The Wound Is the Product

Victimhood is the highest-paying content on the internet. The system rewards it, the reward selects for it, and most of the people participating in the process have no idea it is happening. Including, on plenty of days, me.Somewhere in the last fifteen years, being wronged became a business model. Not simply a feeling or a misfortune, but a reliable way to generate attention, loyalty, and revenue. If you want reach on any platform that matters, one of the most reliable ways to get it is to show an audience that someone has done you harm and that you are bearing it with dignity. That post will travel farther than your best argument, raise more money than your best work, and bind followers to you more tightly than almost anything you could accomplish by simply being right. The wound outperforms the insight.This is not a moral failing in the people it happens to. It is the result of incentives built into the system.I want to take this apart carefully, because the easy version gets it wrong.The easy version says that people who play the victim are frauds working a grift. A few are. Most are not. Most believe every word, and that is the most interesting part of the story.Most people are not sitting around plotting how to become professional victims. They are doing what all of us do. They post something, watch what happens, and learn from the response. The posts that get attention get repeated. The posts that disappear do not. After enough repetitions, the process starts selecting for itself.Nobody has to decide to run the play. The incentives do most of the work.Breaking Through the FloorTo understand why grievance is so powerful, you have to start with a simple reality. The internet does not distribute attention evenly, or anything close to it. A tiny number of accounts receive most of it while everyone else receives almost none. Much of what gets posted, including thoughtful and accurate work, is seen by very few people and disappears without a trace.For anyone trying to be heard online, that is the central fact. The hard problem is not producing good content. The internet is already full of good content. The hard problem is getting noticed at all. Most people who try never manage it.So ask what actually breaks an unknown account through.It is usually not careful analysis. Careful analysis fills the internet already. What breaks through is emotional and moral charge, and one of the most potent forms of that charge is grievance.The people who study how messages spread online have a technical term for this. They call it moral-emotional contagion. Words carrying both moral and emotional weight are shared far more often than ordinary language, with each additional moral-emotional word measurably increasing a post’s reach (Brady et al. 2017).Grievance is built almost entirely from those ingredients. Outrage. Betrayal. Courage. Harm.The important point is not that grievance performs slightly better than a calm post. The important point is that grievance is one of the few things that reliably gives an unknown person a chance to be noticed at all.This explains something that otherwise looks like an indictment of human nature: nearly every successful influencer appears to run on the same fuel.But we only see the people who made it through.Most thoughtful and fair-minded people never break through at all. Their work receives little attention, they eventually stop posting, and they disappear from view. The mistake of studying only the winners while ignoring the much larger number who vanished has a name: survivorship bias.When you look at successful influencers and notice that many rely on grievance, you are not necessarily learning something dark about the people who become influencers. You are observing a selection process. The people who broke through often did so because grievance worked.There is a specific mechanism behind it.To break through, a small account often has to borrow a larger account’s audience. Grievance is one of the most effective tools for doing that. You identify someone bigger than you and argue that they have harmed you, or harmed the people watching. The accused, or the people who rush to defend them, respond. That response carries your name into an audience you could never have reached on your own.In my own social media universe, I have watched this dynamic play out again and again.Over the years, I have been called everything from a mass murderer for my role in early mRNA technology development to a government operative, a pharmaceutical shill, and now, apparently, a DARPA and  CIA propagandist (despite the fact that I have worked for neither organization).Just yesterday, Dr. Jack Kruse launched another attack, built on demonstrably false claims. But the specifics are almost beside the point.If Jill and I sat down and made a list, we could probably name dozens of individuals who have built substantial audiences around the claims that I personally wronged them or their audience, deceived them, betrayed them, or somehow stand at the center of whatever problem they are trying to explain. Some individuals have written hundreds, even thousands, of posts about me across Substack and X. Some are still at it today.The interesting question is not whether they are right. They aren’t.The interesting question is why this pattern keeps repeating.The answer is that grievance works.A public feud is audience acquisition. A villain is a growth strategy. The larger and more visible the target, the greater the opportunity. The truth is that responding is counterproductive because every response expands the reach of the attack.In fact, by mentioning Dr. Kruse here, I am probably helping him gain followers. That is simply how the system operates.He is not unique. He is merely the latest example to cross my path. One in a long line of attackers.Malone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Conflict becomes the distribution mechanism.This is why challenging powerful people is often such an effective way to grow an audience. It may or may not be morally justified, but it also works as a form of distribution. The larger the target, the larger the audience available through the resulting conflict.The same research I cite below found that signals of victimhood also make audiences more willing to view the accused as fair game. In market terms, that is an additional advantage for the person making the claim.I know this territory because I have stood on both sides of it.At the end of 2021, within days of each other, Twitter and LinkedIn both acted against me. Twitter removed more than half a million followers in an afternoon. LinkedIn made its ban permanent, and LinkedIn was not a vanity platform. It was a primary channel through which I found consulting clients and maintained a professional reputation built on credentials, scientific work, and experience rather than grievance. That door closed for good.Days later, I sat down with Joe Rogan for what became the most-watched conversation of my life.I am not going to claim with certainty that the platforms coordinated their actions, although Congressional evidence suggests that the Biden administration had a hand in what happened. I cannot prove that, and I do not need to. What matters is the result.One professional channel was effectively destroyed. The grievance channel that emerged in its place reached a much larger audience.I had started this Substack a few weeks earlier, so the new path was already there. The bans simply slammed one door shut and threw the other one wide open.At the time, I said publicly that the bans meant I was over the target. I believed that, and there was truth in it. There is another truth as well.The censorship was real. The injury was real.It was also the largest single breakthrough in reach and audience growth I have ever experienced on Substack.The suppression was a real injury and a real act of censorship. It was also the largest breakthrough of my life. The wound became the launch, not the setback.When the Old Controls BackfireThere is a larger point hidden in my own experience, and it took me a while to see it.For most of the last century, the people who could injure you and the people who controlled access to an audience were often the same people, or closely aligned. Suppression worked because once they silenced you, there was nowhere else for the audience to go.That is no longer true.The thing that can injure you and the thing that distributes you are now different systems. In many cases, the distribution system rewards the conflict created by the first.As a result, the old tools of narrative control have not merely weakened. In many cases, they have reversed.A categorical official denial, the flat declaration that “this is false,” was designed for a world in which the institution controlled distribution. Today it often accomplishes the opposite. It signals that the topic is worth discussing, gives the target a fresh grievance to distribute, and exposes the target to the institution’s own audience through the ensuing conflict.The denial no longer closes the question. It often amplifies it.An institution still relying on the historic approach to narrative suppression in 2026 (posting statements like “Total BS”, for example) is not demonstrating control. It is demonstrating that it no longer understands the environment in which it operates.Before anyone on my side of these debates celebrates, however, the same dynamic applies to manufactured grievances. The medium does not distinguish between truth and falsehood. It rewards whatever travels.A real injury and a manufactured one spread through the system in much the same way. Both are amplified by the same mechanisms.How Grievance Becomes PowerOnce you break through, the wound continues to pay in ways that go beyond reach.The first was identified by a team of researchers led by Ekin Ok, who described what they called the virtuous victim signal (Ok et al. 2021). It occurs when a claim of injury is paired with a claim of moral goodness.“I was harmed, and I was harmed because I am one of the good people.”That combination attracts sympathy, money, trust, and deference.The second payoff receives less attention. The wound becomes armor.Criticizing a self-declared victim is costly because it looks like attacking someone who is already down. Most people avoid doing it. Those who do often create a fresh grievance for the next news cycle.The signal becomes self-reinforcing.It attracts attention, generates resources, and shields the sender from many of the normal costs of being wrong.Now follow the money, because all of these benefits eventually become revenue.Reach becomes subscriptions, donations, advertising revenue, speaking fees, and book sales. The audience built around a victim narrative is one of the most durable revenue streams available, more durable than shared beliefs and often more durable than entertainment, because followers no longer see themselves as customers. They see themselves as participants in a struggle.People who think they are helping defend a persecuted truth-teller are remarkably loyal.A subscriber who believes he is helping sustain a persecuted truth-teller is likely to remain subscribed.Grievance is not adjacent to the business model. It is the business model.You can watch it operate in plain sight, where a paragraph about censorship or defamation may sit directly above a button asking readers to become paid subscribers.That juxtaposition is not hypocrisy.It is the design.Nobody has to Plan ItThis is where the ugly version of the story falls apart.When a behavior pays this well, nobody has to plan it. This is operant conditioning, the basic principle that governs the behavior of any animal with a nervous system. You do more of what gets rewarded and less of what does not, and you do not need a theory to explain why.A creator posts twenty things in a month. Five succeed, and fifteen disappear. He has no explanation. He simply notices the response to the five and the silence surrounding the fifteen. Over time, his output drifts toward whatever gets rewarded.He never consciously decided to become a grievance entrepreneur. He simply learned what worked.That is why people can tell you, with complete sincerity, that they would never stoop to playing the victim and still be telling the truth as they understand it.I have said it myself more than once. Be a lion, not a victim.I meant it when I wrote it, and I mean it now.Yet the pattern still appears sometimes in my own feed because the part of us that consciously decides what we believe is not always the same part that responds to rewards. My disavowal is not evidence against the system. It is evidence of how the system works.Victimhood as a MindsetPsychologists have measured a more durable version of this as a personality trait (Gabay et al. 2020). Some people consistently experience the world as a place where they are being wronged. The pattern has recognizable features: a strong desire for their suffering to be acknowledged, a belief that they occupy the moral high ground, a tendency to revisit old injuries long after the fact, and an asymmetry in which their own pain remains vivid, while the pain of others fades into the background.The most revealing finding is that the filter tends to operate in only one direction. Present an ambiguous situation, and these individuals reliably assume the worst interpretation rather than the best.Most influencers are nowhere near the extreme end of that spectrum, and they do not need to be. Modern platforms make it easy to adopt the mindset without fully inhabiting it. The incentives encourage people to interpret events through the lens of grievance because grievance performs.There is also a status component. Researchers who study public moral conflict describe what they call moral grandstanding (Grubbs et al. 2019), the use of moral language primarily to elevate one’s own status rather than to resolve a disagreement.It generally takes two forms.One seeks admiration: the courageous truth-teller who paid a personal price.The other seeks dominance: shaming opponents until they retreat.Much grievance content contains elements of both.Since everyone assumes this is the vice of the other side, it is worth noting that the research found little relationship between political affiliation and the tendency to engage in this behavior. The incentives operate across the political spectrum.When Grievance Becomes PowerFor most influencers, grievance converts into attention and money.For politicians, it converts into attention, money, and power.A loyal grievance-based audience is simultaneously a donor list, a voter base, and protection against potential challengers. The same dynamic is operating. The stakes are simply higher.Look across the political landscape and the ideological differences largely disappear.Marjorie Taylor Greene built a powerful small-dollar fundraising operation and left Congress with a public narrative centered on betrayal and mistreatment.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez built an almost entirely people-funded operation and produced some of the most prominent personal-victim narratives of the January 6 era.Kari Lake carried a stolen-election narrative through repeated defeats and never abandoned it.These politicians do not share an ideology or a constituency. What they share is a common set of incentives.The most useful example, however, is the politician who had one of the strongest claims to victimhood and largely refused to use it.Thomas Massie endured the most expensive House primary challenge in history while being personally targeted by the President of the United States. Yet his public message remained focused on constitutional questions and fiscal realities rather than on his own grievances.He lost.  Because grievances convert into votes.  Issues and logical debate often do not.But he demonstrated something important.Genuine victimization does not require victim-signaling.The signal is a choice the system rewards. It is not something the situation forces upon you.Our own side is not exempt from any of this, and pretending otherwise would make this essay worthless.Bobby Kennedy was, in demonstrable fact, deplatformed and savaged in print for years, and his grievances have real foundations under them, the same as mine do. That is exactly why the machine works on (and for) him, and on the movement around him. A real wound is the honest raw material the signal is built from - but an entire ecosystem has been built around those grievances. The question is never whether the injury happened. Mostly it did. The question is what gets built on top of it, and how much of what gets built is the system quietly paying us to keep the wound open.That is precisely why the dynamic works.A real injury is often the raw material from which the signal is built.The question is not whether the injury happened. Much of the time it did.The question is what gets built on top of it, and how much of that construction is being quietly rewarded by the system.This article is public. If you found it useful, share it widely. The incentives described here do not belong to the left or the right. They belong to all of us, which is precisely why they are worth discussing.ShareThe Cost of SuccessThis brings me to the part that should make all of us uncomfortable.The problem does not disappear once you build an audience. It gets worse.Moving from ten thousand followers to one hundred thousand, and from one hundred thousand to a million, is often the same challenge repeated at a larger scale. The audience that initial grievance assembled around must continue to receive grievance if it is going to remain engaged.The incentive does not weaken. It strengthens.And underneath it sits the ugliest fact in the entire arrangement.An audience that pays to support a persecuted truth-teller has a vested interest in the persecution continuing.Not because anyone planned it. Not because anyone wants it. But because that is how the relationship was formed.The audience gathered around the wound.The result is a subtle but powerful incentive structure. It rewards the person who discovers a new outrage every week more than the person who solves a problem and reports that it has been solved.You can see this dynamic across the political spectrum. Once an influencer reaches a certain scale, the challenge is no longer attracting an audience. It is maintaining one.Consider what happened after Candace Owens leftThe Daily Wire. Whether her claims about Charlie Kirk, his wife Erika, Brigitte Macron, or anyone else were true is not the point. The point is that the audience's incentive increasingly favored conflict itself. Every new feud generated attention, engagement, discussion, reaction videos, rebuttals, and fresh content for supporters and critics alike. The conflicts became self-sustaining.That is not unique to Candace Owens. It is simply a highly visible example of a broader phenomenon. Once a large audience has been assembled around controversy and opposition, the pressure to find the next controversy never entirely goes away.The audience gathered around the conflict. The conflict becomes part of the product.That incentive quietly rewards the person who finds a new outrage every week over the person who solves a problem and reports that it is solved.Solutions end stories.Grievances extend them.Once you see that dynamic in your own feed, it becomes difficult to ignore.One of the most striking examples emerged during COVID. Entire audiences formed around resistance to lockdowns, mandates, censorship, and official public health messaging. Many of those grievances were legitimate. That is not the point.The point is that once those audiences existed, they became economic assets.Media outlets, publishers, advocacy organizations, conferences, subscription platforms, supplement companies, telemedicine services, and alternative healthcare businesses all emerged to serve them. A large audience of people who believed institutions had failed them became a market. Some organizations sold information. Some sold memberships. Some sold products. Some sold treatments intended to protect against the very threats that had helped build the audience in the first place.None of this required a conspiracy. It is simply what markets do. Audiences attract entrepreneurs. Demand attracts supply.The uncomfortable part is that the incentives do not disappear once the crisis passes. An audience assembled around institutional failure, censorship, corruption, persecution, or the corruption of big pharma must continue to hear about the same issues if it is to remain engaged. So now, the company formed to sell ivermectin against COVID-19 has become the company selling ivermectin asan antiparasitic to restore gut balance and vitality. Hint: As a pathologist, I have examined thousands of human biological samples from Americans under the microscope. Generally speaking, parasites are not a significant problem in the United States, despite the attention they often receive on social media. And yes, when I read such claims from our side, it makes my skin crawl.The institutional side operates according to the same logic. Pharmaceutical advertising influences legacy media. Government agencies defend their budgets and authorities. Public health organizations protect their reputations. The fear product I describe in the book we are currently writing called “The Grift” was monetized by institutions in much the same way grievance is monetized by their critics.Different products.Different customers.Similar incentives.An analysis that recognizes only one side of that equation is not an analysis. It is advocacy.The Way OutThere is an easy way out of this argument, and it is also the wrong one.“The system made me do it.”That is the easy escape, and it is really just another version of the victim’s argument wearing a lab coat: the system made me do it, so go look somewhere else.The system selects for behavior. It does not force it. People can recognize the incentives and choose differently. In fact, one of the simplest ways to tell who is sincere and who is merely working the incentives is to explain the mechanism and watch the reaction.Sincere people usually become uncomfortable. They look at their own feed, their own behavior, and the incentives acting on them. The operators become defensive. For them, the grievance is no longer just a belief or a habit. Grievance has become an asset, and you have just questioned its value and moral integrity.This is also why the burden now falls on the audience.The old information order had external checks. Editors, producers, publishers, and gatekeepers could suppress a claim, whether true or false. They often abused that power, but it existed. Today, most of those checks are gone. There are no guardrails to prevent a grievance from spreading, whether it is legitimate or fabricated.That leaves only one remaining check: your own judgment.So how do you tell when a legitimate grievance has crossed over into something else?First, ask whether the injury was real. Most of the injuries discussed in this essay were real. Mine were. Bobby Kennedy’s were. Many others were as well. But some aren’t. That is the first test.Next, the question to ask is whether the grievance remains tethered to reality, or whether it has become a self-sealing narrative.One of the warning signs is that nothing is allowed to count as evidence against it.If people attack you, that proves you are over the target.If they ignore you, that proves they cannot answer you.If the prediction fails, then they must have changed their plans because you exposed them.Every outcome becomes evidence for the same conclusion.At that point, the grievance is no longer being tested against reality. It is being protected from reality.That is the moment to be careful.A real injury does not require a permanent story built around it. A true claim should remain vulnerable to contradictory evidence. It should be possible to imagine what would change your mind.When you can no longer answer that question, something important has changed. The injury may still be real, but the narrative built on top of it has taken on a life of its own.That is when the incentives begin doing some of the thinking for you.I have caught myself doing exactly that more than once while publicly insisting that I would not. I am not offering that observation as a gesture of humility. I am offering it because it may be the most useful fact in this entire essay.If this pattern can operate in someone who is aware of it, has publicly rejected it and sincerely meant the rejection, it can operate in anyone.Most of us have been wronged in real ways. That is not the question.The question is whether what we build on top of those injuries is true, and whether we would still say it, if saying it cost us the audience.Marshall McLuhan once famously observed that the medium is the message.In the decentralized media environment of 2026, one can observe a similar dynamic.The wound is the product.If essays like this are worth having, they are worth supporting. Malone News is funded by readers, not advertisers, corporations, political parties, or government grants. If you would like to help keep it that way, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.ReferencesBrady, William J., Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker, and Jay J. Van Bavel. 2017. “Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks.”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences114 (28): 7313–7318.Gabay, Rahav, Boaz Hameiri, Tammy Rubel-Lifschitz, and Arie Nadler. 2020. “The Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood: The Personality Construct and Its Consequences.”Personality and Individual Differences165: 110134.Grubbs, Joshua B., Brandon Warmke, Justin Tosi, A. Shanti James, and W. Keith Campbell. 2019. “Moral Grandstanding in Public Discourse: Status-Seeking Motives as a Potential Explanatory Mechanism in Predicting Conflict.”PLoS ONE14 (10): e0223749.Ok, Ekin, Yi Qian, Brendan Strejcek, and Karl Aquino. 2021. “Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities.”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology120 (6): 1634–1661.

Summary: The highest paying content on the web is victimhood


Sunday Strip: Sad Little Man-child

Given the events over the past week, I think reposting Brad’s infamous song is in order, 'cause it is still so gud…Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public, so feel free to share on social media, email, or crosspost!ShareMalone News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.JGM


Israel’s Wall Fell to Water Cannons

Audio Version:Israel’s Wall Fell to Water CannonsThe wolf at the door, part two: notes from the Israeli frontierJill and I spent the last week of July 2026 in Israel with a delegation organized to push back against Jew hatred, specifically the version now circulating on the American right. That was the purpose, and I expected to spend the week looking outward.Instead, the country kept handing me a mirror.The detail that did it was small and administrative. Young women assigned to watch the Gaza fence had spent months reporting rehearsals against mock Israeli compounds and drills on breaching the barrier. Their reports went up the chain and stopped, and some of them were told to quit filing.God lives in the details.I know the shape of that. I lived something similar during COVID. So has anyone who has ever been the person whose report was never forwarded, at any scale, in any setting. The recognition comes with a jolt of vindication, and that is the thing to be careful about.Seeing your own experience reflected in someone else’s catastrophe is not evidence of anything. It is the same mechanism that failed the Israelis, now running in me rather than in an intelligence directorate. A story that flatters the man telling it deserves to be held at arm’s length, and that includes this one.The Israeli failure was not villainy. Nobody in Tel Aviv wanted that fence to fall. The officers who read the observers’ reports and moved on were competent people working inside a structure that made their judgment seem almost inevitable. Fifty years earlier, different people made the same call about the same kind of evidence in the same building.If that charity is owed to them, it is owed elsewhere. I have spent five years criticizing American public health institutions, and I retract none of it. But I also have to take seriously that most of the people inside those institutions were not conspirators. They were doing what the observers’ superiors did: receiving information that contradicted a settled model and dismissing it as noise.That is a less satisfying story than the villain version, and the villain version is the one that sells. I am not immune to its appeal. But I think the duller story is closer to the truth, and I think it is more useful, because a structure can be redesigned, while a villain can only be replaced.The thought does not stay in Israel, and it does not stay in 2023.Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to share it.ShareDefeating a Fortress with Water CannonsIn 1973, many military planners regarded Israel’s Bar-Lev Line along the Suez Canal as one of the strongest defensive positions in the world. Built after the 1967 Six-Day War, it was intended to make any Egyptian assault across the canal prohibitively costly.At two in the afternoon on October 6, 1973, Egyptian engineers pointed high-pressure hoses at the Israeli sand rampart along the Suez Canal and turned on the water.The rampart formed the outer face of the Bar-Lev Line. Israel had spent several years and much of its defense budget building it. Thirty-odd fortified strongpoints, a wall of sand and rock rising sixty feet above the waterline, and buried pipes intended to set the canal itself on fire.The water cut through it in a matter of hours. Egyptian assault troops crossed on rafts and walked through the gaps.By the next morning, most of the strongpoints were surrounded. A single reserve infantry brigade of older men held them, roughly 450 soldiers spread across a hundred miles of canal. Only sixteen positions were manned.The Bar-Lev Line had effectively ceased to exist as a defensive barrier. The problem was not that the fortifications were weak. It was that the assumptions behind them were wrong.The Maginot Myth: The Defenses Held, The Strategy Failed.The Maginot Line has become shorthand for a spectacular military failure, a monument to misplaced confidence in fixed defenses. That is not what happened.Built along France’s border with Germany after theFirst World War,it was a vast system of underground fortresses, artillery positions, bunkers, tunnels, and obstacles designed to make a direct German invasion prohibitively expensive. It was never intended to defend every inch of France. It was meant to anchor the frontier so France’s field armies could fight elsewhere.The Maginot Line was not breached in May 1940. German forces did not overwhelm it, did not outfight it, and, for the most part, did not attack it.The fortifications performed the mission their designers assigned them, which was economy of force. Hold the German border cheaply so the mobile armies can concentrate somewhere else. The line did exactly that.France then squandered what the line had bought. Maurice Gamelin, the French supreme commander, sent his best formations north into Belgium under the Dyle-Breda Plan, committing the strongest Allied divisions to a forward line inside Belgium and the Netherlands. His most capable mobile reserve went furthest of all.That left the hinge of the whole position at Sedan, on the Meuse River. Two Series B reserve divisions held it, formations of older men with obsolete equipment and little training (Horne 1969).The Germans came through the Ardennes instead and hit the hinge. The Maginot Line had done its job. The French command had failed to do theirs.The Caveat That Got LostThe hinge was weak because the Ardennes had been judged impassable to armor. But that judgment came with a condition, and the condition stopped being repeated.Philippe Pétain, then France’s most decorated living soldier, told a Senate commission in 1934 that the Ardennes forest was impenetrable, provided special dispositions were made. The conclusion survived in French planning for six years. The condition did not.By late 1944, the Allies had reached much the same conclusion about the same forest. In December 1944, they judged that Germany no longer had the capacity for a major offensive and treated the Ardennes as a quiet sector where tired divisions could rest. Three German armies came through it (MacDonald 1985). Same terrain, same assessment, different army.A qualified judgment hardens into an unqualified premise. Nobody formally decides to discard the condition. It simply stops being repeated. After enough repetitions, the premise begins to look like fact rather than opinion.Israeli intelligence did this twice. In 1973, the governing assumption held that Egypt would not attack without the ability to strike Israeli airfields in depth, and that Syria would not attack without Egypt. In 2023, it held that Hamas had been deterred and had become a government with something to lose. Israelis call the pattern HaConceptzia, the Conception.Zvi Lanir distinguished between two kinds of surprise. Situational surprise concerns timing and place. Fundamental surprise occurs when the model itself collapses (Lanir 1983). Sedan, the Suez Canal, and the Gaza envelope were all fundamental surprises. In each case, the enemy did not merely arrive unexpectedly. It arrived through a possibility the prevailing model had ruled out.Wingtip to Wingtip in HawaiiOn November 27, 1941, Washington sent a war warning to the Hawaiian commands. Lieutenant General Walter Short read the threat as sabotage by local agents rather than attack from the sea, and ordered the lowest of three readiness states, one designed to guard against exactly that.Aircraft came out of dispersed revetments and were parked in tight rows on open ground, wingtip to wingtip, where a small guard force could watch them all. Ammunition went into locked storage. The precaution was rational for the threat Short believed he was facing. It also arranged the Hawaiian Air Force into an ideal strafing target, and most of it burned on the ground within the first minutes of the attack (Prange 1981).The Navy’s assumptions failed in much the same way. Pearl Harbor is about forty feet deep, and American planners believed aerial torpedoes could not operate in water that shallow. In November 1940, British aircraft had crippled three Italian battleships at Taranto in comparable depth using torpedoes modified for the purpose. The Japanese studied Taranto and adapted their torpedoes with wooden fins that allowed them to run in shallow water. American planners read the same reporting. The information was accepted. The implication was not.Data collection was not the failure. American cryptanalysts had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher, and in September 1941 they decrypted an instruction from Tokyo directing its Honolulu consulate to divide Pearl Harbor into five sub-areas and report warship berthings by grid. Analysts interpreted it as Japanese thoroughness rather than targeting data.At 7:02 on the morning of December 7, two privates at the Opana Point radar station detected a large formation about 130 miles north. The duty officer they telephoned told them not to worry because a flight of American bombers was expected from California. A flight of American bombers was, in fact, expected. The first Japanese bombs fell fifty-three minutes later.Roberta Wohlstetter’s classic study of the attack settled the broader question. The problem was not a lack of information. The signals were present, buried in far more noise, and they appear obvious only after you know which ones mattered (Wohlstetter 1962).What Sharon LostThe Bar-Lev Line was built after an argument, and the people who lost the argument were right.Ariel Sharon and Israel Tal favored a mobile defense. Hold the canal thinly, keep the armor back, let the Egyptians cross, and destroy them on open ground where Israeli tanks held the advantage. Chaim Bar-Lev and Avraham Adan favored the fortified line. Bar-Lev was Chief of the General Staff, and the line carries his name because he won the argument (Rabinovich 2004).Nobody disputed the engineering. Both camps agreed the fortifications would be formidable. They disagreed about whether strength in a fixed position was the relevant variable. That was a judgment, not a technical question.Institutions are good at answering technical questions. They are much less comfortable with questions of judgment. So they resolve what they can measure, and seniority of staff settles the rest.Why Walls Cannot be QuestionedA large fortification is a political object before it is a military one. It is expensive, and it has a name attached. Budgets were defended for it, and the public was told it would keep them safe.After that, doubting the wall means doubting the people who approved it. In any hierarchy, that is costly for a junior person to say and uncomfortable for a senior person to hear. Neither of those facts has anything to do with evidence.Israel spent roughly a billion dollars on the Gaza barrier and completed it in 2021. Confidence in the sensors rose, manpower behind the fence thinned, and units shifted to the West Bank. Hamas studied the system, disabled the remote weapon stations first, and opened roughly thirty breaches in the first hour.None of this requires concrete. Any expensive countermeasure that prominent officials have publicly defended acquires the same protection. Questioning it stops being an empirical act and becomes a political one. Once that happens, evidence no longer competes with reality. It competes with reputation.Vincennes Had No RadioIn 1940, French commander Maurice Gamelin directed the defense of France from the Château de Vincennes outside Paris. His headquarters had no radio. Orders and reports moved by telephone and motorcycle courier. André Beaufre, who served on Gamelin’s staff, later described the headquarters as “a submarine without a periscope” (Horne 1969).French aerial reconnaissance did spot the German columns moving through the Ardennes. The concentration was among the largest traffic jams in military history, stretching for more than a hundred miles toward the Rhine. But the reports reached a headquarters that could neither process nor respond at the speed events demanded. Worse, they contradicted an assumption that no one was prepared to question.On October 7, 2023, something similar happened in southern Israel. The Gaza Division headquarters at Re’im was itself overrun. Divisional command stopped functioning for most of the day, and the opening fight fell to local ready squads, off-duty soldiers, police officers, and civilians.Centralized command has a characteristic failure mode. It works when information flows reliably, and events unfold slowly. It struggles when communications break down, and decisions must be made immediately, which is precisely when it is needed most.Groupthink: When the Explanation Becomes the ProblemIrving Janis offered the framework most people reach for.Janis studied the Bay of Pigs, Pearl Harbor, and the escalation in Vietnam. He argued that cohesive groups under stress converge early on a course of action while suppressing the doubts of their own members (Janis 1972). The symptoms that matter here are collective rationalization, the illusion of unanimity, direct pressure on dissenters, and what Janis called mindguards, people who shield the group from disconfirming information.His remedies were structural. The leader withholds his own preference until others have spoken. Someone is assigned to argue the opposing case. Independent subgroups work the same problem separately.The Agranat Commission, Israel’s state inquiry into the 1973 surprise, reached nearly identical prescriptions in 1974 from an entirely different direction. It broke the military intelligence’s monopoly on national assessment, added an intelligence adviser to the Prime Minister, and created a standing office inside the intelligence directorate whose only job was to write the contrary assessment. Israelis call that officeipcha mistabra, an Aramaic phrase from the Talmud meaning the opposite seems likely.Groupthink is also contested, and has been for thirty years. Ramon Aldag and Sally Riggs Fuller showed that the model was built from case studies selected because they ended badly, which guarantees the symptoms will be found (Aldag and Fuller 1993). Roderick Kramer reexamined the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam records and concluded that political self-interest explained the decisions better than the group cohesion that the theories behind groupthink did (Kramer 1998).A seductive framework is exactly what trapped the Israelis. Used carelessly, groupthink becomes the very kind of unquestioned assumption it was meant to expose. Anyone who diagnoses it only in organizations he dislikes and never in those he belongs to is participating in the phenomenon rather than analyzing it.What survives is narrower and better established. Groups under time pressure converge early. Dissent is expensive to voice. Senior people hear less than they think.The Cost of DeferenceOne of history’s clearest examples of the cost of deference came before Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.Barton Whaley later counted eighty-four separate warnings that reached Soviet leadership before the attack (Whaley 1973). Stalin believed Hitler would not open a second front while Britain remained undefeated, so every report of an impending invasion was dismissed as British provocation. He returned one report from the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, with a note that its source inside the German Air Ministry was a disinformer rather than a source (Murphy 2005). Officers who pressed the point risked execution.That is the authority gradient with the safety catch removed, and the gradient is a spectrum rather than a category.Psychologist Solomon Asch explored the power of social conformity with a deceptively simple experiment. Volunteers were shown a set of lines and asked to identify which two were the same length. The correct answer was obvious. Unknown to the volunteer, however, everyone else in the room had been instructed to give the wrong answer.The experiment’s most famous result is not its most important one. Roughly a third of the volunteers denied the evidence of their own eyes and agreed with the unanimous group. The more important finding came when Asch planted a single confederate who broke with the majority. Conformity fell by about three-quarters (Asch 1955). Unanimity generates the pressure. Breaking unanimity releases itOne industry took that lesson seriously. In December 1978, United Airlines Flight 173 circled Portland while the captain focused on a landing gear problem. The first officer and flight engineer both knew the aircraft was running out of fuel. They mentioned the fuel repeatedly, but neither directly challenged the captain or declared that they needed to land immediately. The aircraft crashed into a suburb with its tanks dry.In response, the industry builtCrew Resource Management, a training discipline aimed at the authority gradient between a captain and his crew (Helmreich, Merritt, and Wilhelm 1999). Junior officers learn escalating assertion. Captains learn to solicit challenge and to state their reasoning aloud so it can be attacked.Aviation solved a problem that intelligence services and health agencies have not. Airline crashes produce bodies, a mandatory investigation, and a public report with named recommendations. Intelligence failures produce arguments.Lieutenant Siman-TovBy now, the pattern should look familiar. The warning exists. It reaches the institution. Then it stops moving.Benjamin Siman-Tov was a lieutenant serving as an intelligence officer at Israel’s Southern Command. On October 1 and again on October 3, 1973, he wrote assessments arguing that Egyptian activity along the canal was not another exercise but a deployment for war. He was junior, he was right, and his superior did not forward the reports.Israel had no shortage of information. Ashraf Marwan, the best-placed human source Israel ever ran inside Egypt, gave warning. Soviet advisers quietly evacuated their families. The Egyptian buildup was visible from the far bank.Eli Zeira, who headed military intelligence, told the political leadership that certain special collection systems had been activated when they had not (Bar-Joseph 2005). Uri Bar-Joseph and Arie Kruglanski later analyzed the failure through the psychology of cognitive closure, arguing that those involved became committed to an answer they already had and stopped searching for evidence that might overturn it (Bar-Joseph and Kruglanski 2003).Richard Betts drew the conclusion that should trouble anyone who designs institutions. Intelligence failures persist because the binding constraint is rarely collecting information. It is whether decision makers are willing to hear unwelcome conclusions, and no procedural reform can guarantee that (Betts 1978).Fifty Years LaterThe examples are separated by half a century. The pattern is almost unchanged.In 1973, the Egyptians massed divisions along the Suez Canal in plain view, and Israeli intelligence classified the activity as an exercise. In 2023, Israeli intelligence possessed a Hamas planning document, reported afterward asJericho Wall, describing a cross-border assault at roughly the scale of the one that came. Senior officers classified it as aspirational.Exerciseandaspirationalare, in effect, the same word. Both mean the enemy is doing the thing, but the thing does not count because our model says he will not follow through.Siman-Tov wrote his assessments, and his superior filed them away. Fifty years later, thetatzpitaniyot, young women conscripted to watch the Gaza fence, spent months reporting rehearsals against mock Israeli compounds, drone reconnaissance along the barrier, and other preparations. Their reports moved up the chain and stopped. Some of them were told to quit filing.A junior person with a view of the ground writes it down. A senior person with a model decides it does not matter.On the night of October 5, mass activation of Israeli SIM cards inside Gaza was detected. A consultation took place around three in the morning. The alert status was not raised.Theipcha mistabraoffice was staffed and operating throughout. Israel had built the precise institutional answer to the precise institutional failure, maintained it for half a century, and it still did not fire.The lesson is uncomfortable. Institutions can preserve reforms for decades without preserving the habits of mind those reforms were meant to encourage.The cost was not theoretical. On October 7, more than 1,200 people were murdered, hundreds were taken hostage, and entire communities were overrun before the system understood that the model had failed.Agranat was convened within weeks of the 1973 war and reported in April 1974. Nearly three years after October 7, Israel still has no equivalent state commission. The debate over how to constitute one has moved through the Supreme Court and the Knesset without resolution.The Knowledge ProblemAn economist described this problem in 1945 without mentioning armies, intelligence agencies, or war.Friedrich Hayek argued that the knowledge most important to a decision rarely exists in one place. Much of it consists of what he called “the particular circumstances of time and place,” held by people on the spot. Much of it cannot be fully articulated, even by the people who possess it. A central authority cannot simply collect that knowledge because, in compressing it for transmission, it loses the very details that matter (Hayek 1945).The young women at the observation posts did not hold a threat assessment. They knew what the far side of the fence looked like on an ordinary Tuesday, well enough to notice when it stopped looking ordinary. That kind of knowledge does not survive translation into a summary paragraph, and a summary paragraph is the only form in which it can travel upward.The pattern repeated itself again and again. Lieutenant Benjamin Siman-Tov, a junior Israeli intelligence officer in 1973, was close enough to events to recognize that Egyptian forces were preparing for war, but his warnings never reached the people making the final decisions.Fifty years later, the local defense squads in communities such as Be'eri and Nir Oz were the only people with an accurate picture of what was happening on their own streets during the opening hours of the October 7 attack. Every one of these systems was designed to move local knowledge upward to a central authority that would decide. Every one of these systems was designed on the assumption that local knowledge could be transmitted upward without losing its meaning.The loss is not random. Whoever writes the summary already has a model of the situation. Summarizing requires judging what is relevant. Relevance is judged against the model. The details most likely to challenge the model are therefore the first to be discarded as noise. At every level, the filter preferentially strips awaydisconfirmingevidence. But God lives in the details.Markets avoid this problem because they do not require all knowledge to travel to the center. Prices carry the signal, and local actors make local decisions. Armies and public health agencies cannot go that far because someone still has to decide where reserves, personnel, and resources should go.What they can do is move authority closer to the knowledge instead of pulling the knowledge toward the authority.The Germans had a word for that in 1940:Auftragstaktik, usually translated as mission command. A subordinate commander was given the objective and left to determine the method, on the assumption that the commander looking at the ground sees what the map cannot. Heinz Guderian, commanding the German armored spearhead, crossed the Meuse at Sedan on his own initiative and kept going, in places beyond his orders (van Creveld 1985).Israel built much of its military doctrine on the same principle and has been unusually successful with it. Eitan Shamir’s comparative study identifies the IDF as the strongest modern practitioner of mission command among Western militaries (Shamir 2011). The fighting in the first hours of October 7 was carried by people exercising exactly that discretion.The people closest to the fight performed as intended. The failure occurred higher in the chain of command.The Phoenix MemoThe pattern repeated itself in the United States before 9/11.Kenneth Williams was an FBI agent in Phoenix. On July 10, 2001, he warned headquarters that Osama bin Laden might be sending followers to American flight schools and recommended a nationwide canvass of aviation schools. His memo never reached senior FBI leadership before September 11 (National Commission 2004).In August 2001, agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after a flight school reported that a student with almost no flying experience wanted time on a Boeing 747 simulator. The field office asked headquarters for authority to search his laptop. Headquarters refused. Coleen Rowley, the division counsel in Minneapolis, later documented the sequence in a memorandum to Director Robert Mueller (Rowley 2002).Two field offices. Two people close to the problem. Both warnings stopped at the same level. God lives in the details.There was also "the wall," the informal name for the legal and procedural barriers separating intelligence and criminal terrorism investigations. Procedures dating from 1995 sharply restricted the flow of information between intelligence and criminal terrorism investigations. The barrier is legal rather than physical, and it exists for a defensible reason: protecting criminal prosecutions. Its unintended effect is to prevent exactly the fusion of scattered warnings that the intelligence system was supposed to provide.The 9/11 Commission concluded that the central failure was one of imagination (National Commission 2004).That conclusion is only partly convincing. The scenario had been imagined repeatedly.The Bojinka plot uncovered in Manila in 1995 envisioned airliners used as weapons.Algerian hijackers seized an Air France flight in 1994 with the reported intention of crashing it into Paris.A report prepared for the National Intelligence Council in 1999 described al-Qaeda operatives flying an aircraft into a building in Washington (Hudson 1999).The problem was not imagination. It was that institutions failed to act on what they had already imagined. Israeli intelligence filed the Hamas invasion plan later known asJericho Wallas aspirational for much the same reason.Political scientist Amy Zegart reached the same conclusion in organizational terms. The agencies had been built for a Cold War adversary, their structures resisted adaptation, and competent people operated inside systems that all but guaranteed the outcome (Zegart 2007).Congress responded to this issue during the 9/11 attacks in 2004 by creating the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center so that scattered warnings could be fused and delivered to the President. Institutional reforms followed. As elsewhere in this essay, the harder question is whether structures alone can overcome the habits of mind that produced the failure in the first place.Five MicronsThe same failure mode appeared during COVID.For most of 2020, the World Health Organization and American public health agencies treated SARS-CoV-2 as spreading primarily by large droplets that fell quickly to the ground. That model produced the countermeasures Americans lived under, including surface disinfection, plexiglass barriers, and distancing rules. It de-emphasized ventilation and shared indoor air.The model rested on a boundary between droplets and aerosols set at five microns.Katherine Randall and her co-authors traced the origin of that number. It did not come from the physics of airborne particles. Instead, it appears to have migrated from a different literature concerned with how deeply inhaled particles deposit in the lungs, an entirely different question. The two became conflated in the mid-twentieth century, and the figure was repeated as settled science for decades (Randall et al. 2021). Megan Molteni’s account forWIREDis the most accessible summary (Molteni 2021).In July 2020, Lidia Morawska and Donald Milton published an appeal inClinical Infectious Diseases, co-signed by 239 scientists from 32 countries, asking health authorities to recognize airborne transmission (Morawska and Milton 2020). The signatories were aerosol physicists and engineers. They were the observation post. They held dispersed technical knowledge that central public health authorities could not absorb without abandoning guidance they had already publicly defended.The institutional response was gradual and slow. Morawska and her co-authors published a retrospective in the same journal three years later titledScience Rejected, Lives Lost(Morawska et al. 2023).The suppression of dissent in this case left a paper trail. On October 8, 2020, four days after three epidemiologists published the Great Barrington Declaration, Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci and Clifford Lane. He called the authors “three fringe epidemiologists,” noted that the declaration was receiving attention, and wrote that there needed to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. He asked whether one was underway. The email surfaced through Freedom of Information Act requests and was entered into the congressional record (Bhattacharya 2023).The email documents a process rather than resolving a scientific debate. Two senior officials responded to scientific disagreement by organizing its public rebuttal rather than commissioning its evaluation. Janis, with his Groupthink theory, called that behavior a mindguard: protecting a prevailing view from disconfirming evidence rather than exposing it to challenge.Institutionalized dissent is not valuable because dissenters are usually right. They may be right or wrong, but if correct, they represent a threat to established authority and consensus. That is precisely why it is easy to dismiss them and difficult to hear the dissenting opinion that matters.Institutionalized dissent is not valuable because dissenters are usually right. It is valuable because, at the moment a disagreement matters most, no institution can confidently tell the difference between a flawed objection and the one warning it, and which decision makers ignore at the peril of all concerned.What Actually WorksThe encouraging news is that we already know a great deal about how organizations become more reliable. None of it requires perfect people.Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe studied organizations that operate dangerous systems with remarkably few catastrophes, including aircraft carriers and nuclear power plants. They found a common set of habits: constant attention to small failures, reluctance to accept simple explanations, and deference to expertise rather than rank during a crisis (Weick and Sutcliffe 2007). That last habit directly counters the authority gradient.Sociologist Diane Vaughan, studying the Challenger disaster, coined the phrasenormalization of devianceto describe how repeated anomalies gradually become accepted as normal simply because nothing bad has happened yet (Vaughan 1996). Physicist Richard Feynman reached much the same conclusion in his appendix to the Rogers Commission report: “Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled” (Feynman 1986). God lives in the details.Psychologist Gary Klein proposed perhaps the simplest intervention of all: the premortem. Before adopting a plan, the group assumes it is a year later, and the plan has failed catastrophically. Everyone then writes the history of that failure. Treating failure as an established fact rather than a mere possibility removes much of the social cost of raising uncomfortable objections (Klein 2007).Political scientist Philip Tetlock addressed a different weakness. Instead of rewarding confidence or seniority, he argued that institutions should track predictions, measure their accuracy, and learn who is actually well calibrated over time (Tetlock 2005).None of these ideas is exotic. None is especially expensive. All cost far less than building a wall, and all are more likely to prevent the next surprise.The Office ExistedThe Agranat Commission created the Devil's Advocate Office in 1974. Israeli military intelligence still had it on October 6, 2023. A named unit with a written mandate and fifty years of institutional memory. It did not prevent October 7 from happening.The United States built the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947 so that scattered warnings would be fused and carried to the President. Fifty-seven years later, after concluding that scattered warnings still were not being fused and carried to the President, Congress created a second office and assigned it much the same mission.Political scientist Richard Betts, whose landmark 1978 study examined why intelligence failures persist, predicted this outcome. Procedural reform does not solve the deeper problem. It cannot compel people to hear what they do not wish to hear.That is the narrower, more durable lesson. Every institution that suffers a major surprise writes down what it learned. Writing it down is the easy part. The difficult part comes years later, when a junior officer, an analyst, an engineer, or a scientist brings forward an unwelcome report that challenges an accepted model. In that moment, no reform, commission, or organizational chart makes the decision. A person does.The Bar-Lev Line was made of sand. It fell to water in an afternoon.Fifty years later, the Gaza barrier was among the most sophisticated border defenses ever built. It, too, failed when the assumptions behind it proved false, and on a failure to attend to the details of local intelligence.  And God lives in the details.Every institution builds its own walls.Most of them are made of assumptions.RWM/JGMWe spent a lot of time researching, checking primary sources, and trying to understand not justwhathappened butwhy institutions keep repeating the same mistakes, I hope this essay has given you something worth thinking about.If essays like this are valuable to you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.The headlines are free. Digging through commission reports, memoirs, academic papers, declassified documents, and historical records to connect ideas across decades is not. That work takes time, and paid subscriptions are what make it possible.They also allow us to stay independent. No advertisers, no sponsors, no foundations, and no institution deciding which questions are acceptable to ask.If you want more long-form investigations that go beyond the news cycle and try to understand how systems actually work, your support genuinely makes them possible.Subscribe nowThank you for reading, for sharing our work, and for helping us keep doing it.ReferencesAldag, Ramon J., and Sally Riggs Fuller. 1993. “Beyond Fiasco: A Reappraisal of the Groupthink Phenomenon and a New Model of Group Decision Processes.”Psychological Bulletin113 (3): 533 to 552.Asch, Solomon E. 1955. “Opinions and Social Pressure.”Scientific American193 (5): 31 to 35.Bar-Joseph, Uri. 2005.The Watchman Fell Asleep: The Surprise of Yom Kippur and Its Sources. Albany: State University of New York Press.Bar-Joseph, Uri, and Arie W. 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