aggregating collective negations needs roundabout mechanisms like tabooing.

old title: dissent is individual, which is why collective negations can only happen through the frankly roundabout mechanism of taboo.

Saying "no" acknowledges the thing you're responding to as having enough weight to be noticed in the first place. "No" is a transformation that just doesn't survive intact through the transmission and lensing of the collective illusion. This fact is there, buried in the reflexive mistrust of protest, in the invitation to suspicion being inescapably double-edged as a rhetorical tool..."no" invites pruning, it invites criticality and logic, the exercise of reasoning over priors, and being the purest, most effective tool for the generation of powerful (useful, correct, effective, unpredicatable, unsimulable, fearsome) ideas that we have, is therefore much, much cheaper for an individual, and less risky, than it could ever be for a society. The mechanism of taboo, therefore, functions as an attempt at inoculation. It's an act of name-stealing, or dilution, of confusion. If you want certain things not to be thought, these roundabout mechanisms are all that you could hope to see working.