What happens when a narrative of lies becomes embedded in our institutions? By Krzysztof Szczawinski.

Within systems built on institutional falsehood, something happens to people that goes far deeper than political disagreement or economic hardship.

A process of demoralization sets in – and this word must be understood in its fullest sense. Not merely disappointment. Not discouragement. But the systematic erosion of the moral infrastructure that holds a person, and a society, together: trust, integrity, the shared assumption that truth is real and that it matters.

Truth is penalized, loyalty to the lies is rewarded:

People learn, through accumulated experience, that honesty costs. They watch colleagues who speak plainly get passed over, demoted, or destroyed. They watch those who perform loyalty — regardless of whether they believe a word of it — advance. The lesson is absorbed not as ideology but as survival knowledge: say what the system wants to hear. After enough repetition, this stops feeling like compromise. It becomes instinct.

Negative moral selection:

The result is one of the most destructive and least discussed phenomena of institutional life under such systems: negative moral selection. The term deserves to be used widely, because the process it describes is precise and devastating.

In a healthy institution, the qualities that get rewarded — competence, honesty, independent judgment, willingness to deliver unwelcome truths — are roughly the qualities that make institutions function well. The selection pressure, however imperfectly, tends to elevate people worth elevating.

Under a system of institutionalized lying, the selection pressure inverts. What gets rewarded is the willingness to subordinate truth to narrative, to signal loyalty over competence, to manipulate rather than inform. And crucially, those most willing to do this — whether out of opportunism, cowardice, or genuine ideological capture — rise. Those least willing to do it are sidelined, pushed out, or in harder cases, destroyed.

 

 

Over time, the institution fills, top to bottom, with people selected specifically for their unreliability. The honest are gone. The competent who refused to play along are gone. What remains is a self-reinforcing culture of cynicism and mutual complicity — everyone knowing, at some level, that the whole structure rests on a lie, and everyone invested in maintaining it because the lie is now the source of their position.

This is not merely inefficiency. It is institutional rot at the genetic level.

The social aftermath:

Beyond the institutions themselves, something corrodes in the broader social fabric.

• Public life becomes performative theater.
• Language decouples from meaning — words are uttered not to convey reality but to signal allegiance, deflect suspicion, or accumulate social capital.
• Truth inverts: the more emphatically something is proclaimed, the more suspicious a rational person learns to be.
• People adapt. They develop a kind of split consciousness – participating in the public rituals because refusal carries costs, while privately withdrawing all genuine trust from the system. They say the words. They attend the meetings. They sign the statements. And inwardly, they check out entirely.

This is doublethink, not as a dramatic Orwellian act of self-violation, but as a mundane daily habit. A way of moving through the world. And like all habits, it shapes the person who practices it.

The bad habits die slower than the lies:

When communism formally collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe, there was a widespread assumption in the West — and to some degree among the people themselves — that the pathologies would dissolve along with the system that produced them. Remove the oppressive structure, introduce free markets and democratic institutions, and the culture would normalize.

It did not. Or at least, not nearly as quickly as hoped.

Because the damage was not located in the ideology. The ideology was the occasion. The damage was located in the people — in the habits of mind, the social reflexes, the deeply internalized assumptions about how the world works, that decades of living inside a system of lies had produced. …

The negative moral selection continued … The people most skilled at institutional maneuvering, at cultivating networks of complicity, at navigating power through loyalty-signaling rather than competence, were precisely the people who had been selected into positions of influence under the old system. They remained. They adapted their language. They learned to mouth the new words — democracy, market, civil society — with exactly the same fluency and exactly the same hollowness with which they had mouthed the old ones.

The cynicism persisted. The corruption persisted. The distrust persisted.

A generation of virtue-signalers and liars, practiced at ignoring certain truths, for social and professional survival. Look what it did for the Soviet Union — what will it do for the West?