Part 1: The Metadata of Lies: How Exponential Fabrication Reveals the Terminal Phase
- john raymond
- 1 minute ago
- 6 min read
What the graph shows is more than five different curves crossing a pale landscape of colored zones. Each zone marks a phase in the life of an authoritarian regime: reprisal, bunkerization, brazenness, lying, and finally the terminal phase.
Reprisal power declines. Defensive integrity erodes. Brazen amplitude rises and then flattens. Legitimacy slides toward zero. All of those curves matter, but none of them tells you, by itself, exactly when the system has crossed from “still dangerous but stable” into “terminal and unbounded.”
The only clean tell is in the metadata of the lies themselves. That is what the yellow curve—fabrication rate—represents.
The content of any individual lie can be as lurid or as trivial as the regime wants. That is almost irrelevant analytically. A single absurd claim, or even a week of them, can be written off as noise. What matters is how many lies are being told, how rapidly the rate is increasing, and how far the overall fabrication pattern has detached from the linear structure of everything else. When lying turns exponential while all other forces remain linear or saturating, you are watching the regime enter its terminal phase.
The graph formalizes that intuition. At the left, in the reprisal zone, the fabrication rate is low and almost flat. The regime still believes it can control events by punishing enemies. It uses the justice system and the security services as levers. It lies, of course, but the lies are still accessory to the real machinery of coercion. Their rate of increase is modest. On a short time window, the yellow curve looks nearly straight.
As reprisal power decays, the system bunkerizes. Defensive integrity begins to fall—staff churn, legal defeats, leaks, internal dissension. Even so, the lies still track reality in a rough way. They distort facts but remain recognizably related to them.
If you fit a straight line to the early portion of the fabrication curve, it performs well: the statistical test says this might just be “normal” political dishonesty, merely more frequent and more shameless than before.
The next zone, brazenness, introduces spectacle. Brazen amplitude climbs; the regime does things it would once have considered unthinkable, staging overtly corrupt meetings or dispatching compromised envoys into obvious conflict-of-interest situations. The lies now serve as a shield around those acts. They become louder, cruder, more defiant. But the rate of lying is still bounded by event tempo. One scandal, one cluster of lies. Another scandal, another cluster. A sufficiently flexible linear model can still explain the yellow curve.
What changes in the late lying phase is not simply that the regime lies more, or that the lies become more grotesque. The change is that the rate of fabrication starts to grow faster than any plausible linear narrative can account for. That is why, on the graph, the yellow curve bends upward while the others are flattening or sinking. The system has discovered that words are the only instrument it can still deploy without material constraint.
Tanks, investigations, and staff all cost something. Fabrication is cheap. So the regime and its surrogates leans on the cheap weapon.
This is where metadata matters more than content. You do not need to decode every lie. You do not need to argue about the supposed “meaning” of each claim. You watch the rate. How many outright false statements does the regime’s leadership produce per day? How many contradictions does it generate per week and simply barrel past? How often does a claimed number—drug prices “down 500 percent,” for example—bear no relationship to any coherent baseline?
As long as the fabrication rate can be approximated by a line, you may still be in a pre-terminal phase: dangerous, corrosive, but not yet unbounded. When you extend the early linear fit across the full time horizon and it fails catastrophically—when the true curve races away from your line—you have diagnostic evidence that the regime has crossed into something qualitatively different. That divergence in curvature is the signal.
At the same time, note what the other curves are doing on the right-hand side of the graph. Reprisal power has slumped toward zero. Defensive integrity is nearly gone. Brazen amplitude has plateaued at its maximum; you cannot double “shouting into the microphone” once you are already at full volume.
Legitimacy is scraping the floor. All of those trajectories are either linear decays or saturating processes. They move, but they respect bounds.
Only fabrication is unbounded.
Only lying still has the capacity to “grow” in response to internal pressure. That is why the regime resorts to it as its last instrument of control: not because lies are uniquely effective, but because they are uniquely unconstrained.
This has two implications. The first is diagnostic. A regime may appear stable even as it decays from within. Institutions can still function. Elections can still be held. Courts can still issue rulings. The graph reminds us that from the outside, many of the structural lines will look like slow, grim slopes rather than cliffs. If you examine only those variables, you can tell yourself a story that there is still time, still balance, still space to maneuver.
The metadata of the lies tells you otherwise. When you see the fabrication rate bend upward—not in isolated bursts, but as a continuous pattern—you are not watching “normal” politics, or even garden-variety authoritarianism. You are watching the system lose its last attachment to the discipline of reality. That bend is the approach to the terminal phase.
The second implication is about danger. It is tempting to treat the terminal phase as a moment of weakness. After all, legitimacy is gone, discipline is gone, the outer circle is defecting, and the center is shrinking around the leader and his most fanatical loyalists. The graph could be misread as a victory chart: everything but lying is collapsing.
That is the wrong inference. A regime that has retreated to exponential lying as its primary weapon is a regime that has given itself permission to do anything that can be wrapped in the resulting fog. Once the leadership has accepted that truth no longer constrains it, law and precedent no longer constrain it either. The point of exponential fabrication is not persuasion. It is to create an environment in which any act can be justified to the faithful and denied to everyone else, in real time, with no cost.
From the outside, observers may still try to model such a system linearly. They will say that the leader “cannot possibly do X, because X would be too unpopular,” or that “there must be a limit” to what the base will accept. They are fitting a straight line to the early segment of the yellow curve and extrapolating. They are using metadata from the wrong regime—one in which fabrication has costs and trade-offs—on a system that has already decided that no such trade-offs exist.
The correct move is to accept what the graph is telling you. When fabrication becomes exponential, you have lost the ability to estimate an upper bound on what the leadership might attempt. The only constraints left are physical capacity and the willingness of subordinates to execute orders. Moral, legal, and reputational costs have already been written off; that is what the shape of the curve means.
This is why, in the terminal zone on the right edge of the diagram, the other lines are almost advisory. They approximately tell you how much real power the regime has left: how many officials, how much institutional buy-in, how much residual legitimacy. Those values matter for mapping possible trajectories.
But the yellow curve tells you something more urgent: the regime has already chosen to inhabit a parallel reality in which its own survival is the only coherent objective. Having made that choice, it will not voluntarily step back into a world where facts bind.
The lesson is simple and brutal. If you want to know whether a system is approaching terminal collapse, do not fixate on the content of each lie. That way lies madness and semantic trench warfare.
Count instead. Measure the rate. Track how quickly claims are escalating and how indifferent the leadership has become to contradiction. Fit your straight line, and then watch when the curve peels away from it. That is the moment the graph is warning you about.
Everything else in the picture—reprisals, bunkerization, brazenness, the steady dimming of legitimacy—is the backdrop. The tell is in the metadata of the lies.