The Scimitar Narrative.

 I had a hard time conjuring up a title for this article. What can it be when Lies are manufactured and propagated as Truth? This may seem hard hitting but so too is Truth for those who seek to manipulate and deceive. A deception coded into their written ideology. After a long while I came up with this title, The Scimitar Narrative. Have you heard of The Borg? For those who followed the fictional television series Star Trek, you will perhaps know the Borg as a fictional alien species, antagonists, who go about assimilating and conquering the universe. So, what has this to do with reality? The truth is that The Borg Is Real! Just as they went about conquering the universe in that huge dark cube which was their space ship, we earthlings too have a typical cube where millions of adherents who have been assimilated, display of collective homogeneity encircling this giant black-silk shrouded cube in a play of homage.

The narrative is the same. You are either assimilated, enslaved or die. This Borg, spread a radical ideology of hate for all who are not a part of their Hive and they either enslave or kill the others. Yet, they transpose or sell themselves through the propaganda of Peace. If by now you haven’t caught on where I am headed with this, it is on purpose. You see, those who have been ensnared by this terrestrial Borg, generally, are limited in their ability to think rationally, question or understand. The assimilation keeps them as a single cell lifeform with the purpose of serving the Hive with one mission. Spread lie as truth for conquest.

The challenge of titling an inquiry into the manufacturing of "truth" stems from the inherent friction between empirical reality and systemic deception. When blatant lies are manufactured and codified into a formal ideology, the truth functions as a disruptive force against those who benefit from manipulation.

The parallels between the fictional "Hive" and real-world radicalism are manifested in several key areas:

·   The Binary of Subjugation: The ideological framework presents an absolute ultimatum: assimilation, enslavement, or elimination.

·   The Propaganda of Paradox: While the internal doctrine may facilitate hostility toward the "other," the external projection is often marketed under the guise of "an ideology of peace."

·   Cognitive Stagnation: The process of indoctrination functions to diminish the capacity for rational inquiry or individual dissent. You do not think, question or step out of line.

Ultimately, this "terrestrial Borg" seeks to reduce the individual to a single-cell component of a larger collective I refer to as the Hive, and tasked primarily with the propagation of manufactured narratives. By examining these parallels, one can better understand how coded ideologies bypass rational discourse to maintain the supremacy of the collective over the individual. Today, I address them by various names. ‘The Black Plague’, ‘The Scimitar Narrative’ or simply ‘The Borg’. It is no wonder then, why a certain man named Yuhana Ibn Mansur ibn Sarjun from Damascus, a monk, priest, hymnographer and apologist said what he did about the false prophet and the alleged religion. Truth is not easy to discuss especially with those whose ability to think rationally has been exorcized. It is more so when actual traceable evidence and fact, doesn’t exist.

Human beings do not experience reality directly. We experience interpretations of reality. Between the world as it is and the world as we perceive it, stands a thick layer of narrative, memory, identity, and social reinforcement. Propaganda lives in that layer. It is not merely lies. It is the organized shaping of perception so that something harmful can feel virtuous, something unjust can feel necessary, and something irrational can feel sacred.

History shows that propaganda does not succeed because people are stupid. It succeeds because it attaches itself to needs that are profoundly human: the need for belonging, certainty, moral clarity, and meaning. When an idea offers identity, it is no longer evaluated as an argument. It is defended as a self.

The most dangerous form of propaganda is not crude censorship or obvious distortion. It is moral reframing. A harmful act becomes rebranded as a noble sacrifice. Aggression becomes protection. Domination becomes salvation. Exclusion becomes purity. Once this reframing is accepted, criticism is no longer interpreted as disagreement; it is experienced as an attack on the moral order itself.

This is why propaganda often flourishes inside totalizing ideological systems that claim exclusive access to truth. A totalizing ideology does not merely offer guidance; it defines reality. Everything must be interpreted through its lens. Evidence that contradicts it is not weighed neutrally; it is pre-labeled as corruption, heresy, enemy influence, or deception. In such systems, truth becomes circular. The ideology is true because it says it is true, and any challenge proves how necessary it is.

At that point, propaganda becomes self-sealing.

One of the most psychologically powerful tools in this process is sanctioned deception. When an ideology contains an internal justification for misleading outsiders, whether framed as strategic concealment, higher wisdom, or protective rhetoric, it dissolves the normal ethical barrier against lying. Deception becomes not a moral failure but a duty in service of the cause. This creates a split ethical system: honesty within the group, manipulation outside it. The result is an echo chamber that grows increasingly insulated from corrective feedback.

The tragedy is that believers inside such systems are rarely villains in their own minds. They experience themselves as defenders of truth, guardians of order, or protectors of the good. Propaganda does not feel like manipulation from the inside. It feels like clarity. It simplifies a chaotic world into a story with heroes, enemies, and a clear moral axis. That emotional relief is intoxicating.

The deeper danger is not that propaganda convinces people to believe false things. It is that it trains them to distrust the very process of independent verification. Once skepticism is redirected outward, and always toward critics, never toward the ideology, the mind becomes selectively armored. Facts that support the system are embraced as proof. Facts that threaten it are dismissed as conspiracies or heresy. This asymmetry is the hallmark of psychological capture, the assimilation.

The most sobering realization is that no society, religion, political movement, or intellectual tradition is immune. Propaganda is not a foreign infection; it is a recurring feature of human cognition under social pressure and especially so among the terrestrial Borg. Any group that believes itself uniquely protected from deception is already at risk of deeper deception. Immunity claims are themselves a propaganda signal, calling everything that questions their narrative a phobia.

For believers within any total system, the path to clarity is not abandonment of identity but restoration of epistemic humility. A mature worldview can survive questioning. If an idea collapses under scrutiny, its fragility was always there. Truth does not fear examination; only narratives do.

The wake-up call is not “your ideology is evil.” That message only triggers defensive consolidation. The more profound realization is this: if your belief system requires you to suspend empathy, silence inquiry, or justify deception in order to protect it, then it is no longer serving truth. It is serving its own survival.

Human progress has never come from perfect certainty. It has come from the courage to revise what we thought was unassailable. The civilizations that stagnate are not those that lacked faith, but those that forbade self-correction.

Propaganda thrives where identity outruns reflection. Its antidote is not cynicism, but disciplined self-awareness: the willingness to ask, repeatedly and without exemption, “How do I know this is true, and who benefits if I never ask that question?”

That question is not an act of betrayal. It is the highest form of loyalty to truth.

In writing this article which took several iterations, I referenced several great thinkers, They are listed below.

1)      Dan Kahan’s work on cultural cognition demonstrates that individuals tend to evaluate evidence in ways that reinforce the values of their in-group. As he writes, “People are motivated to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact to values that define their cultural identities” (Kahan, 2012). In other words, belief is not just about information. It is about belonging.

2)      Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance showed that when people encounter evidence that conflict with deeply held commitments, they often double down rather than revise. Festinger observed that “a man with a conviction is a hard man to change” (Festinger, 1957). The discomfort of dissonance is resolved not by abandoning the belief, but by reinterpreting the world to preserve it.

3)      Karl Popper warned against when he described closed systems of thought that render themselves unfalsifiable. A theory that explains away all counter-evidence, Popper argued, has stepped outside the domain of rational inquiry. It has become dogma masquerading as knowledge. In such a system where that ‘truth’ is no longer discovered; it is enforced.

4)      The psychological transformation that occurs inside totalizing ideologies is subtle. Individuals do not experience themselves as manipulated. They experience themselves as morally clarified. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on ideological thinking, noted that its appeal lies in its promise of coherence: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… no longer exists” (Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951). Propaganda dissolves that distinction not by brute force, but by saturating the emotional environment with a single narrative lens.

5)      Albert Bandura writes, “People do not ordinarily engage in harmful conduct until they have justified to themselves the rightness of their actions” (Bandura, 1999). Once justification is institutionalized, and manipulation becomes virtue. A virtue by which they are willing to commit shahada.

6)      In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre describes bad faith as the act of lying to oneself in order to escape the anxiety of freedom. Propaganda offers a collective version of this escape. It relieves the burden of uncertainty by replacing open inquiry with scripted certainty. The believer is spared existential doubt, but at the cost of intellectual autonomy.

7)      Michel Foucault’s insight that power produces regimes of truth becomes especially relevant here. Power does not simply repress; it generates the frameworks within which ‘their truth’ is recognized. Yet propaganda reveals a participatory dimension: people internalize the regime. They become, as Foucault might say, the vehicles of their own discipline. The censor is no longer external. It is woven into identity. To question the narrative is self-harm.

8)      Erich Fromm captured this dynamic in psychological terms. In Escape from Freedom, he argued that many individuals willingly surrender autonomy to authoritarian systems because freedom is psychologically demanding. “The burden of freedom,” Fromm wrote, “is too heavy for most men to bear” (Fromm, 1941). Propaganda offers relief from that burden. It replaces the anxiety of independent judgment with the comfort of predetermined answers.

   The Gentile!

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