The Inner Monologue

There’s a rule of thumb I’ve started using:
If a CEO, politician, or government agency tells you a story that sounds straight out of a blockbuster — it probably is. Not literally, but narratively. Because we no longer sell truth; we sell believability packaged as entertainment.

Modern propaganda, corporate messaging, and even crisis communications don’t emerge from reality; they’re inspired by it. Just like Hollywood “based on a true story” films, today’s public narratives are adapted from the faint outline of something that might have happened, filtered through the structure of screenwriting. There are heroes and villains, ticking clocks, redemption arcs, and convenient moral clarity. Every leak is timed like a trailer drop. Every denial is framed as a plot twist.

📺 Life as Scripted Reality

It’s not that the world isn’t dramatic — it’s that genuine reality is too messy to hold our attention. Bureaucratic corruption isn’t cinematic; it’s emails, memos, budget justifications, and procedural inertia. The underworld isn’t neon-lit shootouts; it’s wire transfers and encrypted messages about shipments of fertilizer. Nobody’s going to option the rights to that.

So when a government agency says, “We intercepted a plot that sounds like a Jason Bourne script,” maybe the correct question isn’t “How could this be true?” but “Why are they framing it like that?” Because the real world, even the underworld, is boring — and boring doesn’t make headlines or justify funding.

🕵️‍♀️ Propaganda by Storyboard

Propaganda doesn’t work because it’s believable. It works because it’s entertaining.
Humans have a bias for narrative coherence. We’d rather accept a dramatic, emotionally satisfying explanation than a dull, bureaucratic one — even if the latter is true. We don’t remember court transcripts, we remember courtroom dramas.

When officials say, “We foiled an international conspiracy involving high-tech espionage and rogue actors,” it sounds impressive because it mimics the structure of movies we’ve already seen. It resonates because it feels familiar. The public has been trained by decades of Hollywood scripts to respond emotionally to that pattern. The modern press release is just a logline: “In a world where freedom is under threat…”

🔒 The Secrecy Paradox

And then there’s the giveaway:
If the story is that fantastic, it wouldn’t be public knowledge.
If it were truly a national-security-level secret, it would remain locked in classified files until 2075 — or it would never leak at all. The fact that it’s being publicly narrated, complete with dramatic language and cinematic stakes, tells you it’s not an intelligence operation. It’s a marketing campaign.

Governments have learned the same lesson movie studios did long ago: leaks drive engagement. Secrecy sells tickets. “Anonymous sources” are the new “exclusive trailer drops.” You can almost hear the orchestral swell behind every quote.

🧠 Fiction as the Template for Reality

We often think movies imitate life. Increasingly, it’s the other way around. Politicians hire storytelling consultants. Intelligence agencies employ screenwriters. Executives are trained to “control the narrative.” Reality is now the raw footage from which media teams cut the trailer.

When every story is told through cinematic framing — good vs. evil, us vs. them, climax and resolution — complexity dies. And that’s the point. Complexity invites questions. Spectacle silences them.

🪞The Final Twist

The more a public statement feels like the setup for a movie you’ve already seen, the less likely it is to be true.
Real conspiracies don’t come with convenient villains or photogenic endings. Real heroism rarely gets an audience. Real truth is tedious — but that’s what makes it real.

If what we’re told sounds too exciting for C-SPAN, too polished for chance, too perfectly timed for coincidence, then we’re not being informed — we’re being entertained.