WHEN government reverses solemn commitments, reframes mandates, undoes democratic decisions or does not admit what it’s actually doing, the injury to citizens is more than ideological disagreement, and more than ‘covering up the truth’ and ‘all politicians lie’. It is the injury caused by living under a state-sponsored deception. Resignation yes, but also something more corrosive. A sense of betrayal by those in authority that can psychologically alter a population.
Research from societies subjected to long-term ideological control and sustained deception, from Mao’s Cultural Revolution to Iran, shows strikingly consistent patterns. People learn to self-censor, sometimes unbelievably quickly. At a population level. They publicly repeat what is required while privately holding unspoken doubts. Their communication becomes ritual rather than reciprocal. Anxiety and depression in the population reach impossible levels.
This experience is no longer unknown in modern Western democracies. How many of you sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant now guard your tongue? How does that make you feel? Governments don’t need to be brutal for societies to be irreversibly damaged. They need only to make knowing the truth feel unsafe, to pretend belief in order to survive or feel safe.
Political psychologists call this preference falsification. Another term is coercive control; the concealment of true beliefs because expressing them carries social or material risk. When whole populations are required to live with sustained contradiction, cognitive dissonance kicks in,helping people process information and interactions quickly in terms of threat or non-threat, or as friend or enemy. It’s a way of sorting difficult information works in emergency situations. The more it’s used the easier it becomes, but at a highly destructive price.
Essentially, the brain adapts by reducing knowledge because nuance and flexible thinking becomes neurologically exhausting, and uncertainty starts to feels ‘dangerous’. At this point rigid belief replaces natural curiosity so people gravitate toward prefabricated narratives and externally imposed ‘truths’.
This isn’t because they are weak or gullible but because human nervous systems are adaptive and when dissent feels ‘dangerous’ the brain always prioritise survival over truth. This is how societies drift toward polemic and polarisation. But while adults can adapt through this sort of concealment, children can’t. For them it means developmental injury on an industrial scale.
Adults can survive through compartmentalisation. A mature brain can hold a private inner narrative while outwardly complying. Even as state deception increases many can still think, I don’t believe this, but I won’t challenge and will agree to it anyway. Children can’t do this – they do not have the reflective capacity to examine the totality of its meaning.
Globally children increasingly are being exposed to narratives that are aggressively nihilistic: as well as ‘the world is burning’ warnings, dismissing family as dispensable, biology as negotiable and the foundations of human continuity as irrelevant. History is unequivocal: when ideology eclipses reality, children become its raw material. From Mao’s Red Guards to the Soviet rewriting of truth, states have repeatedly embedded distortion into schools, youth movements, and legal systems, shaping young minds around loyalty rather than inquiry. What’s unfolding in the West now is not identical in form, but disturbingly familiar in structure. Children are easy fodder; highly suggestible, neurologically immature, and very, very vulnerable.
The most far-reaching distortions now embedded in children’s lives through state and family-law structures are the insistence that sex is negotiable, and that erasing one parent, often the father, from children’s lives is OK. Both demand that children reorganise themselves psychologically around adult ideology rather than developmental truth.
Across species, noticing when something doesn’t fit expectation is fundamental to survival. In children, this capacity is especially pronounced. When something doesn’t align a child’s nervous system automatically flags the discrepancy and seeks resolution. Instinctively, they will turn to a trusted adult to help make sense of what they’re perceiving. This moment is crucial. It’s how epistemic trust is formed: the child expects that caregivers will interpret reality honestly, help resolve uncertainty and regulate confusion. When that process is disrupted or denied, the consequences are not merely emotional, but developmental, and they ripple outward into identity, relationships, and moral reasoning.
Human brains have evolved to detect lies because lies signal danger. But when a child is forced to deny reality to stay connected with an attachment figure, they simply comply. The contradiction is not resolved, it’s absorbed. And it changes how the mind works.
I saw this recently in a moment so ordinary it would usually pass unnoticed. Sitting on a bus, I watched a young child suddenly notice an adult getting on whose physical presentation was visibly incongruent: a bearded man wearing makeup and a tight clingy long skirt which left nothing to the imagination. The child did exactly what a healthy developing brain should do, in the short space between instinctive action and inhibition he clearly registered the discrepancy and looked to his mother for explanation. She froze; no information could be read from her still and controlled face. She wasn’t being cruel or dismissive but because social rules now forbid naming what is plainly seen, she was stuck. Her child was left to resolve the dissonance alone. No words were spoken, yet a lesson was learned, not that the world is complex, but that noticing reality can leave you unsupported. This is how subtly and insidiously true memory and trust is being eroded but not through argument, through silence. The demand the small children accept ‘storytime drag queens’ equipped with male appendages is another example.
No amount of adult assertion can override what a child’s brain is capable of integrating at a given stage of maturation. Labelling contradiction as ‘normal’ doesn’t resolve it internally; it suppresses expression and pushes the conflict deep into the nervous system. In other words it forces maladaptive thought processing to become the norm.
Ten years ago, adults could help children integrate difference without denying reality. What’s changed isn’t the presence of difference, but the demand that it should be denied. When governments can’t clearly say what a man or a woman is, adults lose their authority to explain the world. Cognitive dissonance becomes the child’s primary coping strategy, eroding emotional stability, empathy and flexible thought.
This same mechanism appears in its most devastating form in family courts, in cases of parental alienation. Here, a well-documented and clinically recognised pattern of harm, of one parent turning his or her children against the other, is increasingly dismissed by a cohort of radical feminist professionals, legal and psychological. This denial is supported by like-minded media sources not through a rational or genuine scientific dispute but by refusing to engage with evidence that disrupts their preferred feminist narrative. The result is a parallel system in which children’s lived experiences are reinterpreted or ignored, with contrary evidence recast as ‘pseudo-science’.
But the reality doesn’t disappear. Its absorption by children has consequences that are profound and long-lasting. There are few experiences more psychologically corrosive than one parent turning a child against the other parent while presenting that betrayal as protection. Children are not only deceived by someone they love, but are then forced to become deceptive to themselves, their rejected parent and to the professionals who attempt to assess them. Troublingly this is supported by a ‘captured’ family adjudication system. In the name of safeguarding, some institutions including the judiciary have started to normalise this denial.
When authority defines reality, dissent is discouraged or punished and deception is reframed as virtue. Anxiety is resolved not through understanding, only dysfunctionally through compliance. Identity becomes something imposed. There is no escape route for the child.
Thus large-scale deception does not simply alter public discourse; it reshapes relational dynamics, migrating from institutions into families where its psychological effects become most acute. Children are now exposed to increasingly absolutist narratives, that one parent can be erased from their lives in the name of protection, or that biological reality itself must be reinterpreted in order to belong. In both cases, doubt is discouraged, contradiction can’t be named, and children are forced to adapt with the cost being borne by their developing minds.
Societies that cannot tell the truth to their children are not becoming kinder, they are becoming psychologically unsafe, and history suggests that the cost will be paid long after the delusions have faded.
