Supplementing Vexler: From the Trunk and Tusk to the Elephant — And from the Elephant to the Animals of War
- john raymond
- Aug 1
- 2 min read
They touch the elephant, these podcasters, pundits, and media figures. They run their hands over its parts — one touches the tusk and calls it inequality, another feels the wrinkled hide and names it polarization, a third clutches the swaying trunk and mutters something about populism or the loss of shared reality.
And yet, somehow, they miss the whole animal. Or more precisely — they miss that the elephant is trust. It’s not one of the parts. It is the body that holds them together. And trust, as Vlad Vexler rightly argues in his recent response to Gary Stevenson’s podcast appearance, is not merely fraying at the edges. It is the foundation. Its collapse, not any one of the symptoms, is what threatens to bring the entire democratic project down.
But Vexler stops at the edge of something larger. He outlines the problem with clarity — trust is being lost, both structurally (through economic exclusion) and cognitively (through neurodiversity misunderstandings and alienating discourse). Yet he doesn’t go far enough.
The problem isn’t just that trust is eroding. It’s that trust is under attack. The elephant is not simply wasting away — it is being hunted, wounded, and deliberately driven off cliffs by actors who understand what it means to bring down democracy. These are not misfortunes. These are strategic operations.
To see this clearly, we must zoom out even further than Vexler dares. We must see the animals of war. Because what is happening across the democratic world is not merely political breakdown or cultural drift. It is asymmetric warfare — and trust is its primary battlefield.
The best frame for understanding this is not metaphorical, but algorithmic: the Byzantine Generals Problem. In this model, a group of actors — generals — must agree on a coordinated plan. But some of the generals are traitors. Some lie, delay, or send contradictory signals. And unless the loyal generals have a robust strategy to identify the bad actors and achieve consensus, the mission fails. Replace “generals” with politicians, media figures, citizens, and digital platforms, and the analogy becomes painfully real.
We are living inside this Byzantine problem, and traitor generals — Trump, Putin, their allies, and their ideological surrogates — are flooding the network with noise, confusion, and betrayal.
They aren’t confused. They are coordinated. Their goal is to prevent consensus, to destroy shared reality, and to cripple trust so profoundly that democratic decision-making becomes impossible.
What Vexler sees as breakdown, I see as battlefield. And what others mistake for political confusion is actually a form of strategic sabotage — a kind of fifth-generation warfare aimed at the very software of democracy.
The elephant is under attack. But the herd still thinks it’s just walking through a fog.
It doesn’t realize it’s being hunted.
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