Nations are not held together by shared beliefs or unanimous agreement. They remain stable because citizens develop a shared sense of reality—a common set of expectations about what is real, what consequences will follow actions, and which futures are plausible. This sense of reality operates below ideology and opinion and is reinforced through institutions, rituals, and social consequences. The public return of North Korean soldiers from foreign deployment illustrates how societies actively repair and stabilize these shared expectations, absorbing potentially disruptive experiences into a coherent national order rather than allowing them to fracture it.
