Believing Your Own Propaganda: The Fastest Way to Self-Destruction
There’s a simple rule in politics, business, and war: the moment you start believing your own propaganda, you’re screwed.
We see it over and over—governments, corporations, and individuals build up a narrative, repeat it until it becomes self-reinforcing, and then one day wake up completely detached from reality. It’s the Roman problem: the inability to process and adapt to real-world feedback because your entire structure is built around the illusion of eternal success. And once you can’t deal with the real problems, everything goes to shit.
Propaganda Is Just Human AI Model Collapse
If you’ve ever heard of AI model collapse, you’ll know what happens when an algorithm starts training only on its own outputs instead of fresh, diverse data. The system becomes more and more detached from reality, making increasingly useless or nonsensical predictions until it can no longer function.
People do this, too.
When a nation, a business, or a movement starts filtering out inconvenient truths in favor of self-reinforcing narratives, it’s the human equivalent of model collapse. The more you double down on your own hype, the worse it gets. You stop seeing the gaps in your thinking, you start making decisions based on internal fiction rather than external fact, and eventually, reality comes crashing in.
The Best Way and the Second-Best Way
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The best way to avoid this fate? Stick to facts. Be brutally honest about strengths, weaknesses, risks, and outcomes. No spin. No sugarcoating.
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The second-best way? At least know you’re bullshitting. If you must engage in propaganda (and let’s be real, some level of it is inevitable), maintain the self-awareness to recognize that it’s not objective truth.
The worst thing you can do is drink your own Kool-Aid. Once you cross that line, you’re no longer running the show—your own delusions are.
