How is anyone to know what’s true anymore – Some good advice
Fri 5:58 pm +00:00, 17 Apr 2026
Source: https://stylman.substack.com/p/two-rules-for-the-cartesian-crisis
Text below starts about a third of the way down at the link
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One of the places we went and didn’t fully resolve was the question of how anyone is supposed to know what’s true anymore. Bret eloquently calls this the Cartesian Crisis – that moment when you realize how much of what you thought was fact was actually just authority, and once you start pulling at it the whole thing comes apart. You question one thing and then you question everything and then you’re kind of paralyzed. Like a growing number of people I’ve been living in that space for the last few years.
After we wrapped, I was telling Mark – one of my best friends since I was 8 years old, who was staying with me for the weekend – about the discussion. The same guy who gave me the cage and pit bull metaphor from The Enemy Is Not Each Other. Mark has this way of surfacing things I didn’t know I was looking for. He brought up two old legal doctrines that made me realize it’s what I’d been doing but simply didn’t have the vocabulary for.
I’m not a lawyer. I’d never heard of either of these by name. But I think they might be the cleanest answer to the Cartesian Crisis I’ve found.
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So the first one: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Latin for “false in one thing, false in everything.”
It comes from common law – witness testimony, specifically. If a witness gets caught lying about something that actually matters to the case, the jury is allowed to throw out everything else that witness said. Now, that doesn’t mean everything was necessarily a lie. But the credibility is shot. And once it’s gone, the burden flips – you don’t owe that witness your trust anymore and if they want it back they have to earn it.
I think this is the perfect frame for how I think about institutions nowadays. The New York Times told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They told us Russiagate was real. They told us the lab leak was a conspiracy theory. They told us Hunter Biden’s laptop was disinformation (or was it misinformation? I can never keep the difference straight.) How many times does a witness have to get caught before the jury stops listening? At some point I don’t have to prove the next story is a lie. I just stop extending the benefit of the doubt and make them come get it. And, before people start throwing around words like cynicism or blackpilled, that’s what falsus in uno actually means. I don’t owe them the next one – the burden of proof is on them now.
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I’d argue the second one is even better. Omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem. “Everything is presumed against the destroyer of evidence.”
This one is ruthless and I kind of love it. Here’s how it works in court: if you’re the side that shredded the documents or hid the records or made the witnesses disappear, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt on anything. Not on the close calls, not on the ambiguities, not on any of it. You’re the reason nobody can check, so everything unresolved goes against you. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
Think about that in the context of the world we live in.
Despite endless promises, the JFK assassination files have still not been totally revealed and it’s been over sixty years. My parents were teenagers when he was shot and now their grandkids are in college. What exactly is in those files that we can’t handle? The Oklahoma City bombing – the Murrah Building had surveillance cameras pointed right at it and that footage has never been released. After 9/11 they scooped up the structural steel from the Twin Towers – the largest crime scene in American history – and shipped it to China to be melted down before anyone could run a proper forensic analysis on it. Why would anyone do that? Building 7 – which housed SEC and DOD offices – came down at free fall speed on 9/11 and NIST still won’t release the collapse model so that independent engineers can check their work. The day before, Donald Rumsfeld announced $2.3 trillion was unaccounted for at the Pentagon. Could that be related? The Las Vegas shooting – the FBI closed the case without establishing a definitive motive, and MGM’s response was to sue the victims. Epstein’s cell cameras just happened to malfunction on the one night it mattered. The Maxwell client list, a DOJ that acknowledged having it and prosecuted no one. I could keep going for a while but you get the point.
I don’t know what happened in any of these cases. What I do know is that in every single one, somebody who controlled the evidence made a conscious decision to make sure you and I couldn’t see it. And in a courtroom, when you do that, you don’t get to shrug and say “well, we’ll never know.” You lose. The ambiguity goes against you because you’re the one who created it. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable standard to hold outside of court too. In the real world, somehow that makes you unwelcome at dinner parties (or at least that’s been my experience).
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Put those two together and I think my friend showed me two more nodes in the operating system for navigating all of this without losing your mind. You don’t have to solve every case. You don’t have to prove what happened. You just have to establish two things – the lie and the destruction of evidence – and in a sane and just world the burden moves to the other side.
That’s how lawyers function when the other party controls all the records. It’s also, I think, the only way to navigate an information environment that’s designed to make you feel hopeless and docile.
It’s also part of why I find myself more interested in what happens before events than in the post-event forensics. When you find something in the record that predicts what later happened – a published plan, a simulation that mirrors the real thing a little too precisely (Event 201, anyone?), a headline that reads like a spoiler – that’s the anomaly the official story has to explain away. And when the archives and the investigators and the media all report to the same institutions whose credibility is on the line… well, contra spoliatorem is doing the heavy lifting at that point. The ambiguity doesn’t break their way. They made sure of that when they destroyed the evidence.
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One more thing, because we were wrapping when it came up and I don’t want it taken out of context.
Toward the end of the episode I mentioned finding newspaper clippings from before World War II that referenced the specific figure of six million Jews being at risk of catastrophe. Bret handled it with poise – he asked a Holocaust scholar he trusts how robust the number was, and found the answer convincing. Multiple independent lines of evidence converge on the casualty count, within about 500,000. That is compelling on its own terms. But as Bret noted, he couldn’t speak to the clippings themselves. It’s a fair answer to a different question than the one I was raising.
To be clear, I wasn’t questioning how many Jews died. I know there are people who have, but it’s a rabbit hole I’ve yet to go down. Regardless of the tally, my family is part of that number. I’m named after my grandmother’s oldest brother who burned in a gas chamber. The trauma is real and I carry it.
What I find historically strange is that the exact figure “six million” shows up in print over and over again for decades before Hitler was a household name – attached to various proposed catastrophes, fundraising campaigns, and political arguments, across multiple countries and multiple decades.
Someone compiled well over a hundred of these references into a single document. Max Nordau, one of the co-founders of political Zionism, used the precise figure in a speech to the 1911 Zionist Congress – thirty years before WW2. Nordau’s book, by the way, carries a preamble written by Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi’s father. These aren’t hidden documents. They’re in the historical record that anyone can find.
I don’t know what to make of that and I’m not pretending I do. It’s a strange pattern that I haven’t seen a particularly satisfying explanation for. I’m not making a larger argument because I don’t have one to make yet. I’m raising an anomaly and I’d like to understand how it gets there. My instinct tells me it may have a lot more to do with current events but if I’m staying true to my method, I need to keep pushing before I come to any real conclusions.
For anyone who wants to go deeper on the financial and institutional history around both world wars, I suggest you read Antony Sutton. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler is the place to start. He built his case with State Department documents and corporate archives – primary sources, not speculation. Sutton doesn’t tell you what to think, he simply shows you the receipts and lets you sit with it. Spoiler alert: it’s a lot to take in.
And the doctrines above apply here too. If the foreshadowing pattern is real – and it is documented, you can go check – then the official story needs to account for it. Until it does, the ambiguity doesn’t break in their direction. Not when they’re the ones who’ve been controlling the narrative the whole time.
That’s all I’m saying. I respect that Bret left it where he did. It’s a bigger conversation than ninety minutes allows for.
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Bret asked me on the show what my epistemology is, more or less. I meandered my way to an answer. This is the cleaner version. And it’s why I often write these things slowly instead of trying to say them in real time.
I don’t know what happened on 9/11. I don’t know what happened at Pearl Harbor. I don’t even know what really happened with OJ Simpson, another topic we touched on. Frankly, I don’t know the full story of a lot of events I’ve been told the full story of. What I do know is that the institutions that wrote those stories have lied to my face, repeatedly, about things I can verify. And the evidence that would let me check the things I can’t verify has been destroyed, sealed, or put in the hands of the same people whose credibility depends on me not looking too closely.
That’s not nihilism and it’s not paranoia. It’s two old rules, applied consistently. Lawyers have been using them for centuries. I don’t see why the rest of us can’t.
Thanks, Mark. Thanks, Bret. And to everyone who has already reached out after the episode – I’ll get to the inbox. Slowly. I’m probably going to meander.
