Some lies are load-bearing. They hold up the ceiling of social reality — shared narratives about fairness, competence, progress, identity — and removing them does not reveal truth beneath. It collapses the structure on everyone inside. Truth must be attended to by a bodyguard of lies in order to survive the gauntlet of acidic illusion.
Simple Picture
ELI5: imagine a building held up by columns. Some columns are solid stone. Others are hollow plaster — fake, but bearing real weight because everything around them leans on them. If you smash a hollow column to prove it is fake, the ceiling does not thank you for your honesty. It falls on your head. We each require a personal reality distortion field to live. Humor is what tempers it and makes it elastic — a person who takes himself seriously considers his personal reality the whole of reality.
Everyone Is a Main Character
The first move in understanding power is accepting that every person is the protagonist of their own story. Nobody thinks of themselves as an opportunistic vulture. There is no sense in being bitter about this — it is the operating system of social cognition. Your task is to sense the stories of others and the effect your story has on theirs.
Your story should not stir up resentment or be threatening to their stories. The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost intolerable. People want to be commended for their taste, their social standing, their intelligence. Everyone compensates for their deficiencies. Play to that — not to manipulate, but because refusing to acknowledge others’ stories is a form of blindness that guarantees isolation.
This is the interpersonal version of what elephant-in-the-brain describes at the cognitive level: the conscious self is a story machine, and the stories it tells about itself are not optional decorations but structural features. Challenge someone’s self-story and you are not correcting an error — you are threatening the foundation on which they stand. The credit system runs on the same principle at civilizational scale: creditworthiness is a shared fiction that creates the reality it describes, and shattering it does not reveal the “real” economy — it collapses the economy that the fiction was holding up. The deepest load-bearing illusion in economics is the barter myth itself — the story that markets are natural and prior to states, which makes capitalism seem inevitable rather than constructed. The egoic immune response is what happens when the threat is existential: devaluation or idealization, both designed to keep the protagonist’s story intact.
Why Illusions Are Critical
People prefer to believe in their wisdom and fairness rather than their incompetence and cruelty. This is how civilization is built. The bullshit narratives that are load-bearing for institutions, relationships, and social order are impossible objects serving impossible tasks. They are treated with reverence and caution because only certain perspectives maintain the illusion. The illusion of control is the personal-cognitive version of this same architecture: the optimistic prior that “my actions matter” is structurally necessary for action, and stripping it does not produce truth — it produces immobility. The Alloy-Abramson finding is best read not as “depression reveals reality” but as “removing a load-bearing illusion reveals what happens to a system without it.”
Corporate morality runs entirely on load-bearing illusions: everyone knows decisions are made to please the boss, but the official narrative of meritocracy must be maintained because it is the only thing preventing open warfare. Thiel’s question — “what important truth do very few people agree with you on?” — reveals why truth-tellers are rare: truth isn’t valuable to most companies and groups because it is corrosive to the stories that hold them together. Truth is only valuable to groups that can profitably mine it with new realization. Everyone else treats truth as a solvent to be kept away from structural fiction. paradigm-lock-in is the epistemological version: the paradigm is a fiction that organizes perception, and evidence that contradicts it is suppressed not out of stupidity but because the fiction is doing structural work. The Manufactured Normalcy Field is the civilizational version: the label “the present” is itself a load-bearing fiction that hides the fact that we are living in a radically transformed reality we have never truly comprehended.
Rivero names the political version: most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all. Once a citizen acknowledges that the government is lying and corrupt, they must choose what to do about it — and most people do not have the courage to face that choice. The illusion is not believed. It is used.
Honesty is a blunt instrument that bloodies more than it cuts. You will be punished for making another feel inferior — eventually. Those who shatter mirrors will be isolated and ignored. Those who can conjure the right romance and fantasy are given all the power. This is not a moral commentary. It is a description of selection pressures. The social cost of clarity documents what happens to the person who stops performing: the connections sustained by shared fiction evaporate.
Instilling Willingness Rather Than Change
You cannot change other people’s minds through reason. Most ideas and values are held without reason — they are held because they are load-bearing. McKenna captures the mechanism with brutal clarity: beliefs are easier to change than behavior. “I don’t think it has to be true — it just has to stop the itch.” People do not hold beliefs because they are accurate. They hold them because the alternative is an itch they cannot bear. Haidt’s dog does not wag its tail because it is happy; the tail wags to communicate. Forcibly wagging the tail changes nothing. Arguments that demolish load-bearing illusions do not produce enlightenment. They produce hostility, because the person correctly senses that their structure is under attack.
The operational alternative: instill willingness to change over change itself. Take no credit for change, as it is they who changed themselves. You can only provide an environment that catalyzes it, either through nurture or challenge. Give dangerous ideas exposure by disagreeing with them — pushing an idea underground only preserves it.
This is the same mechanism the sage discovered: you cannot hand someone the answer. You can only point. If the pointing is perceived as an attack on their story, they will drive away calling you a moron and the pointing will have accomplished nothing.
Power as Relationship
The desire to do and control everything yourself via technological leverage is an aversion to power, not an expression of it. Power delegates by encouraging and aligning everyone’s main character energy. Technological leverage allows one to replace the many, but the unaligned energy either pollutes the environment or forms into opposition.
Aggressive behavior — even honest behavior — decreases agency in the long run as you have to constantly react to an ever-growing host of enemies. Infinite players understand this: the game continues, and every bridge burned is a future path closed. Patience is the virtue of those who have nothing but time.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “power is about manipulation — learn the tricks and you’ll win.”
The midwit take is “this is amoral Machiavellianism that justifies lying and exploitation.”
The better take is that load-bearing illusions are neither good nor evil — they are structural. Some should be replaced with better structures. Some cannot be removed without first building alternative support. And some, like the protagonist story each person tells about themselves, should simply be respected as the price of coexistence. The person who insists on shattering every illusion in the name of truth is not a hero. They are someone who does not understand load-bearing walls. Cooling is the social technology for managing what happens when a load-bearing illusion collapses for an individual — the art of helping someone accept a diminished self without bringing the whole structure down with them. Radical honesty is powerful precisely because it is selective — Blanton does not say “destroy all fictions.” He says “stop withholding from people you are in relationship with.” The scope matters.
Main Payoff
When you succeed, acknowledge the role of others and the environment so you do not fall into the pattern of repeating the same thing. When you see a fiction, ask what it is holding up before you tear it down. And when you feel the urge to prove someone wrong, remember: there is no more infuriating feeling than having your individuality ignored. The fiction they are living is not a problem to solve. It is a person to see.
References:
- Adapted from notes on Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, reinterpreted through the lens of narrative and structural fiction