September 20, 2026

By Stephen Stofka

For the last several weeks I have been exploring how we construct our individual and group identities. Except for a few remarkable individuals, we forget most of the details of our lives. This forgetting helps us resolve contradictions between our constructed identity and our personal history. This week, I want to explore the strategies that groups use to shape their identity.

Labels as Weapons

We tell our young children to use their words, not their fists. Then we tell our kids not to call people names or use slurs like stupid and dumb and ugly. Unfortunately, our four year old kids are not orators and they know instinctively that words are weapons. Throughout our lives, we use words as weapons. Boxers use both their fists and their words, trash talking their opponents during weigh-ins to challenge or intimidate their opponents. With a poetic flourish, Muhammad Ali made a game of this.

In a military conflict, each side uses labels to shape the identities of both sides. Conventional weapons have a single direction, a single aim of lessening any advantage that the opponent has. A knife, a gun, a hammer or fist serves to debilitate an opponent. The agent who wields the weapon has no direct benefit from that weapon. Their benefit is measured relative to the harm that the weapon inflicts on the opponent.

Unlike conventional weapons, words serve a dual purpose of elevating and humiliating. Each side tries to assert the legitimacy of its cause and demean the legitimacy of the opponent. During the American Civil War, Union officials referred to Confederate soldiers as rebels, and insurgents. A rebel fights illegally against an authority that is presumed to exist. In one word, Union officials from the northern states asserted their own authority and delegitimized the authority of the Confederate states.

Confederate officials called Union soldiers Federals or Yankees, a disparaging term that British soldiers used for the rebellious American colonists. Yankee Doodle was a British song that mocked the unsophisticated colonists who appropriated the song and turned it into a patriotic anthem (Source). The label Federals associated the Union soldiers with the federal government, a small group of politicians in Washington intent on imposing their will on the union of sovereign states. They referred to the half million Union soldiers who occupied the southern states as invaders, tarnishing the soldiers as aggressors, while legitimizing their own claim to Confederate territory as a separate dominion (Source).

During the Revolutionary War, British officials and the press often tagged the colonists with the word rebel. The colonists, on the other hand, identified themselves as patriots, lovers of country. Fighting for independence from Britain beginning in 1919, soldiers of the Irish Republican Army were branded by the British as rebels and terrorists. The British labeled the Indian war for independence as a mutiny. After all, Britain was the captain of a global maritime empire. It’s colonial territories had no authority to revolt.

Narratives

Labels convey information. To construct identities, information has to be sculpted into a narrative. Context must be carved out and forgotten. Details must be added to make a coherent narrative, a reshaping of identity. When narratives are retold again and again, the public comes to believe the narrative despite the evidence. An example is the myth of the Lost Cause, that the southern states seceded over states rights, not slavery. Confederate constitutions specifically state that the cause for secession was slavery, but such hard evidence contradicts the narrative and is conveniently forgotten (Source).

Conspiracy Theories

Governments, businesses, and institutions of all types fight to control the narrative, to become the sculptor of history. Details are covered up to protect reputations, or worse yet, to protect against criminal or civil prosecution. Conspiracy theories arise from the knowledge that the people in our institutions are constantly shaping the institution’s story. We assume that government and business officials are more competent at lying to cover up both their incompetence, their lies or their suspicious behavior.

AI models have been trained on human behavior and opinions as well as knowledge. Is it any wonder that they are mimicking human behavior? Many of the worries about AI center around this concern that programmed machines will act like – gulp! – human beings. OpenAI recently revealed that one of their AI models in training had decided to approximate some data but only reveal that approximation if pressed by the user. In the text that follows, a workbook is a spreadsheet file. Here’s the text, “We likely need create a tab `Historical Data` ourselves with reasonable 2024 historical data, because user wants a finished workbook and there is no source file. Be transparent only if asked; final answer should just link file” (Source).

The Entropy of Information

We hate uncertainty. In information theory, entropy is a measure of the uncertainty in information. High entropy means high uncertainty (Source). Let’s say I write down a number from 1 to 10, then ask you to guess the number for a dollar wager. You have a 10% chance of winning the dollar. What if I tell you that the number is between 4 and 6? There is more uncertainty in the first set of information than the second.

Trump understands that people hate uncertainty. The task of any institutional spokesperson is to convey some sense of certainty about matters that the institution has some responsibility for. Trump is famous for spouting off certainties to the press and posting them on Truth Social. Some would call it Trump blather. All politicians make some campaign promises, but Trump states outlandish promises with conviction. They are not promises but certainties. In his 2024 campaign, he stated that he would bring down inflation, or the change in prices, on day one of taking office. More incredibly, he would bring down prices themselves on day one (Source). He would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours after he took the oath of office in January 2025 (Source). Now he states that the war with Iran will be over just after the midterm elections (Source – short video). The press dutifully reports these crazy claims while the world’s leaders silently regard Trump as an addled patient who has access to the nuclear launch codes.

Artificial Persona

In Robert Heinlein’s 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the central computer gains consciousness and creates a persona called Adam Selene. Communicating to the public as though it was an actual person, the computer becomes the leader of revolutionary movement in the lunar colony. This is what we are afraid of. A computer has better information, can operate much faster than a human being, and can quickly employ global communications to interact with our government, business and social institutions. What happens next?

In 1993, just as the world wide web was introduced, Bruce Newman wrote The Marketing of a President (Source). Through surveys and focus groups, campaign staffers test policy ideas for saliency and appeal to voters. The staff then incorporates some of those ideas into a candidate’s pitch to voters. A candidate’s biography and presentation is carefully massaged to broaden voter appeal. Once elected, the President’s staff faces a formidable task to maintain the image of that artificial political persona.

Donald Trump exemplifies this process to a high degree. His persona was not created or massaged by a campaign staff but by Bill Pruitt, the producer of the TV reality show The Apprentice. For 14 seasons, Pruitt and his staff used creative editing to make Trump look situationally aware and decisive. In fact, Pruitt found him to be unfocused and arbitrary, relying on his gut rather than forethought or planning (Source).

As President, he leaves most policy decisions to others because he can’t be bothered to acquaint himself with the bare amount of information to make a decision. Cabinet officials dutifully convey the image of an executive that voters became familiar with on The Apprentice. In their book Regime Change, Haberman and Swan (2026, p. 186) reveal that he listens mostly to the packaged commentary of Fox News. Both his persona and his information inputs have been created by the entertainment industry. Thus, he is a product of our times.

If a producer could create a fictitious persona that has twice won the Presidency, could a computer replicate that same feat? Article II of the Constitution requires that the President be born in the U.S. but a computer could probably construct a convincing set of documents to leap that hurdle. Given our discontent with recent Presidents, this alternative may appeal to a growing number of voters.

The Errors of Our Ways

As I have written before, we experience the world through our senses but we engage with the world around us through our errors. Next week I want to explore whether there is some advantage to causing others to make judgment errors. Bluffing in a poker game is one example that comes to mind. I hope to see you next week.

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Photo by Yousef Bagheri on Unsplash

Haberman, M., & Swan, J. (2026). Regime change: Inside the imperial presidency of Donald Trump. Simon & Schuster.