The Pattern
A field guide to getting away with it
I’ve been noticing a pattern. It’s everywhere now, in brands pretending to be authentic, politicians walking back promises, influencers exposed for fabricating their “real” lives, and even in people close to us. When they get caught lying, they don’t admit it. They reframe it. Not guilt. Not accountability. Just spin.
“It wasn’t a lie, it was storytelling.”
“It was just curation, selective framing, an incomplete truth.”
“So what? I did X. Big deal. People do worse.”
“I am just playing the game.”
It’s never an apology. It’s a strategy.
The lines change, but the formula doesn’t: minimize, redirect, recontextualize, anything but owning the core truth.
And here’s the thing: it works. Not because it convinces us, but because it wears us down. The reframe isn’t about proving they were right. It’s about creating just enough fog, just enough plausible deniability, that holding them accountable starts to feel petty. Exhausting. Like you’re the one making it a bigger deal than it is. And since we’re all tired, we let it slide.
We live in a culture that forgives a good performance faster than it rewards honesty. Admitting fault feels like career suicide. But spinning it? That’s “media-savvy.” “Strategic.” “Smart.” The incentives are clear: being wrong isn’t what gets punished anymore. It’s being perceived as unable to handle being wrong. So people build entire defense systems not around truth but around optics.
And the real cost isn’t just that liars get away with it. It’s what happens when this becomes the default script. When everyone learns that the skill that matters most isn’t integrity, it’s recovery. You saw what happened. You know what they said. But now they’re calmly explaining why you misunderstood, why context matters, why you’re being unfair. And slowly, against your better judgment, you start to doubt your own perception. Maybe you did overreact. Maybe they have a point.
That’s the damage. Not just the erosion of trust, but the slow corrosion of your relationship with your own clarity. Truth stops feeling solid. Confronting something starts to feel pointless. And we don’t become complicit through agreement, we become complicit through fatigue.
There’s no simple fix for this. You can’t shame people into honesty when shamelessness is the strategy. But you can notice the reframe when it happens. You can refuse to feed it with your attention. You can hold the line inside yourself, even if they won’t. And when it’s your turn to be wrong, and it will be, do the harder thing, not the clever one. Tell the truth.
Because this pattern only works if we keep rewarding it.