Warg Franklin describes the Overton Bubble:
The Overton Window is a concept in political sociology referring to the range of acceptable opinions that can be held by respectable people.
“Respectable” of course means that the subject can be integrated with polite society. Respectability is a strong precondition on ability to have open influence in the mainstream.
Thus the Overton window becomes a mechanism of political control. If you can define the coordinating ideologies of all enemy political coalitions as outside the Overton window, then respectable society, which is your own power base, will be free of their influence, and they will be fatally marginalized. It is difficult to get your people to play along just by fiat, but it can be done. This is the basic insight behind official ideologies and religions, inquisitions, political repression of speech, and so on. It is an indispensable system of power for any ruling coalition, and is thus present in all societies.
The trouble with the Overton window as a mechanism of political control, and with politicization of speech and thought in general, is that it causes significant collateral damage on the ability of your society to think clearly. If some thoughts are unthinkable and unspeakable, and the truth happens in some case to fall outside of polite consensus, then your ruling elite and their society will run into situations they simply can’t handle.
Thus a wise elite uses the politicization of speech very sparingly, only in situations where immediate political security is threatened, and they use it in concert with other destructive but effective mechanisms like martial law, state seizure of assets, and such, to quickly and decisively return to a state of political security. Once political security is restored, the lawful freedom which is necessary for clear thought and prosperity can be reinstated.
[...]
Despite an increase in the power and availability of “right wing” and other unorthodox ideas, folks within the Overton window are less willing to hear and understand ideas outside the mainstream than ever before in Western history. Even at the height of religious persecution of heretics, top theologians were engaging more honestly and openly with the best heresies than Harvard does today. The Overton window has become an Overton bubble, with most respectable people trapped inside of it, unable to hear or think thoughts outside it.
[...]
When media and universities had hegemonic control over the intellectual space, an effective, if destructive, tactic was to radicalize the thing a bit to flush out the insufficiently loyal, and then purge everyone who doesn’t step in line. The heretics, thus exiled, would be doomed to wander the intellectual wasteland outside of the universities, and would not be able to organize any kind of counter-thought. Thus the Overton window occasionally shifting and expelling the “bigots” was an effective means of political control.
Today, it is no longer effective; the expelled intellectuals go on thinking and publishing and working together, they just do it over the internet in an uncontrolled fashion. It’s still weaker out here for the most part than inside the bubble, but that has been rapidly changing over the past few years, and we can expect the trend to continue. It is no longer effective because exclusion from the bubble, no matter how vigorous, is no longer intellectually fatal, and is even becoming liberating.
This is where Mr. Doll and his “Syneidesis” could really be of help:
“…If the elite mainstream won’t open to dialogue and understanding with the outside, and the outside doesn’t make good-faith attempts to engage with the intellectual mainstream, the intellectual-political landscape will divide, and we will get civil war…”