The Architecture of Truth and the Creation of a New Reality

We live in a world full of myths—stories we create ourselves, consciously or unconsciously. From early childhood, as we listen to bedtime stories or lullabies, we already inhabit an invented world. As we grow, our myths mature with us: we watch the news, read blogs, and choose whom to listen to, what to think about, and how to relate to history, world events, or politics. But in essence, nothing has changed. We still live in a myth, only now these myths are crafted by others, using the media to direct our attention where they want it.

Many people don’t notice this artificial reality (or prefer not to), living life like puppets controlled by a skilled puppeteer. Sometimes, that’s just easier. But there are moments when the myth-making process breaks down, and everything falls apart—our artificial reality and our “supposed” personal opinions clash with actual reality. This leads to conflict, power struggles, objections, and disagreements that divide people into opposing camps, sometimes even leading to war.

You might ask, “Are myths really that real in our lives?” After all, we’re not particularly interested in the biographies of Buddha or Ilya Muromets, Odysseus or Richard the Lionheart; it’s enough to know them as heroes who became legends. But politicians, advertisers, journalists, and ideologists see mythological characters differently: they consciously borrow motifs from myths to create the reality they need, inventing new myths to control the world.

We’re used to the idea that myths and stories preserve moral principles, wisdom, and the experience of previous generations in allegorical form, their meanings hidden behind metaphors and symbols. Modern myth-makers use these ancient images and legendary plots to create new myths aimed at anything they choose. These new myths can subtly control mass consciousness: changing beliefs, imposing stereotypes, manipulating choices, and even inciting protests. Elites rule the world through myths, and our task is to learn to distinguish truth from fiction and gain the right to shape our own reality.

How We Are Controlled and Which Myths Are Used

Myths About Myths

In ancient times, myths explained the unknown: the origins of life, the world, nature, and events. Ancient mythologists interpreted these aspects poetically, giving them meaning in people’s worldview. Myths became the foundation for various ideological systems—religion, culture, politics, morality, art, and creativity.

Today, myths are still used to control mass consciousness. Myth-design can strip old myths down to their core idea, which then serves new societal needs. The plot may change, but the narrative idea remains: to convey information and its encoded meaning in an engaging way.

Major companies, famous people, even countries and nations have their own myths. It’s important to distinguish between skillful manipulation of public consciousness and the myths of a country or people, as well as between the related concepts of brand and image:

• Brand reflects how people of a nation are perceived in the public mind.
• Image is a set of ideas and principles about how a person (company, country, nation, etc.) should behave according to their status and authority.

Brand and image are children of myths—they’re based on stereotypes and worldviews both within and outside a country.

Why Stereotypical Thinking Is Convenient

Stereotypes save mental energy and allow us to react quickly to a rapidly changing reality, speeding up our understanding of the world. However, it can be hard to separate reality created by the media from actual reality. There are so many images of the “new reality” that we can only navigate them by creating basic guidelines for managing people’s lives—a kind of coordinate system for understanding. That’s why people need not so much the complex laws of objective reality, but a simple, understandable system of signs and concepts. The architecture of truth becomes such a system, where everyone knows the rules for behavior and response to certain external stimuli.

The term “myth-design” or “architecture of truth” first appeared in Russia in 1992, initially as a method for creating myths for commercial advertising—stereotypes, beliefs, concepts of behavior, and success in society. Modern myths, like ancient ones, create a coordinate system for understanding the world and structure reality around people. A well-constructed myth becomes a social truth and can determine national security and psychological health.

For example, states that use the architecture of truth for ideological purposes base their leadership not on violence or threats, but by involving people in a myth where everyone works for the common good. This myth doesn’t force, but gently or sometimes firmly encourages people to become part of it.

Unfortunately, most socio-political and ideological structures don’t value the methods of the architecture of truth as a way to influence the masses and create new myths to solve current societal problems. We’re full of contradictory stereotypes about myth-design and myths in general. Here are a few:

• For many, a myth is almost 100% falsehood, deception, or a lie that must be exposed with undeniable evidence.
• Myths are “old wives’ tales,” superstitions, and silly inventions, irrelevant to the current era or stage of history.
• Myths aren’t suitable as a basis for ideology or politics. They’re outdated, so there’s no point in reviving or creating new ones.

In today’s world, myths are more real and powerful than we imagine: a good product or service is no longer enough for an ad campaign—you need a story, a myth people can see themselves in. Global brands have long surpassed universal values and emotions—they’ve created their own myths, which in turn create our new reality. Most of these myths are so embedded in our consciousness that analyzing them can seem like a conspiracy against society.

Myths reign supreme in media and online, drawing the masses into discussions with predetermined goals and outcomes, shaping the “right” path for people in an ideal reality. Myth-designers don’t stop at one myth: they create a multidimensional mythological world where each myth supports the next—politics and its leaders, history and its interpretations, intelligence and spies, humanism and justice, theories, doctrines, and “special” paths of development. The list is endless, but the key is understanding that a system of myths is a vital part of a country’s political structure and security.

Today, mastering the tools of the architecture of truth allows for ideological battles without bloodshed, increasing a state’s power and national security. Weakening an opponent’s influence and gaining control and leadership on the international stage through not just military buildup, but also socio-cultural ties and influence, is the main task of the truth architect.

By creating myths, the ideologist consciously fills gaps in the collective unconscious, materializing what once seemed impossible. As a result, the masses get involved, adding new meanings and realizing goals and dreams. This feature of mass consciousness has long been used by those in power as a method of influence and control.

Despite the years and centuries, the architecture of truth hasn’t changed globally: it’s still a message or text, written or remembered, that sets the general guidelines for understanding reality. Today, the architecture of truth in any system—be it the internet or media—has three main features:

• System interaction – By creating a media space in social networks, the architecture of truth involves many people in interactive activities: communicating, presenting themselves, exchanging information, developing business, and more.
• Productivity – The architecture of truth invites the masses to participate in the creative development of the myth: by adding their own elements, people diversify the myth, increasing its effectiveness.
• Creation and destruction – The architecture of truth works both ways: it creates new myths and destroys old ones, often using new myths to do so.

How to Become an Architect of Truth

In a world where the need for information is more than satisfied, the architecture of truth manages society’s needs in various spheres. The intensity of information flows is so high that only metaphors, allegories, and comparisons can help us cope. These tools of ideological myths make the complex simple and accessible.

Every architect of truth faces a transformation of their own personality at the start—a shift from everyday thinking to the mindset of a professional ideologist and myth-maker. This transition is never easy; it often feels like all moral principles are lost forever.

It’s at this moment that the main principles of the architecture of truth become clear:

1. People don’t live in nature; they live in history.
   This quote from Boris Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago” perfectly illustrates that our lives are descriptions, not life itself. Our lives are not just objective facts, but their retelling—stories about people, countries, love, family, the world. Consciousness distorts reality, filtering it through personal knowledge and experience—necessary for comparing and transforming our realities. Each person’s criteria and worldview are unique and can differ dramatically. The architect of truth creates stories that people with different perceptions trust and see as reality. The story must captivate, impress, and provoke thought—in short, it must influence. We all see ourselves as part of world history, even though historical truth is often lost. Modern ideological myths are a struggle to call things by their real names, but sometimes that’s impossible. Then, new versions of history replace the old ones.
2. Every story is a consciously distorted informational reality.
   Every story is not just facts, but also distortions of those facts—that’s the essence of history. The architect of truth must reshape the media space so that the new story or myth fits the worldview of the target audience. To create a myth, you need to:
   • Remind the audience of the values and associations of “old” myths, and naturally weave your own myth into them
   • Connect the new myth to people’s lives and beliefs
   • Synchronize the new myth with people’s dreams of a “bright future,” their goals, and plans

   The architect of truth must always present the new myth so people feel like co-authors, but also keep control to ensure the myth still serves its intended purpose.

3. Informational reality is a mix of provable facts, axioms that need no proof, and simulacra of traditions, culture, values, politics, and beliefs.
   The main paradox of informational reality is that if you watch news on different channels about the same topic, each will be different. The core event is there, but it’s presented according to the channel’s policy and the cultural traditions of most viewers. Cultural tradition is not just how the anchor looks, but what and how they say it—it’s a historically developed perception of reality. For most people, this is reality itself.
   Here comes the concept of the simulacrum—a copy with no original in reality. One of the main tasks of a myth in the information field is to simulate ideal representations according to the client’s needs, whether it’s culture, politics, or selling diamonds. The architect of truth must remember they are creating reality, not just stating facts. By creating reality with simulacra, the architect blurs the boundaries of reality, replacing real things with their copies. In such a copy, people stop perceiving objective reality, taking the copy or myth as the original. The process can be described like this: a person thinks they’re living, but actually they’re watching others live, who are also imitating life. This is often seen on social media, where people live through images and myths created by media, advertising, and propaganda.
   Speaking of propaganda and political myths: political elites are often the clients for new myths. Politicians are in a double bind: they must listen to the people’s wishes and also solve state problems, sometimes with unpopular methods. That’s why political myths must be able to control mass consciousness. Politics itself is a special mythological world where myths are created, clash, die, and reappear. Political myths can incite hatred or, on the contrary, boost patriotism, justify “temporary difficulties” and “hardships,” distract from pressing problems or politicians’ wrongdoing—it all depends on the order.
4. Hyperreality’s goal is to preserve or destroy reality.
   Informational reality recycles old myths to create new ones. But old myths remain in the architecture of truth, ready to be revived and combined with new myths when needed. This process is called remythologization, when old myths, stripped of their sacredness, become the basis for shaping the worldview, managing mass behavior, national consciousness, language, culture, faith, politics, and ideology.
   For example, when a state needs to boost civic consciousness through spirituality and morality, it uses so-called “spiritual bonds.” Or, when shifting from socialism to capitalism, a country needs to make an evolutionary leap on a global scale. If a country manages to combine these two levels of development, as Singapore did in the 1960s, you get the “Singapore economic miracle,” where myth-design played a key role in economic, national, and cultural development.
   Conversely, the collapse of the USSR was, above all, the collapse of myths about a “bright future” and “developed socialism,” replaced by “democracy,” “free market,” and “religiosity” as a synonym for spirituality. But new myths brought new mythological heroes—“new Russians” in flashy jackets, gold chains, and black armored cars. Unfortunately, there was no economic miracle.
5. Creating informational reality has an associative structure.
   Like memories, myths in mass consciousness lie dormant, waiting to be needed. When the time comes, a myth is “unarchived” in its most general form, as a mythologem—absolute knowledge used to denote universal mythological plots found in cultures worldwide. Then, at the architect’s command, any mythologem can be activated, triggering an associative chain that includes associations, archetypes, and meanings, sometimes far removed from the original context. This associative path of managing mass consciousness is the architect’s task.
   The dominance of totalitarian classical cultural traditions, where people depend on stereotypes and values, has reached a new level in the postmodern era, which has captivated the masses since the second half of the 20th century. Tolerance for all viewpoints, cynicism, irony, seeing the world as chaos, shock value, and outright plagiarism—these postmodern principles have been used by skilled architects of truth to create a new media reality that ultimately replaced reality for the masses. This process is brilliantly described in Victor Pelevin’s novel “Generation ‘P’,” where the myth created by the protagonist, in all its forms and transformations—from classical to modern social and political mythology—reaches its peak and becomes reality.