It might be worth separating self-consciousness (awareness of how your self looks from within) from face-consciousness (awareness of how your self looks from outside). Self-consciousness is clearly useful as a cheap proxy for face-consciousness, and so we develop a strong drive to be able to see ourselves as good in order for others to do so as well. We see the difference between this separation and being a good person being only a social concept (suggested by Ruby) by considering something like the events in “Self-consciousness in social justice” with only two participants: then there is no need to defend face against others, but people will still strive for a self-serving narrative.
Correct me if I’m wrong: you seem more worried about self-consciousness and the way it pushes people to not only act performatively, but also limits their ability to see their performance as a performance causing real damage to their epistemics.
It could also be that everybody (suitable quantification might be limited to: every student in this course/everyone at this party/every thinker on this site/every co-conspirator of our coup/etc) does in fact know X, but not everybody knows that everybody knows X. Depending on the circumstance of this being pointed out this can be part of creating common knowledge of X. This is related, but not identical to the fourth mode (of self-fulfilling prophecies) you describe. Consider the three statements:
X: “the king is wicked and his servants corrupt”
X’: everybody in our conspiracy knows X
X″: it’s common knowledge in our conspiracy that X
It’s clear that saying X’ can’t make X true as long as our conspiracy doesn’t leak information to the king or his servants. It’s also clear that saying X’ at a meeting of our whole conspiracy makes X″ true, and that this can be a useful tool for collective action. In fact if X’ is not quite true (some people have doubts) saying it can make it true (if our co-conspirators are modal logicians using something like the T axiom).
From a more individualistic view-point such a statement of this form could still contain information if Bob does not know that he knows X (consider Zizek’s description of ideology as unknown knowns).
I think you point to a valid type of problem with conspiracies of savvy and complicity, but mistakenly paint these as weapons asymmetrically favoring the forces of darkness. Perhaps the Common Knowledge framing makes it clearer, but the modes you describe are degenerate cases of tools for Justice:
The first mode attempts to look as deferral to experts on a question of fact. This often isn’t as useful as discussing the object level, but might be more effective and legible if used as basis for a decision if the statement about expert opinion is not a lie.
We need to be able to punish defection in a legible way so it doesn’t degenerate into blame games. For this we need common knowledge about these things so that people don’t have excuses for saying or acting along the lines of not-X, but it really needs to be common knowledge so that people don’t have excuses for not punishing defection on this point.
Restricting the universe over which you quantify can be really useful. In particular if you want to coordinate around a concrete project (like building Justice or a spaceship) it’s necessary to restrict your notion of ‘somebody’ to a set that only includes people willing and able to accept certain facts/norms as given.
As mentioned above the self-fulfilling nature can be subtle, but it’s not necessarily an ominous prophecy. It could be more along the lines of: “We all band together in accomplishing our goal, so we accomplish it and everyone who took part is greatly rewarded.”