Joshe

The Psychological Architecture of Post-Truth Propagation: A Concentric Model

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The Psychological Architecture of Post-Truth Propagation: A Concentric Model

Overview

This model maps the psychological architecture underlying post-truth political movements, revealing how they function as collective psychological defense systems rather than ideological persuasion campaigns. By focusing exclusively on psychological mechanisms, the model explains why post-truth beliefs prove so resistant to factual correction and rational argument.

The concentric structure illustrates how unresolved psychological pain at the core radiates outward through unconscious mechanisms, creating a self-reinforcing system that recruits and maintains believers through emotional contagion rather than logical conviction.

The Three Layers

Core Pillars: The Psychological Engine

At the model's center lie the fundamental psychological drivers that power post-truth movements. These aren't political beliefs but rather deep psychological needs and defensive strategies:

Authoritarian Psychology represents more than a preference for strong leadership—it reflects a psychological orientation toward external authority as a means of managing internal chaos and uncertainty. This psychological structure seeks to outsource the burden of ambiguity and moral complexity to a powerful figure who provides certainty.

Identity Merging describes the dangerous fusion of personal and political identity. When political beliefs become psychologically indistinguishable from the self, any challenge to those beliefs triggers survival-level psychological defenses. This isn't mere loyalty; it's a complete enmeshment where the political becomes personal at the deepest level.

Shame Avoidance identifies the core emotional driver. Shame—unlike guilt—attacks the entire self, making it psychologically unbearable. Post-truth beliefs offer protection from shame by creating alternative narratives where the self remains virtuous and powerful rather than diminished or wrong.

Coping Mechanism (Pain) reveals the ultimate function: these beliefs serve as psychological painkillers. They manage deep emotional pain and trauma by transforming it into righteous anger and externalized blame. The post-truth framework becomes a psychological medication that must be continuously administered.

Propagation Mechanisms: The Unconscious Transmission System

The middle ring contains the psychological processes through which post-truth beliefs spread. Critically, all operate below conscious awareness, bypassing rational evaluation:

Emotional Osmosis describes how feelings transfer between individuals without conscious processing. Like cellular osmosis, emotions flow from areas of high concentration to low concentration, spreading anxiety, anger, and certainty through groups via mirror neurons and emotional contagion. People "catch" feelings before thoughts.

Mimetic Desire (from René Girard's theory) explains how humans unconsciously copy the desires and beliefs of others, especially during uncertainty. We don't want things directly; we want what others want. In post-truth contexts, people adopt beliefs not through evaluation but through unconscious imitation of valued group members.

Symbolic Dominance Transfer captures how displays of strength and certainty trigger ancient dominance-submission psychological patterns. When leaders project absolute confidence, followers experience psychological relief by submitting to that certainty, transferring their anxiety upward in the hierarchy.

Projection and Blame-Shifting serve dual psychological functions: protecting the ego from uncomfortable self-knowledge while providing targets for displaced emotional pain. These mechanisms operate automatically, creating external enemies that explain internal distress.

Passive Enabling describes how the discomfort of confrontation leads to psychological accommodation. Rather than challenge post-truth beliefs—risking conflict and social rupture—people unconsciously adjust their own reality to maintain social harmony.

Peripheral Supporters: The Psychological Vulnerabilities

The outer ring identifies not demographic groups but psychological orientations that make individuals susceptible to post-truth contagion:

Family Absorbers prioritize belonging needs over truth-seeking. The psychological need for family cohesion overrides critical thinking, as the threat of family rejection activates primal abandonment fears that overwhelm rational processing.

Low-Info Voters aren't necessarily unintelligent but rather operate with limited cognitive bandwidth for political processing. Overwhelmed by complexity, they rely on cognitive shortcuts and emotional heuristics that post-truth narratives exploit.

Cultural Conformists derive psychological safety from group alignment. Their self-esteem depends on social position, making them exquisitely sensitive to group beliefs and unable to risk the psychological threat of nonconformity.

Conflict-Avoidant Moderates experience such psychological distress from confrontation that they'll unconsciously distort reality to maintain peace. Their "both sides" frameworks aren't intellectual positions but psychological defenses against the anxiety of taking stands.

The System Dynamics

The model's power lies in revealing post-truth politics as a psychological contagion system rather than an information problem. The core's unresolved psychological pain doesn't stay contained—it radiates outward through these unconscious mechanisms, recruiting others with similar psychological vulnerabilities.

This explains why fact-checking fails: you cannot fact-check a psychological defense mechanism. 

The concentric structure shows how each layer reinforces the others. The peripheral supporters, through their enabling and conformity, validate the core's defenses. The propagation mechanisms ensure continuous psychological reinforcement. The core, feeling validated, intensifies its psychological investment. It's a self-reinforcing psychological system.

Why This Matters: The Gift of Clarity

This model matters because it brings clarity to those standing in bewilderment, watching reality itself seem to fracture around them. For those who've felt gaslit by the failure of facts to matter, who've watched loved ones disappear into alternate realities, who've questioned their own sanity as truth became negotiable—this model offers the profound relief of comprehension.

The bewilderment is real and legitimate. It's the vertigo of watching half the population reject observable reality. It's the cognitive dissonance of seeing intelligent people embrace obvious falsehoods. It's the exhaustion of engaging in good-faith arguments that go nowhere. It's the heartbreak of losing family members not to death but to an impenetrable psychological fortress.

This model explains why you're not crazy. The phenomena you're witnessing follows psychological laws as predictable as gravity. When you understand that you're watching psychological defense mechanisms, not intellectual positions, the bewildering becomes comprehensible. The person rejecting climate science isn't evaluating data—they're managing psychological pain. The relative embracing conspiracy theories isn't thinking poorly—they're medicating shame.

Understanding this doesn't make the phenomenon less tragic, but it makes it less maddening. It's the difference between watching a loved one's mysterious illness and understanding their diagnosis. The illness remains, but the bewilderment lifts. You stop taking it personally. You stop exhausting yourself with futile interventions. You stop questioning reality itself.

This clarity also explains your own psychological experience. The anxiety you feel watching post-truth spread isn't irrational—you're correctly perceiving a psychological contagion. The exhaustion from fact-checking isn't weakness—you're using the wrong tool for the job. The grief over lost relationships isn't overdramatic—you've lost someone to a psychological defense system that won't allow them to return.

Conclusion

The Psychological Architecture of Post-Truth Propagation model offers a framework for understanding one of the most pressing challenges of our time. By mapping the psychological mechanisms rather than the political content, it reveals post-truth movements as collective psychological defense systems that spread through emotional contagion rather than rational persuasion.

This psychological lens explains both the intensity of post-truth beliefs and their immunity to factual correction. When we understand that we're dealing with psychological pain management rather than information deficits, we can begin developing interventions that address the actual problem rather than its surface manifestations.

The model ultimately suggests that the post-truth crisis is, at its core, a mental health crisis playing out in the political arena—a collective psychological symptom of societies struggling to process rapid change, social fragmentation, and accumulated trauma. Until we address these underlying psychological realities, fact-checking will remain as ineffective as using logic to treat a broken heart.

Edited by Joshe

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I don't believe this is a new phenomenon("Post-"). Most people up to 40 years ago believed a flying spaghetti monster told men in white robes how everyone shouldn't dress and what music they should listen to, now it's down to about 10% of the population(maga and maga-adjacent)

Edited by Elliott

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11 minutes ago, Elliott said:

I don't think this is a new phenomena("Post-"). 

Hopefully you get the point though. I think this model explains a lot and I haven't found anything better that explains the fucked up reality we find ourselves in. 

None of the ideas are new, it's just that these ideas are often talked about in isolation, which makes it hard to see how everything is connected.

Edited by Joshe

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Just now, Joshe said:

Hopefully you get the point though. I think this model explains a lot and I haven't found anything better that explains the fucked up reality we find ourselves in. 

None of the ideas are new, it's just that these ideas are often talked about in isolation, which makes it hard to see how everything is working together. 

Ya, I think it's a great post.

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Each core pillar is huge, but I think shame-avoidance might be the biggest. Just to demonstrate how shame-avoidance works, using conspiracy theories as an example:

"The Shame-to-Conspiracy Pipeline

Conspiracy theories medicate shame through several mechanisms:

1. Transformation into special knowledge - The shame of being "ignorant," "left behind," or "unsuccessful" transforms into being one of the few who "sees the truth." You're not a failure; you're awakened. The shame of exclusion becomes the pride of insight.

2. Externalizing the cause - If you lost your job, your status, your sense of cultural relevance - that's shameful. But if a cabal of elites deliberately destroyed your industry to control you? Now you're a victim of evil forces, not a personal failure. The shame dissolves into righteous anger.

3. Retroactive meaning-making - Past humiliations and failures get recontextualized. That bankruptcy wasn't poor decisions; it was "them" keeping you down. That divorce wasn't personal inadequacy; it was "their" attack on traditional values. Shame transforms into evidence of persecution.

4. Community of the knowing - Shame isolates, but conspiracy theories create instant belonging with fellow "truth-seekers." You go from shamefully alone to proudly connected.

Example: Someone whose small business failed during economic changes could face crushing shame - "I'm a failure, I couldn't adapt, I'm worthless." But if they believe globalist elites deliberately destroyed small businesses? The shame evaporates. They're not a failed businessperson; they're a warrior against the New World Order.

Admitting error would re-activate shame, which is why counter-evidence is blocked.

The conspiracy theory doesn't just distract from shame - it performs psychological alchemy, converting shame's poison into the medicine of purpose, belonging, and specialness."

You can almost view conspiratorial thinking, Tucker Carlson, and many other right-wing figureheads as "shame-regulation technology".

Edited by Joshe

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I feel  this is very American Centered. Out of America may work a bit like this explanation, but america is the epithome of this stuff. The World is bigger than the fuckedup America Dystopia. Luckly

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3 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

I feel  this is very American Centered. Out of America may work a bit like this explanation, but america is the epithome of this stuff. The World is bigger than the fuckedup America Dystopia. Luckly

Israel, Russia, Argentina,.....?

Edited by Elliott

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10 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

I feel  this is very American Centered. Out of America may work a bit like this explanation, but america is the epithome of this stuff. The World is bigger than the fuckedup America Dystopia. Luckly

Maybe. America is all I really know. I could still see it applying to any other country, given the right circumstances. 

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This is one of the few posts on this forum that actually lives up to the idea of conscious politics.

Most people's idea of conscious politics is just "Let's accept that everyone is on a different part of the Spiral in the Spiral Dynamics model... as the problems we're seeing are just a reflection of low development within that model." And it's like, "Let's look with a critical lens at each of the phases... and let's find the good in each of these phases."

But the Spiral Dynamics model is not equipped to explain what's happening now... nor does it provide any solutions. The rise of authoritarianism can happen regardless of someone's Spiral phase... as human beings all have similar needs and psychological mechanisms. And those don't go away or change.

That is why true conscious politics requires a deep and compassionate collective psychological awareness of our psychological blindspots and weaknesses as humans... and how we're all susceptible to being weaponized towards enabling and abetting authoritarianism.

It is not some great evil... it is psychological illness that every single human being is susceptible to without requisite consciousness to avoid these traps. It's the darkening of the collective human spirit towards a meaner and angrier world.

While it's important to push back on the symptoms and not be wishy washy about the problems we're dealing with on the surface level (a.k.a. Stop pussy-footing and weasel wording around and call a thing what it is (apropos of Fascism)... lest we fall into "Passive Enabling" or becoming "Conflict Avoidant Moderates")... one cannot understand the roots of these "political issues" without realizing that 95% of politics is just a collective psychological projection and Shadow boxing with that projection.

The same is true with all instances of authoritarianism and mass mobilization towards 'evil' ends that have ever happened in human history.

Nazis and Fascists in the 1940s had the contagion. And now, many human beings in many nations have the same contagion... producing the same patterns and symptoms. The main difference is that the world is different technologically and ideologically. So, it looks slightly different... but is ultimately the exact same thing.

A hurricane starts the same way every time and has similar patterns. So too does this collective contagion.

And if we can recognize it as a temporal and contagious psychological illness, we can find ways to prevent it and treat it. And that's a much better solution than condemnation of those who are afflicted.

Edited by Emerald

Are you struggling with self-sabotage and CONSTANTLY standing in the way of your own success? 

If so, and if you're looking for an experienced coach to help you discover and resolve the root of the issue, you can click this link to schedule a free discovery call with me to see if my program is a good fit for you.

 

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42 minutes ago, Rafael Thundercat said:

I feel  this is very American Centered. Out of America may work a bit like this explanation, but america is the epithome of this stuff. The World is bigger than the fuckedup America Dystopia. Luckly

This is very much a human thing... not specifically American... and not particular to this era.

Every human being is susceptible to this contagion.


Are you struggling with self-sabotage and CONSTANTLY standing in the way of your own success? 

If so, and if you're looking for an experienced coach to help you discover and resolve the root of the issue, you can click this link to schedule a free discovery call with me to see if my program is a good fit for you.

 

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1 hour ago, Emerald said:

This is one of the few posts on this forum that actually lives up to the idea of conscious politics.

Most people's idea of conscious politics is just "Let's accept that everyone is on a different part of the Spiral in the Spiral Dynamics model... as the problems we're seeing are just a reflection of low development within that model." And it's like, "Let's look with a critical lens at each of the phases... and let's find the good in each of these phases."

But the Spiral Dynamics model is not equipped to explain what's happening now... nor does it provide any solutions. The rise of authoritarianism can happen regardless of someone's Spiral phase... as human beings all have similar needs and psychological mechanisms. And those don't go away or change.

That is why true conscious politics requires a deep and compassionate collective psychological awareness of our psychological blindspots and weaknesses as humans... and how we're all susceptible to being weaponized towards enabling and abetting authoritarianism.

It is not some great evil... it is psychological illness that every single human being is susceptible to without requisite consciousness to avoid these traps. It's the darkening of the collective human spirit towards a meaner and angrier world.

While it's important to push back on the symptoms and not be wishy washy about the problems we're dealing with on the surface level (a.k.a. Stop pussy-footing and weasel wording around and call a thing what it is (apropos of Fascism)... lest we fall into "Passive Enabling" or becoming "Conflict Avoidant Moderates")... one cannot understand the roots of these "political issues" without realizing that 95% of politics is just a collective psychological projection and Shadow boxing with that projection.

The same is true with all instances of authoritarianism and mass mobilization towards 'evil' ends that have ever happened in human history.

Nazis and Fascists in the 1940s had the contagion. And now, many human beings in many nations have the same contagion... producing the same patterns and symptoms. The main difference is that the world is different technologically and ideologically. So, it looks slightly different... but is ultimately the exact same thing.

A hurricane starts the same way every time and has similar patterns. So too does this collective contagion.

And if we can recognize it as a temporal and contagious psychological illness, we can find ways to prevent it and treat it. And that's a much better solution than condemnation of those who are afflicted.

Thanks! 100%. I wish more people would start acknowledging these things rather than just dropping their jaw and resorting to condemnation or refutation of surface-level points every time they're confronted with it. I need to do more to integrate this knowledge myself. 

I get the sense that even those with the clarity to see the pattern might want to avoid this topic because they might intuit "I do this too, just with different content.". But even if this were to become widely discussed, it would be like understanding drug addiction in a society flooded with dealers. Understanding would mitigate the issue somewhat, but as long as dealers are dealing, the problem isn't gonna go away. 

These shame-avoidant technologies like Tucker Carlson are on the rise. lol

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5 hours ago, Joshe said:

Until we address these underlying psychological realities, fact-checking will remain as ineffective as using logic to treat a broken heart.

In my experience, fact checking does work for non-trolls. It requires a lot of instances though. But, I think this is an exaggerated minority we're dealing with, and that 'fixing' them isn't necessary. I think efforts would be more fruitfull if focused on nurturing the liberal base and letting it grow organically whether it be through politically indifferent people or the youth.

I think the root of what you point out is what progressives are already working on; prosperity and inclusion, education and values. It seems to me it's just evolution. I would also add, I don't think 'truthers' are as far from 'liars'(what I would call them rather than post-truth) as it may seem.

Edited by Elliott

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2 hours ago, Joshe said:

Thanks! 100%. I wish more people would start acknowledging these things rather than just dropping their jaw and resorting to condemnation or refutation of surface-level points every time they're confronted with it. I need to do more to integrate this knowledge myself. 

I get the sense that even those with the clarity to see the pattern might want to avoid this topic because they might intuit "I do this too, just with different content.". But even if this were to become widely discussed, it would be like understanding drug addiction in a society flooded with dealers. Understanding would mitigate the issue somewhat, but as long as dealers are dealing, the problem isn't gonna go away. 

These shame-avoidant technologies like Tucker Carlson are on the rise. lol

I think it's more about finding the root of why people become susceptible to these contagions... which I believe is shame resulting in disconnection.

There's the reason why a Tucker Carlson (and the like) resonates with people and is able to push these buttons. It sits with individuals feelings of disconnection with other people, nature, and the universe at large... resulting in a highly delineated sense of self and other.

It's the sense of exile that comes with shame... exile from humanity, nature, and existence itself.

So, if that shame and disconnection were to be remedied and people felt deeply intertwined with everyone and everything else and recognized that they are part of nature itself, this kind of "annihilate the other"-triggering propaganda would not be as magnetic or persuasive... and it wouldn't as easily hit a critical authoritarian mass as it has now.

It wouldn't have to be resolved perfectly either... as these psychological dynamics are here to stay to some extent, even if humanity collectively heals from our disconnection issue.

It's just that currently, there's enough people who are hyper-vulnerable to this contagion, such that it reaches a critical mass... and it gains a stronghold of power.

We're also environmentally, WAY more exposed to TONS of information... the likes of which no human era has ever seen. And upticks in information access (including the invention of the printing press) tend to result in a surge of authoritarianism.

But if we can remedy the roots (shame and disconnection) this will be like strengthening humanity's immune system against the authoritarian problems we're facing with currently.


Are you struggling with self-sabotage and CONSTANTLY standing in the way of your own success? 

If so, and if you're looking for an experienced coach to help you discover and resolve the root of the issue, you can click this link to schedule a free discovery call with me to see if my program is a good fit for you.

 

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12 hours ago, Joshe said:

UQKBRVU.png

The Psychological Architecture of Post-Truth Propagation: A Concentric Model

Overview

This model maps the psychological architecture underlying post-truth political movements, revealing how they function as collective psychological defense systems rather than ideological persuasion campaigns. By focusing exclusively on psychological mechanisms, the model explains why post-truth beliefs prove so resistant to factual correction and rational argument.

The concentric structure illustrates how unresolved psychological pain at the core radiates outward through unconscious mechanisms, creating a self-reinforcing system that recruits and maintains believers through emotional contagion rather than logical conviction.

The Three Layers

Core Pillars: The Psychological Engine

At the model's center lie the fundamental psychological drivers that power post-truth movements. These aren't political beliefs but rather deep psychological needs and defensive strategies:

Authoritarian Psychology represents more than a preference for strong leadership—it reflects a psychological orientation toward external authority as a means of managing internal chaos and uncertainty. This psychological structure seeks to outsource the burden of ambiguity and moral complexity to a powerful figure who provides certainty.

Identity Merging describes the dangerous fusion of personal and political identity. When political beliefs become psychologically indistinguishable from the self, any challenge to those beliefs triggers survival-level psychological defenses. This isn't mere loyalty; it's a complete enmeshment where the political becomes personal at the deepest level.

Shame Avoidance identifies the core emotional driver. Shame—unlike guilt—attacks the entire self, making it psychologically unbearable. Post-truth beliefs offer protection from shame by creating alternative narratives where the self remains virtuous and powerful rather than diminished or wrong.

Coping Mechanism (Pain) reveals the ultimate function: these beliefs serve as psychological painkillers. They manage deep emotional pain and trauma by transforming it into righteous anger and externalized blame. The post-truth framework becomes a psychological medication that must be continuously administered.

Propagation Mechanisms: The Unconscious Transmission System

The middle ring contains the psychological processes through which post-truth beliefs spread. Critically, all operate below conscious awareness, bypassing rational evaluation:

Emotional Osmosis describes how feelings transfer between individuals without conscious processing. Like cellular osmosis, emotions flow from areas of high concentration to low concentration, spreading anxiety, anger, and certainty through groups via mirror neurons and emotional contagion. People "catch" feelings before thoughts.

Mimetic Desire (from René Girard's theory) explains how humans unconsciously copy the desires and beliefs of others, especially during uncertainty. We don't want things directly; we want what others want. In post-truth contexts, people adopt beliefs not through evaluation but through unconscious imitation of valued group members.

Symbolic Dominance Transfer captures how displays of strength and certainty trigger ancient dominance-submission psychological patterns. When leaders project absolute confidence, followers experience psychological relief by submitting to that certainty, transferring their anxiety upward in the hierarchy.

Projection and Blame-Shifting serve dual psychological functions: protecting the ego from uncomfortable self-knowledge while providing targets for displaced emotional pain. These mechanisms operate automatically, creating external enemies that explain internal distress.

Passive Enabling describes how the discomfort of confrontation leads to psychological accommodation. Rather than challenge post-truth beliefs—risking conflict and social rupture—people unconsciously adjust their own reality to maintain social harmony.

Peripheral Supporters: The Psychological Vulnerabilities

The outer ring identifies not demographic groups but psychological orientations that make individuals susceptible to post-truth contagion:

Family Absorbers prioritize belonging needs over truth-seeking. The psychological need for family cohesion overrides critical thinking, as the threat of family rejection activates primal abandonment fears that overwhelm rational processing.

Low-Info Voters aren't necessarily unintelligent but rather operate with limited cognitive bandwidth for political processing. Overwhelmed by complexity, they rely on cognitive shortcuts and emotional heuristics that post-truth narratives exploit.

Cultural Conformists derive psychological safety from group alignment. Their self-esteem depends on social position, making them exquisitely sensitive to group beliefs and unable to risk the psychological threat of nonconformity.

Conflict-Avoidant Moderates experience such psychological distress from confrontation that they'll unconsciously distort reality to maintain peace. Their "both sides" frameworks aren't intellectual positions but psychological defenses against the anxiety of taking stands.

The System Dynamics

The model's power lies in revealing post-truth politics as a psychological contagion system rather than an information problem. The core's unresolved psychological pain doesn't stay contained—it radiates outward through these unconscious mechanisms, recruiting others with similar psychological vulnerabilities.

This explains why fact-checking fails: you cannot fact-check a psychological defense mechanism. 

The concentric structure shows how each layer reinforces the others. The peripheral supporters, through their enabling and conformity, validate the core's defenses. The propagation mechanisms ensure continuous psychological reinforcement. The core, feeling validated, intensifies its psychological investment. It's a self-reinforcing psychological system.

Why This Matters: The Gift of Clarity

This model matters because it brings clarity to those standing in bewilderment, watching reality itself seem to fracture around them. For those who've felt gaslit by the failure of facts to matter, who've watched loved ones disappear into alternate realities, who've questioned their own sanity as truth became negotiable—this model offers the profound relief of comprehension.

The bewilderment is real and legitimate. It's the vertigo of watching half the population reject observable reality. It's the cognitive dissonance of seeing intelligent people embrace obvious falsehoods. It's the exhaustion of engaging in good-faith arguments that go nowhere. It's the heartbreak of losing family members not to death but to an impenetrable psychological fortress.

This model explains why you're not crazy. The phenomena you're witnessing follows psychological laws as predictable as gravity. When you understand that you're watching psychological defense mechanisms, not intellectual positions, the bewildering becomes comprehensible. The person rejecting climate science isn't evaluating data—they're managing psychological pain. The relative embracing conspiracy theories isn't thinking poorly—they're medicating shame.

Understanding this doesn't make the phenomenon less tragic, but it makes it less maddening. It's the difference between watching a loved one's mysterious illness and understanding their diagnosis. The illness remains, but the bewilderment lifts. You stop taking it personally. You stop exhausting yourself with futile interventions. You stop questioning reality itself.

This clarity also explains your own psychological experience. The anxiety you feel watching post-truth spread isn't irrational—you're correctly perceiving a psychological contagion. The exhaustion from fact-checking isn't weakness—you're using the wrong tool for the job. The grief over lost relationships isn't overdramatic—you've lost someone to a psychological defense system that won't allow them to return.

Conclusion

The Psychological Architecture of Post-Truth Propagation model offers a framework for understanding one of the most pressing challenges of our time. By mapping the psychological mechanisms rather than the political content, it reveals post-truth movements as collective psychological defense systems that spread through emotional contagion rather than rational persuasion.

This psychological lens explains both the intensity of post-truth beliefs and their immunity to factual correction. When we understand that we're dealing with psychological pain management rather than information deficits, we can begin developing interventions that address the actual problem rather than its surface manifestations.

The model ultimately suggests that the post-truth crisis is, at its core, a mental health crisis playing out in the political arena—a collective psychological symptom of societies struggling to process rapid change, social fragmentation, and accumulated trauma. Until we address these underlying psychological realities, fact-checking will remain as ineffective as using logic to treat a broken heart.

This is religion at its core with figures like Jesus or Mohammed being the authoritative figure. This isnt post-Truth or a mental health issue it's delusion.   It's a lack of consciousness.  Thats what delusion is ultimately.  It's separation from Truth. 

Edited by Inliytened1

 

Wisdom.  Truth.  Love.

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This is an interesting model which addresses  root causes.  After World War II, there were psychologists like Erich Fromm who explored the psychological roots of authoritarianism.  But all their work didn’t seem to come up with a solution.


Vincit omnia Veritas.

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13 hours ago, Joshe said:

 

Conflict-Avoidant Moderates experience such psychological distress from confrontation that they'll unconsciously distort reality to maintain peace. Their "both sides" frameworks aren't intellectual positions but psychological defenses against the anxiety of taking stands.

 

You don't know that everyone who is a moderate is due to psychological discomfort.  @Emerald there is such a thing as tier 2 politics. But you see yours seems biased against authoritarianism as you made it the core of your stance.  This is a mistake because you look at politics through the lens of anti-authoritarianism this already puts you at a disadvantage from really entering into tier2 because you already have established what is good and what is evil.  Putting it under the guise of psychological or mental illness does not exempt you from your demonization tactics.  And you've associated any and all views on the right authoritarian and thus would not be open minded to.them.  Even if there were some good points there.  There are problems and also some good points on both sides. So how can you look at things from a holistic perspective if you have already ruled one perspective out as wrong.  This will never allow you to see any good points on the right.   The tier two levels of the spiral dynamic model incorporate all the previous stages  because- well- ultimately because of Oneness.  So all stages ultimately must include all of the others before it.  Before you can truly understand stage blue, red or orange you have to incorporate them.

Major problem with stage green. You have a lot of yellow thinking but politically you are still mostly green because of this. 

Edited by Inliytened1

 

Wisdom.  Truth.  Love.

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8 hours ago, Emerald said:

. The main difference is that the world is different technologically and ideologically. So, it looks slightly different... but is ultimately the exact same thing.

 

Not the world. Society has changed. Just like in 100 years society - meaning the people - will be more advanced and unified still- so it's not the technology.  It's the people.  But when the left treats the people and society like its still 1945 that's what you are going to.get.  1945. 


 

Wisdom.  Truth.  Love.

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This model is great. Lots of overlap with what I've been writing about for my book lately.

That also reminds me, I made a cute little graphic to explain what post-truth means for normies (ie your coworkers, your grandma).

signal-2025-08-20-17-04-13-394.jpg

Edited by DocWatts

I have a Substack, where I write about epistemology, metarationality, and the Meaning Crisis. 

Check it out at : https://7provtruths.substack.com/

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Also, you should consider turning your Concentric Model into a Substack article - one that's more easily shared than a forum post - since this is valuable information.

Edited by DocWatts

I have a Substack, where I write about epistemology, metarationality, and the Meaning Crisis. 

Check it out at : https://7provtruths.substack.com/

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