How a teenager accidentally explained the collapse of shared reality
I recently bought a pack of staple removers. They came in a set of three.
Now, I should explain: I am "old". For as long as I can remember, staple removers were the claw variety—those little metal jaws you'd wedge under the staple and pry up. But these were the modern, improved version. Sleek. Efficient. A revelation, at least to me.
Apparently this was only new to me.
Still, I was excited enough to share my discovery. We had family friends over at the time. Their teenage son is close to ours in age. The adults declined my offer, so I turned to the boys. Both passed, with our friend's son explaining:
"I don't need to remove paper clips from my papers."
A few of us paused. "Did you mean staples?"
Now here's where it gets interesting. He immediately knew he'd meant staples. He knew we knew. We all knew. But instead of correcting himself, he doubled down without missing a beat:
"I don't need to remove paper clips from my papers."
And we accepted it. Because now he wasn't making a mistake about what the tool does. He was telling us something about his workflow. He uses paper clips. Who are we to argue?
Except he doesn't use paper clips. He meant staples. He'd just made a silly mistake and instinctively covered it with conviction.
As soon as we moved off the topic, the teenager started laughing. He excitedly shared his theory: Whenever you make a stupid mistake, you can always double down to avoid embarrassment. Call a Porsche a Toyota by accident? Double down. Compare some quality they share, or lean into how different they are. Either works. The point is to never flinch.
He wasn't wrong about the theory.
And that's when I started noticing how often I was seeing the same move. But without the mistake.
Leaders asserting claims with weak or no evidence. Getting challenged. Doubling down. Facing no accountability. And it working. Not occasionally, but routinely. The bet was paying off.
This teenager had stumbled onto the innocent version of something. But stripped of the verbal slip, the same structure was everywhere. And it was breaking things.
Here's what he accidentally discovered: any challenged assertion creates a moment of negotiation. The speaker has two choices:
Option 1: Concede the frame. Accept the challenge. Adjust the claim. Acknowledge the evidence. This treats reality as something external that your words need to match.
Option 2: Assert harder. Treat the challenge as irrelevant. Double down. Act as if the confidence of the claim matters more than its accuracy. This treats reality as something you can define through sheer commitment.
His version was innocent: a verbal slip covered by quick thinking. He shifted from a fact claim (what the tool removes) to an identity claim (what his workflow involves). Identity claims are harder to dispute. He has privileged access to his own filing system. We'd have to audit his papers, and nobody cares that much about paper clips and staples.
But the same structure works for deliberate assertions. And when the cards are right, doubling down on a weak claim beats conceding to strong evidence.
This is what Goffman called "face-work," the social labor of maintaining dignity. This teenager discovered the domestic version. But there's a political version, an institutional version, a four-decades-and-counting version. And they all run on the same logic: when challenged, assert harder.
But the technique has levels. What starts as conscious face-saving can become something else entirely.
George Costanza, patron saint of the strategy, captured it perfectly: "Jerry, just remember. It's not a lie... if you believe it."
The line illuminates a spectrum. There's the innocent version: he just instinctively leveraged a hack to save face, shared his method, and moved on. There's the practiced version: do this enough and you start to lose track of which reality is the constructed one. And then there's the believing version: when someone has doubled down so many times, across so many contexts, that the performance has become indistinguishable from belief.
But here's the thing about belief at the highest levels: it's not accidental.
When a politician genuinely believes that cutting taxes on the wealthy will help working families, that belief didn't emerge from nowhere. It was manufactured. Think tanks produced the white papers. Lobbyists arranged the dinners. Conferences provided the social proof. Pollsters tested the language. The entire ecosystem exists to make certain frames feel like common sense, to make doubling down feel like telling the truth.
Consider the boss-level example: trickle-down economics. For over forty years, we've been told that cutting taxes on the wealthy would unleash investment, create jobs, and lift all boats. The evidence against this is now overwhelming. Wages stagnated, inequality exploded, the promised growth never materialized for most Americans. And yet the frame persists. Politicians keep doubling down. Not because they're all cynics, but because the infrastructure has done its work. They've attended the conferences, read the white papers, internalized the talking points until the frame feels like simple truth.
This is how manufactured frames become genuine belief. Not just for voters, but for public servants themselves. The most effective version of the strategy isn't when politicians knowingly lie and double down. It's when the infrastructure has done its work so well that they believe the frame. They're not performing conviction. They have it.
That spectrum, from innocent face-saving to manufactured belief, is what makes the technique so slippery to analyze. The same move looks very different depending on where someone sits on it.
Here's where the gambling origin of the phrase becomes useful.
In blackjack, "doubling down" means doubling your bet in exchange for exactly one more card. You do this when you're holding 10 or 11, a strong position. You do it when the dealer is showing weakness. And you do it when you can afford to lose twice your stake if you're wrong.
Doubling down isn't a strategy. It's a bet. And like all bets, it's only smart relative to your position.
This teenager could double down because:
High trust environment. Family friends, relaxed evening. Everyone wanted to move on.
Low stakes. Nobody actually cares about his usage or non-usage of staple removers.
No verification mechanism. We weren't going to audit his desk.
He was holding good cards. The bet made sense.
So when does doubling down become the dominant strategy of power?
When the cards are stacked:
Base loyalty is identity-based, not performance-based. Supporters aren't evaluating claims. They're expressing allegiance. Challenges from outside the tribe actually strengthen commitment.
Media fragmentation sorts witnesses into believers and non-believers. There's no shared room anymore where "everyone saw what happened." Every challenge can be dismissed as partisan.
Electoral structures don't require majority belief. Power can win while most people think it's lying, as long as the right people in the right places believe, or don't care.
The opposition plays "establish facts" while power plays "maintain frame." Different games. One has structural advantages.
This kid was working a small room with high trust and low stakes. Now picture the same exploit in a fragmented media landscape: a loyal base that will defend anything, opponents who were never persuadable anyway, and an exhausted middle that just wants the noise to stop.
Same exploit. Industrial scale.
The innocent version is a teenager avoiding trivial embarrassment over staple removers. The industrial version is how shared reality collapses.
If doubling down is a bet, then the counter-strategy isn't fact-checking. You're pointing out their weak hand while they're betting on the rigged table.
Fact-checking assumes everyone is playing "establish what's true." But if someone is playing "maintain frame," fact-checks become content: things to be dismissed, mocked, or absorbed into the frame itself. ("The fact-checkers are biased. Of course they'd say that.")
The actual counter-strategy is changing the cards.
This means:
Breaking identity-based loyalty. Material outcomes have to matter more than tribal affiliation. People have to evaluate based on "is this actually helping me" rather than "is this our guy."
Restoring accountability structures. Consequences that actually bite, not just reputational, which can be spun, but structural.
Rebuilding shared epistemic spaces. The "too many witnesses" problem has to return. When everyone saw the same thing and can't retreat to separate realities, doubling down stops working.
Raising costs to the person doubling down. Not just to their abstract "credibility," which they've already decided to sacrifice, but to something they actually value.
The reason doubling down works at political scale isn't that the strategy is powerful. It's that the cards have been stacked. Concentrated wealth funds narrative infrastructure. Media fragmentation eliminates shared epistemic spaces. Electoral structures allow winning without majority belief. Accountability mechanisms have been captured or defunded.
The strategy isn't new. The conditions that make it consistently successful have been constructed.
Here's what bothers me most.
The most effective practitioners of this technique tend to be those protecting concentrated wealth interests. They've industrialized doubling down as a core competency, often on claims with weak evidentiary support. It works because they're holding good cards: captive media ecosystems, identity-locked bases, and structural insulation from accountability.
Meanwhile, those trying to challenge extractive systems often treat doubling down as a character flaw, something intellectually dishonest people do. When challenged, they reflexively concede small points to appear "reasonable." They engage with quibbles. They defend details. They assume everyone is playing "establish facts" and will eventually be convinced by evidence.
This is not a fair fight.
But here's the thing: doubling down on true frames is not the same as doubling down on false claims.
When this teenager doubled down on paper clips, he was manufacturing a reality. But what if you're insisting on a reality that the evidence actually supports, one that the discourse keeps trying to fragment into disconnectable pieces?
That's discipline.
Consider how quibbles work. Someone says: "Well, technically, the carried interest loophole benefits some pension funds too..."
Old response: "That's a fair point, it's complicated, let me explain the nuances..."
You've now lost the frame. You're playing defense on their terrain. The conversation is about exceptions and technicalities, not about the system.
Double-down response: "Right. The system is so tilted that even the exceptions prove the rule. Exposed earnings get taxed. Sheltered wealth doesn't. That's the extraction machine working exactly as designed."
You've absorbed the objection into the frame. You haven't lied. You haven't even exaggerated. You've just refused to let a quibble dislodge you from the structural point.
The quibbles aren't neutral. They're often a fragmentation strategy: keep the opposition defending details so they never get to reassert the frame. Doubling down is how you refuse to play that game.
A lot of people on the reform side need explicit permission to see this. Conceding points can be capitulation dressed as reasonableness. Holding a frame is discipline, not stubbornness. Absorbing objections into your argument is how you refuse fragmentation.
The discipline of doubling down on truth is underweaponized. And it's underweaponized partly because good-faith people have been trained to see any version of the technique as inherently dishonest, even when they're holding better cards and better evidence than the people using it against them.
I keep coming back to this:
Wealthy interests are holding better cards. And they helped design the deck.
A teenager discovered a life hack for avoiding minor embarrassment over staple removers. Harmless. Kind of funny.
The same hack, industrialized and backed by the right structural conditions, is how we've spent four decades doubling down on policies that benefit wealthy interests while failing to deliver the promised benefits to everyone else. Trickle-down didn't trickle. But the frame held, because the infrastructure kept manufacturing belief, and the cards stayed stacked.
The counter isn't to fact-check harder. The counter is to change the cards.
The staple remover story is true. Sometimes the most interesting frameworks come from the most mundane moments, if you're paying attention.
For more on how concentrated wealth constructs the conditions that make this strategy work at scale, see The Extraction Machine.
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