A Potempkin village relies on forced perspective. Wherever there is a widespread social conceit being entertained, there is also a balance of incentives and disincentives holding the audience in their positions.
Anyone can lie, but when you lie in such a way that other people are incentivized to share the lie, it's public relations.
We must really be living under conditions of managed outcomes (not competition / competitive equilibrium) if there's enough surplus capacity to orchestrate these incentives.
I foresee neomedievalism. The attacks on consensus institutions, and the grifts that have been cashing checks in the name of consensus institutions, have been very successful. We're going to reach a point where the most responsive institutions will be absolutely tied in knots responding to the sharpest, most analytically refined critiques of human history, while the dumber and less responsive institutions will plod on because they water the plants and feed the goldfish.
Remember that Justinian was the emperor for both the Justinian Code and the Nika riots. Remember that Cybersyn was creating a comprehensive structuralist economic model while Chile's soldiers were reduced to ransacking Pablo Neruda's house. You can have extremely refined symbolic state capacity -- even while material state capacity has collapsed.
