Audience Hygiene Is Fine, But It Doesn’t Substitute for Minimax Analysis When Engaged in Warfare
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Audience hygiene matters. In a polluted information environment, people need tools to think clearly: how to distinguish speculation from evidence, how to resist doomscrolling distortions, how to keep moral judgment intact when the feed is engineered to exhaust and confuse. There is a real civic function in helping the public recover its balance.
But audience hygiene is not strategy. It is not defense. It is not minimax analysis. When you are engaged in war—especially the modern form of political war that blends economics, coercion, narrative manipulation, sabotage, and alliance fracture—cleaning the audience’s epistemic lenses is necessary and still insufficient.
Hygiene can keep you from hallucinating. It cannot tell you where the enemy is moving, what the move enables, or how to stop it.
The mistake of the hygienist, when the environment turns existential, is to treat public analysis as a philosophy seminar. The hygienist wants the cleanest possible inference, the most cautious possible claim, the most carefully hedged description of intent.
The hygienist is offended by rhetorical overreach, and rightly so. But war does not wait for perfect phrasing, and it does not require the enemy to be omnipotent to be lethal. War requires only one thing: that the enemy’s moves reliably degrade your ability to coordinate, resist, and win.
That is why minimax is not optional.
Minimax analysis is what you do when you accept that your adversary is not a misguided interlocutor but a proven enemy. You do not begin from their stated reasons. You begin from the worst credible harm their move enables, and you treat that harm as the likely intent until proven otherwise.
This is not paranoia. It is simply the logic of survival.
The category error: “audience truthfulness” versus “enemy advantage”
The hygienist asks: Is this claim responsibly sayable? The minimax analyst asks: What does this move do to us?
Those questions are not interchangeable.
A public figure can say something that is careful, evidentiary, and ethically restrained—and still miss the strategic truth because they are treating the situation as discourse rather than conflict. Conversely, an activist can say something that is rhetorically overheated—and still be closer to the strategic truth because they are tracking the direction of power.
The conflict is not resolved by choosing “truth” over “rhetoric.” It is resolved by choosing the correct object of analysis.
In war, the object is not your opponent’s psychology. It is your opponent’s advantage.
The Greenland example: not a mystery, a move
Take the Greenland episode. Many people want to treat it like a mystery novel: who whispered what to whom, what the hidden backchannel was, whether the idea originated in Moscow or in President Trump’s own mind.
That is peacetime thinking.
In wartime, you ask a different set of questions:
Did this action fracture NATO cohesion?
Did it normalize territorial coercion as “deal-making”?
Did it force European governments to burn time, attention, and unity managing an internal crisis rather than resisting external aggression?
Did it move the West closer to a moral inversion where sovereignty is conditional and aggression is reframed as security?
If the answer is yes, then the move is hostile—regardless of whether it was “Putin’s idea.”
This is the critical point the hygienist misses. You do not need a demigod mastermind behind every event. You need a hostile axis whose incentives align and whose operations reliably produce your harm.
Authorship, hidden or otherwise, is not the fulcrum; visible outcomes are.
Moral inversion as a weapon system
There is a reason the Trump–Putin axis is best understood as a strategic partnership in moral inversion. It is because moral inversion is not a generalized feeling. It is a weapon system.
It works by attacking the West’s common-knowledge foundations: shared premises about law, sovereignty, alliance duty, and the moral categories that make collective action possible. Once those premises become debatable—once “up is down” and “right is wrong”—resistance becomes a set of isolated individuals arguing about the nature of reality while the enemy advances.
This is why the conflict is existential for both President Trump and Putin. Regime security is their shared prime directive. Their survival depends on degrading the systems that can remove them: democratic accountability, rule-of-law enforcement, allied unity, and the public’s capacity to coordinate around true moral boundaries.
In that environment, “audience hygiene” becomes a form of triage. Important, yes. But triage is not victory.
The hygienist’s failure mode: the demigod trap and its mirror image
To be fair, hygienists often identify a real error: the demigod trap. People exaggerate foreign influence and turn domestic rot into an external conspiracy. That miscalibrates the public and can lead to helplessness.
But there is a mirror-image error that is just as fatal: the minimax vacuum.
When you overcorrect against the demigod trap, you drift into a form of strategic naivety: you become so focused on not overstating causality that you stop stating consequences. You become so focused on whether something can be “stood up in a seminar” that you stop noticing that the enemy is not playing by seminar rules.
War footing does not permit these luxuries.
The enemy is not required to be omnipotent. The enemy is required to be opportunistic. And opportunism thrives precisely when analysts refuse to treat hostile outcomes as the primary unit of meaning.
What minimax demands from public analysis
Minimax does not demand hysterical rhetoric. It demands disciplined suspicion.
It demands three commitments.
First, you track alignment, not just causation. If two regimes repeatedly benefit from the same fractures, and one regime repeatedly produces those fractures inside your system, you do not excuse the pattern because you cannot prove a specific backchannel.
Second, you analyze operations, not speeches. The speech is often a wrapper. The operation is the outcome: the alliance split, the normalization, the diversion, the exhaustion, the rearrangement of what is thinkable.
Third, you prioritize the harm question. When a proven enemy moves, your first interpretive question is not What do they say? It is What does this enable?
That is minimax in a nutshell.
Hygiene is a prerequisite; minimax is the work
Audience hygiene belongs in the toolkit. It can reduce panic, resist manipulation, and strengthen a citizen’s ability to think. But it cannot substitute for wartime analysis because it does not answer the central question: where is the enemy pushing, and how do we stop the push?
If you are engaged in a political war—one that uses more than tanks and drones, one that weaponizes moral categories and alliance trust—then you do not have the luxury of confusing epistemic therapy with strategic judgment.
Clean lenses help you see.
Minimax tells you what you’re seeing.
And in a war, that difference is the difference between reacting and winning.