believe these things, but they may not be true, and we can still live in the hope . . . that they are not.

—Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness