No, you're imagining it - the dread is real
The epistemic system has collapsed - as democracy is being hollowed out, we are all feeling the unease in our bones right now
Pick any major event of the last five years. Now ask yourself, honestly: do you know what actually happened? Not what was reported. Not the official account. Not the consensus narrative that crystallised within 72 hours and hardened into received wisdom. What actually happened. If your answer is anything other than “I’m not sure” - you may be more credulous than the moment deserves.
That is where we are. Globally. Right now.
We are living through the quiet, catastrophic collapse of the epistemic system - the shared infrastructure of facts, institutions, and trust that civilised societies use to make sense of the world. And unlike most crises, this one is almost impossible to prove, because the very tools we would normally use to prove it are implicated in its unravelling.
The Evidence Is Hiding In Plain Sight
Let me give you five data points that are not conspiracy theories or fringe narratives. These are five moments where the version of reality presented to the public was, at best, incomplete, and at worst, actively managed.
COVID-19. We were told with absolute institutional certainty that the lab-leak hypothesis was a debunked conspiracy theory. Scientists who raised it were silenced. Journalists who pursued it were deplatformed. The WHO deferred to China. The NIH funded the research at the centre of the question.
Three years later, the FBI, the Department of Energy, and multiple Senate investigations concluded the lab-leak hypothesis was the most probable origin. Nobody lost their job. Nobody retracted their certainty. The narrative simply... shifted. Quietly. Without apology.
October 7th. One of the most documented atrocities in modern history - committed in real time, on camera, live-streamed by the perpetrators themselves - and yet the story that followed was shaped as much by what Western media chose not to cover as by what it did. The suffering of Palestinian women and children in Gaza, by any honest measure, demanded the same forensic attention as October 7ty, which itself requires scrutiny. It did not receive it.
South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice - a serious, legally argued submission by a sovereign nation invoking the Genocide Convention - was afforded a fraction of the coverage its institutional weight demanded. Meanwhile, the attacks of October 7th themselves were not without context, however uncomfortable that context may be. They did not occur unprovoked, in a vacuum. Some of the most inflammatory claims circulated in the immediate aftermath - including the allegation that babies were killed in microwaves - were subsequently debunked, having spread without verification through the same media infrastructure that claims editorial rigour.
Perhaps most gravely, credible reporting and investigation have since raised serious questions about the alleged application of the Hannibal directive - an IDF protocol designed to prevent capture - and whether its reported use on October 7th contributed to the deaths of Israelis at the hands of their own military.
None of this is speculation. All of it deserved serious public discourse. Almost none of it received any. That is the point. The failure of the epistemic system is not only that it amplifies certain facts - it is that it quietly buries others.
Ukraine. The dominant Western narrative is clean: an unprovoked imperial invasion. Full stop. But clean narratives in geopolitics are almost always incomplete ones, and this one has been scrubbed to the point of historical falsification.
Start with 2008. At the Bucharest Summit, NATO formally declared that Ukraine and Georgia would become members of the alliance. Not might. Would. Russia’s response was not ambiguous. Putin called it a direct threat to Russian national security, and he was not speaking rhetorically.
In December 2021, Russia submitted two formal draft security treaties to Washington and NATO - publicly published by the Russian Foreign Ministry - demanding a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion as a precondition for not invading Ukraine.
Those documents were not secret. They were received, their core demands rejected, and the concerns they articulated were publicly dismissed. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg later confirmed this on the record - three times before the European Parliament - stating plainly that Putin went to war specifically to prevent NATO expansion, and that the draft treaties were his final diplomatic attempt to forestall it.
Western officials privately conceded further ground: Angela Merkel and François Hollande later acknowledged that the Minsk Agreements had been used instrumentally to buy Ukraine time to rearm, not to achieve a lasting peace - while publicly the fiction of inexplicable Russian aggression was maintained.
Then consider the nature of the war itself. If Russia’s ambitions were genuinely imperial - if this were a war of conquest and subjugation - the military logic would demand overwhelming force, shock and awe, the rapid seizure of population centres, and the decapitation of the Ukrainian state. That is not what is happening.
Russia is fighting a grinding, attritional war, systematically degrading NATO weapons systems, depleting Western stockpiles, and exhausting Ukraine’s military manpower - not occupying cities or installing puppet governments. Whether you find that reassuring or not, it is strategically coherent in a way that “imperial land-grab” is not.
Understanding causation is not the same as excusing the invasion. But flattening causation into a morality play makes you feel righteous and leaves you strategically blind - and it has led the West into a proxy war with no articulated exit strategy and no honest public debate about how it ends.
Epstein. This one is perhaps the most clarifying. Jeffrey Epstein built, over three decades, a trafficking network that serviced some of the most powerful men on earth. He was arrested. He died in custody, under federal supervision, in a high-security federal detention facility, with cameras outside his cell malfunctioning and other footage reportedly recorded over. His co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted and is in prison.
The client list - the actual, documented list of individuals who flew on his planes, visited his islands, and appear in his calendars - has never been fully released. No prominent figure has been charged. No serious investigation has been publicly announced. Children were abused. Powerful men watched. Nothing happened to the powerful men. Yet victims are screaming for media attention. If that doesn’t break something in you, you are not paying attention.
Iran. As the region teeters on the edge of a wider conflagration - with proxy wars, missile exchanges, and shifting alliances reshaping the Middle East - the public is receiving breathless tactical updates and almost no structural analysis.
Why is Iran positioned the way it is? Who benefits from escalation and who benefits from containment? What is the relationship between energy pricing, regional hegemony, and the domestic political needs of every actor involved? These questions don’t fit in a chyron, so they don’t get asked.
Three Forces That Broke The System
1. THE VELOCITY PROBLEM
I have been involved in media, PR and related advisory services since 2001. The growth in the speed and volume of information since then is staggering.
Human cognition evolved to process information at roughly the speed of village gossip. We are now operating in an environment where significant, consequential events - with complex causes, disputed facts, and genuine moral ambiguity - are processed, packaged, and declared resolved within 48 hours of occurring. Advisors like me - who excelled in crisis management - learnt to exploit this new reality.
After deep reflection on my previous role, this was great for my clients and my career, not great for my clients’ stakeholders and society at large.
The Ukrainian war, for example, broke on our timelines before most people could have located Kyiv on a map. October 7th was being contextualised before the dust settled. COVID policy was being enforced before the science was complete.
Speed is the enemy of nuance. And nuance is the precondition for truth.
Social media platforms - designed not for comprehension but for engagement - have industrialised outrage and made ambiguity commercially unviable. The algorithm rewards certainty. It punishes complexity. And we have built our entire information ecosystem on top of it.
2. THE ACCESS ECONOMY
Here is a power-media dynamic that is rarely, if ever called out: mainstream media does not report on governments. It reports near them.
Credentialed access - to press briefings, to embeds, to exclusive interviews, to official sources - is the currency of legacy journalism. And access is conditional. It is given to journalists who ask the right questions, withheld from those who ask the wrong ones.
This is not always deliberate censorship. The journalist who burns a government source loses a competitive advantage. Over time, entire institutions self-edit into comfortable proximity with power. I would argue that CBS is the most striking contemporary example. They stop asking the questions that would cost them the relationship. I would go so far as to say that some media outlets and journalists actively ingratiate themselves with power - not merely to preserve access, but to manufacture competitive advantage and to enjoy the very real spoils that come with proximity to those who run the world.
The result is a media class that is, structurally, incapable of adversarialism. They look like journalists. They use the language of journalism. But they are, in practice, sophisticated access management operations with broadcast licences.
3. THE OWNERSHIP PROBLEM
CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery - a company now in the crosshairs of David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son, who has made a bid to acquire it. TikTok’s US operations - through which hundreds of millions of young adults in Western democracies receive their news - were signed over in December 2025 to an Oracle-led investor group controlled by Larry Ellison, a billionaire Trump ally and vocal supporter of Israel.
The underlying algorithm, however, remains owned by ByteDance in Beijing. The platform’s content is now overseen by a Trump-adjacent American billionaire, while its intellectual engine remains under Chinese ownership. If that sentence makes you uneasy, it should.
But the more revealing story is not who owns these outlets - it is how they have behaved under pressure. Since returning to office, Donald Trump has filed nine separate legal actions against news organisations, demanding a combined $65 billion in damages.
The results speak for themselves. Disney’s ABC News paid $15 million to Trump’s presidential library and issued a public apology. Paramount’s CBS - whose lawyers privately described Trump’s lawsuit as meritless - paid $16 million, a settlement widely attributed to the company’s need for FCC approval of its merger with Skydance Media, run by Larry Ellison’s son. Meta paid $25 million. Not one of these organisations was found to have done anything wrong in a court of law. All of them paid anyway.
When the most powerful man in the world can extract tens of millions from media conglomerates without a verdict - and when those conglomerates comply because they need his regulatory approval to do business - you do not have a free press. You have a press that has been domesticated.
When media ownership is concentrated among entities that have commercial, political, or ideological stakes in specific narratives - and when those narratives shape public opinion which shapes policy which shapes markets - you do not have a free press. You have a very expensive one.
What Epistemology Always Knew
The question of how human beings can know anything with confidence is not new - it is, in fact, the oldest question in Western philosophy.
Plato’s allegory of the cave, written four centuries before the common era, imagined prisoners chained underground, perceiving only shadows cast on a wall and mistaking them for reality. The philosopher’s task, Plato argued, was to turn toward the light - toward truth itself - even when those still chained in the dark refused to believe him.
René Descartes, writing in 1637, stripped the question to its barest form: what can I know for certain, if I accept that my senses can deceive me and my perception can be manipulated? His answer - cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am - was not a triumphant conclusion but a radical admission of how little we can actually verify.
Three centuries later, Jürgen Habermas argued that truth in a modern society is not a private possession but a social achievement - produced through what he called communicative rationality: open, honest dialogue in a shared public sphere, free from coercion and manipulation.
What Plato feared, what Descartes doubted, and what Habermas prescribed as the remedy - the free, unmanipulated exchange of ideas in pursuit of shared understanding - is precisely what the collapse of the epistemic system has destroyed.
We are not simply living through a media crisis. We are living through the failure of the Enlightenment’s central promise: that reason, freely exercised, would keep power honest.
Democracy’s Hidden Assumption
Every functional theory rests on assumptions. Efficient markets assume rational actors with access to perfect information. Remove that assumption, and the entire edifice - pricing, competition, capital allocation - breaks down. You don’t get a slightly worse market. The market get rigged.
Democracy runs on the same assumption. Its architects - from Madison to Mill to Habermas - premised the entire system on an informed citizenry. Not perfectly informed, but meaningfully informed.
Voters must be able to assess their representatives’ records, understand the consequences of policy choices, hold institutions accountable, and punish those who abuse power through the mechanism of the ballot. Every democratic norm - a free press, an independent judiciary, the right to assembly, open parliamentary debate - exists in service of that single precondition: that the people have access to a reasonably accurate account of reality.
Remove that assumption and democracy doesn’t function imperfectly. It inverts.
It becomes the most sophisticated legitimacy machine ever devised - producing the appearance of popular consent while the actual levers of power operate entirely elsewhere. Elections become a performance of choice between options pre-filtered by the same interests that control the information environment. The candidate who wins is the one whose narrative achieved the widest distribution, not necessarily the one whose programme best served the public.
This is the operational reality of most Western democracies right now.
When the majority of citizens receive their political information through platforms owned by billionaires with political agendas, or through state-adjacent legacy media structurally dependent on government access, or through foreign-owned algorithms with opaque promotional logic - the feedback loop that democracy requires to self-correct has been severed.
Citizens cannot hold accountable what they cannot accurately perceive. And they cannot accurately perceive anything when the compass is broken.
The ancient Athenians understood that democracy’s enemy was not tyrants - it was demagoguery: the manipulation of the popular mind by those skilled enough to exploit its fears and ignorances. They had no answer for it either. We have simply industrialised the problem.
What This Means For Trust - And For Justice
In my opinion, the epistemic crisis and the justice crisis are the same crisis.
Epstein is not an anomaly. He is an illustration of what happens at the endpoint of a system where the powerful are insulated from accountability by a media that will not pursue them, institutions that will not charge them, and an information environment so chaotic that any serious investigation can be drowned in noise before it gains traction.
The Epstein client list is classified. Children and women were abused. The men who abused them are still at dinner parties, on boards, at conferences.
If that sentence doesn’t produce a primal response in you, ask yourself what we have normalised?
When we stop trusting institutional sources of information, the vacuum always Gets filled
Here is the iron law of information ecosystems: when credible facts become unavailable, or when the institutions responsible for delivering them lose the public’s trust, the vacuum does not stay empty. It fills. And it fills with whatever is most emotionally satisfying, most internally consistent, and most aggressively distributed.
Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the human mind.
This is how you get Q.
QAnon did not emerge because millions of people suddenly became irrational. It emerged because millions of people - correctly - sensed that they were not being told the truth about power, about institutions, and about the people running them. Epstein was real.
The cover-up was real. The media’s selective incuriosity was real. COVID policy contradictions were real. And into that landscape of legitimate, unresolved suspicion, a set of internally coherent - if factually absurd - alternative narratives flooded. They offered what the mainstream could not: a complete explanation, a clear villain, and the intoxicating dignity of believing you had seen through the lie.
You cannot blame people for reaching for a map when they are lost in the jungle. You can only blame the people who destroyed the compass.
The fringe is no longer fringe. That is the thing that should terrify anyone who has been paying attention. The perspectives that were, a decade ago, confined to message boards and late-night radio - about deep states, about managed media, about elite impunity - are now sitting in parliaments, winning elections, and commanding primetime audiences. Not because they became more credible. But because the mainstream became less so.
This is the most dangerous possible outcome of the epistemic collapse: not that people believe wrong things, but that the very concept of a shared, verifiable reality has been so thoroughly discredited that no corrective is possible.
When truth becomes tribal - when every faction has its own facts, its own experts, its own peer-reviewed literature - the mechanism that democracies use to self-correct breaks down entirely. You cannot vote your way out of a disagreement about what is real.
America - the world’s most powerful democracy and the architect of the post-war liberal order - is the most acute case study in what epistemic collapse looks like at scale.
The left and the right are not merely disagreeing about policy. They are operating from entirely different versions of reality, each with its own data, its own economists, its own scientists, its own history of the last decade.
On the economy: one side sees a cost-of-living crisis driven by corporate greed and inequality; the other sees it as the direct consequence of unchecked government spending and open-border labour policy.
On January 6th: one side sees an attempted insurrection documented on live television; the other sees a protest that was mischaracterised and selectively prosecuted.
On immigration: one side produces data on economic contribution and asylum law; the other produces data on crime, displacement and sovereignty.
On gender, on race, on the role of the state - the disagreements are not about values alone. They are about what the facts are.
Each tribe has its own media infrastructure, its own credentialed experts, its own peer-reviewed studies, its own fact-checkers who fact-check the other side’s fact-checkers.
There is no agreed arbiter. There is no shared court of appeal. And into that vacuum has stepped the most transactional political culture in living memory - one that does not resolve the fracture but actively profits from it, because a society that cannot agree on what is real is a society that cannot organise against those who are exploiting it. The implications of what is happening in US are global.
We may have already crossed a threshold from which there is no clean return. The damage to epistemic infrastructure - to the shared trust that facts are facts, that institutions can be believed, that journalists are trying to tell the truth - may not be reversible on any timeline that matters for the democratic systems now struggling to hold their shape.
The Counter-Revolution Is Already Underway
Here is what the gatekeepers did not anticipate: the same collapse of trust that shattered the epistemic system is also building its replacement.
Gallup’s most recent polling shows that Americans’ trust in mainstream media has fallen to a historic low of 28% - down from 68% in 1972, a fifty-year freefall that no single event caused and no single correction will reverse.
Among Americans under 50, trust in mainstream media has never been lower.
Among Republicans, it has fallen into single digits - 8%. The numbers are cross-partisan, cross-generational, and global in trajectory.
This is not mass cynicism, but mass diagnosis. And the market is responding.
Substack - one platform among many - grew from three million paid subscribers in 2024 to five million in 2025. In the 2024 US election, both major candidates reached wider audiences through a single podcast interview than through traditional spots on major networks.
The Washington Post, HuffPost, and Axios each announced significant editorial layoffs in 2024 and 2025 - not because journalism is dying, but because the institutional form it took for a century is being structurally displaced. A survey of media professionals found that 80% believe independent media is now essential to a healthy information ecosystem.
This piece is part of that displacement. Not because it claims to have all the answers, but because it refuses to perform the false certainty that institutional media requires.
Independent media - newsletters, podcasts, long-form essays written by people without corporate editors and without government access to protect - people like me, is the direct consequence of the epistemic breakdown. It is, simultaneously, its most hopeful evolution.
The feedback loop that legacy media severed - between writer and reader, between truth-teller and the people who need the truth - is being rebuilt, reader by reader, subscriber by subscriber, in exactly the spaces the old gatekeepers dismissed as too small to matter.
They were wrong about that. They have been wrong about a lot.
The path back to a functioning epistemic commons will not be built by the institutions that dismantled the last one. It will be built by writers who answer to their readers alone. By journalists who left legacy mastheads rather than kill their stories. By analysts who can say “I don’t know” without a network executive panicking. By readers - like you - who decided that the discomfort of uncertainty is preferable to the comfort of a managed lie.
The jungle is real. The compass is broken. But people are learning to navigate by the stars again - and that, for the first time in a long time, is something worth holding onto.
Kaveer Beharee is the Founder and CEO of Ubiquity Artificial Intelligence.
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