Civilization and Its Distrusts

Quid ex Machina, Act II Scene 2. Theme song by Lin Manuel-Miranda.

New essay of the series Quid ex Machina, which examines the deep, under-explored, and Unseen impact of AI on humans and our societies. See here for the rest of the series.

Yes, the title is a riff on Freud’s (in)famous book, and I promise it’s relevant here.

Today’s theme song is The Schuyler Sisters by Lin Manuel-Miranda, from the 2015 hit musical Hamilton. 

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I believe this truth to be self-evident: one man’s AI-generated untruth, is another man’s weapon.

I also believe this corollary to be obvious: bad actors can use generative AI tools to create their own zombie armies and wage wars on our collective psyche, and break the foundation of our society: trust.

But is this time really different from the countless times before? Generative AIs spill untruths and (the fancy term is “hallucination”, but I dislike the anthropomorphism implication of the word), but untruths have thrived long before generative AIs. So I will not lament how unreliable the chatGPTs and Claudes are. Instead, I will focus on what AI-generated untruths can do to our society, if we keep slumbering in our indifference to truth:

Three score and ten years ago, even before the internet, social media, and generative AIs, untruth campaigns turned a rising nation into a banana republic — a poor, unstable country whose entire economy depends on fruit exports.

Now, imagine what untruth campaigns can do, with the internet, social media, generative AIs, and a few enterprising, malicious minds wanting to set the world on fire?

If you think I’m spouting hyperbole, kindly let me tell you the true story of Guatemala. 

How Untruths Created a Banana Republic

All is fair in love and war. This proverb coined by a 16^th century romance novel just wouldn’t die, because there is at least half a truth to it. In war and battles – essentially, in all military tactics — lies, deception, and untruth are a fair game. From Odysseus faking a retreat from the walls of Troy, to public radios blasting about great victories of the Imperial Japanese Navy in May 1945, for millennia, military commanders have been tricking their enemies on the front-line, and tricking their own compatriots back home. These war-time untruth campaigns share a name: psychological warfare. 

When Odysseus faked the retreat from Troy, he left a wooden horse there. A 1902 picture of the Trojan horse in Histoire des jouets. Public domain image.

But the first modern, peace-time untruth campaign happened only in the 1950s. Planned by the CIA and codenamed “Operation PBSuccess”, this psychological warfare succeeded big time. It overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala, installed a military dictatorship, led to a 36-year civil war in this small central American nation, and its tragic fall into the pitiful state of a banana republic.

The mastermind behind the master plan of Operation PBSuccess was Edward Bernays, chief advisor to the United Fruit Company (UFC), one of the largest banana traders in central America at that time. Coincidentally, Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, whose hit piece, Civilization and Its Discontents, inspired the title for this essay.

Bernays didn’t just overthrow nations, he also convinced entire populations of dubious dietary “facts”. If you ever heard that eating bananas is healthy, or seen bananas placed in hotel lobbies, it’s because Bernays did it: in the 1940s, to help UFC boost banana sales in the US, he started linking bananas to good health in advertising and news stories, and placing them in highly visible public spaces.  

Edward Bernays, photographed in 1917. He’s the godfather of modern public relations, and convinced us of many things: bananas are good for health, disposable cups are sanitary, and ballet is fun to watch. Public domain image.

But his career highlight remains Operation PBSuccess for UFC and the CIA. It started out as UFC’s grand ambition: in the 1950s, UFC sought monopoly over Guatemala's banana trade. But Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz would not let UFC have its way. Naturally, UFC decided to find ways around the Guatemalan president, and set Bernays to the task.

McCarthyism was at its height in the 1950s, and Bernays smelled an opportunity and devised a battle plan for UFC and its political connections. In the US, UFC started running press campaigns to brand President Árbenz as communist, and lobbying high officials to strike Guatemala as a preemptive measure¹. Outside the US, the CIA and UFC hired Spanish-speaking DJs and actors to staff radio stations, broadcasting fabricated stories into Guatemala about President Árbenz’s communist connections and close ties to the USSR. 

President Árbenz of Guatemala was a solid centrist and never communist², but those untruth campaigns worked. In the US, newspapers from liberal (New York Times) to conservative (Chicago Tribune) camps printed false stories about Guatemala rapidly turning communist, inciting public sentiments to demand US interventions. In Guatemala, fabricated stories on Radio Liberación convinced many Guatemalan citizens about their president’s non-existent ties to the USSR, and promised them a national revolution to repel the impending communist doom. 

Finally, in June 1954, a brigade of CIA-trained soldiers staged a coup d’etat, deposing the democratically elected Guatemalan president and congress. Soon after, UFC got their banana trade monopoly, reaping a handsome return on their investment. But the price was paid by Guatemala: nearly 40 years of military dictatorship, a brutal civil war, and a rapid down-spiral into poverty. 

A New York Times article in Feb 1954 describing Guatemala’s non-existent communist regime. Source. .

This is how Guatemala turned into a banana republic by the first modern, peace-time psychological warfare. All done without the internet, social media, and generative AIs. This tragedy was imprinted so deeply into the memory of central and south American nations that almost 70 years later, in 2021, the Peruvian novelist -- and Nobel laureate in Literature -- Mario Llosa wrote Harsh Times, a dramatized account of the Guatemala coup to contemplate the genesis and afterlife of this tragedy. In the novel, Llosa sounded out a popular sentiment in central and south America: the press cannot be trusted, political institutions cannot trusted, people lie all the time, and what’s real, anyway? Everything in life can be false or a fabrication.

This is the damage of untruth campaigns on the collective psyche: trust collapses, a sense of resignation reigns, and concern for truth evaporates. 

I wondered what Bernays thought of the consequences of his dirty deeds for UFC in Guatemala. He was deeply influenced by his uncle’s big idea: unconscious and repressed desires are reflected in people’s outward actions. Did he really see his untruth campaigns as channels for people to act out their repressed desires? Did he himself have repressed desires, that he had to let out by masterminding these psychological wars? For sure he would know that untruth breeds distrust, and more untruth breeds greater distrust.

And with more distrust, comes the breakdown of the foundation of our civilization.

Trust is the Foundation of Our Society

If you have a $5 dollar bill, now it’s time to take a good, close look. What do you see?

“This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,” it says. Presumably, the speakers of this line are the ones who signed on the note. One is named Anna Escobedo Cabral, described as Treasurer of the United States. The other is named Henry Merritt Paulson, described as Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.  

But this is just a piece of paper! Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson – neither of whom I’ve met or personally known – promised this thin paper printed with Lincoln’s solemn look is a “legal tender”. Can I walk up to the US Treasury or the homes of Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson, and demand that they pay me 5 bucks, as they promised? No, because I’d be kicked out in no time. So again, this is just a pretty-printed piece of paper, and the signers made a promise they could not keep personally. Right? 

US $5 Series 2006 obverse side, public domain. Above “FIVE” is Cabral’s signature, above “DOLLARS” is Paulson’s signature.

I played the devil’s advocate here, and you know I was wrong. I would need to think many times before tearing up this $5 bill just because I don’t think anyone would keep the promise to pay me. So what happened? What stopped me from tossing away a piece of paper, with an empty promise printed on it?

It is trust. We trust this $5 bill. We’ve never met Ms. Cabral or Mr. Paulson or known their personal characters, but we believe in the public institutions they represent, and believe in what these institutions tell us about the value of this $5 bill. The value of this piece of paper comes from trust and trust alone: we believe in it, and we believe that everyone else believes in it, too.

This amazes me. It’s a most remarkable accomplishment in our society.

In our lives, public and private, trust goes far and deep. We place trust in others all the time: doctors, lawyers, accountants, journalists, and random strangers.
In markets run by strangers, we buy food produced by farmers we’ve never met and factories we have no knowledge of.

At home, we use water provided by water companies and utility workers we don’t know personally.

On the road, we drive alongside complete strangers; in public transit, we ride on vehicles piloted by people unknown to us.

From the internet, newspapers, radios, and TVs, we read, watch, or listen to news and reports, produced by people we never crossed paths with.  

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

(A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams)

In other words, it’s impossible to not trust. We have to assume that bus drivers and other road users are not trying to kill us, water companies are treating water properly, farmers and grocers are not plotting to poison us, doctors are not planning to harm us, and journalists, media personalities, influencers are telling us some dose of facts and not total fabrications.

I say this again: unless we live on a deserted island or are secluded from society, it is impossible to not trust. Life is too short to constantly question the motives of people we deal with, whether they are visible to us or not. Of course, sometimes we’d find this presumption mistaken and our trust wrongly placed, but the flip side of this presumption – to never trust anyone – will be wrong a lot more often. Too trusting is a weakness, and so is too skeptical: for example, shredding a $5 bill because you don’t trust Ms. Cabral and Mr. Paulson’s personal characters, or the institutions they represent. So maybe trust is indeed the better presumption.

We build our society on the foundation of trust, that’s why untruth is our mortal enemy.

Untruths Break Trust

The 24/7 news cycle – viral videos, rolling reels, and Twitter doom scrolls – is where psychological warfare takes place now. But checking everything we hear and read is exhausting and impractical. Sure, we can observe from the telescope that the moon is not made of green cheese, and look up traffic laws to confirm that red light means “stop” for cars. But in cases like Bernays’ campaign on Guatemala, how could we tell fabrications from facts? How do we know that Guatemala was not a communist regime? That UFC was interested in banana trade monopoly? That director of the CIA had financial incentives to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government? How do we tell reliable information from deception, and truth-tellers from story-spinners?

Here’s the most dangerous use of generative AI tools: producing untruths at a scale so massive that we could no longer find the needle of facts in the haystack of fiction.
In the 1950s, the CIA hired a big crew of DJs, actors, local rumor-mongers, painters, and writers to run untruth campaigns. In 2025, one single conspiracy theorist in his parents’ basement could run the same campaigns, with only a laptop, internet access to the chatGPTs, Midjourneys, and TikToks. Throwing in some voice- and video-generator AIs for 11-second viral clips, this conspiracy theorist just raised an army, an army fighting 24/7 to wage psychological warfare against his chosen enemy.

If one person can wage war so easily, imagine what the really motivated or ill-intended can do. I’m speaking of the UFCs, the Bernays, and the CIAs of today.

Actually, you can have innocuous intentions with generative AIs, but still dump crud into clean fountains of information. Buzzfeed and CNET already did it with their clickbaity articles and error-ridden reports. My favorite is AI-generated realistic photos of Pope Francis’ puffer jacket. Even the customarily unconcerned Midjourney sub-reddit was concerned this time: the rest of the internet thought those images were real? That’s no good!

AI-generated images of Pope Francis wearing a white parka. Source.

Think about it: if trivial matters like the Pope’s attire are worthy of fabrication, there must be higher-stake issues worthy of more convincing fabrications. As long as generative AIs can make untruths look, sound, and read like truth, it’s all that matters.

What happens when we can no longer discern truth from untruth? A safe default would be to halt the presumption of trust: constantly questioning if every picture is a real-life shot, if every story has a factual basis, and if anyone ever has any decent intentions. No individual or institution would be spared from our distrust: we’d be ready to tear up that $5 bill, because we no longer believe any signer or institution could guarantee the value of the note.

What’s worse, we would not be the only ones halting the presumption of trust. It would be everyone else around us, also becoming suspicious of everything and everyone. Then our societies would descend into “the state of nature,” as Thomas Hobbes put it. It is a state of perpetual chaos: no one trusts anyone, everyone is either fighting someone already or getting ready to attack someone else, hostility is returned dollars to donuts – it is a war of all against all.

I don’t know about you, but this Hobbesian version of the world, is not a world I want to live in.

What Can We Do

Psychological warfare is just that – a war. And in war, there are plans of attack, and there are strategies of defense. Untruths attack our trust in our fellow humans and public institutions, and I think there are some practical defense strategies:       

• To get by in life, we need to trust strangers and institutions, but that does not mean we should trust all of them. We should exercise good judgment on what and who to trust.  

• Be vigilant about what we see and hear online, always remind ourselves that AI-generated untruths can be used for deception.

• Ask “why” of stories and claims. Ask why they are being picked up in the first place. A place in the spotlight doesn’t guarantee trustworthiness.

• Ask “who” put forward these stories and claims. Are the “whos” worthy of our trust? Can we reasonably presume their intentions are decent and benign?

Frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, 1651, public domain. Hobbes’ solution to the “state of nature” where no one trusts anyone, and everyone fights with everyone else, is to have a sovereign (an absolute one, preferably) in place to enforce rules, and create an environment where we can behave well and trust each other.

These may sound mentally taxing. Indeed they are, and they are supposed to be. After all, we are defending trust, and trust is the foundation of our civilization. Defending a civilization is never easy, even in Steam games; and we are doing the defense in real life.

To me, I think the fateful question for our society is: when untruth tramples on trust, can we defend trust? If malicious masterminds use generative AI tools to wage psychological wars on us, how much can we push back and thwart their plans to destroy the foundation of our society?

Our tools have become very proficient in imitating what we do – so proficient that with their help, we humans would have no problem waging wars to destroy the trust we hold for one another and our society. We know this, and so comes a large part of our anxiety, our uneasiness, and our sense of either impending doom or exuberant hope for these tools.    

What a time to live in. What a time to be alive.      

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1. UFC had financial ties with John Dulles, the US secretary of State, and his brother Allen, director of the CIA.

2. Even Bernays and CIA officials acknowledged that Guatemala was unlikely to turn communist. Árbenz was elected as a moderate, and had friends in both communist and right-wing parties. No one in his cabinet or congress was a member of Guatemala’s Communist Party. In fact, Árbenz looked to the US as a role model for him to build Guatemala.