Most people don't change beliefs — they change teams.
The ones who build the systems know this very well.
If you want to see how a person will act, you don't ask "What do you believe?" – you ask "Which team currently feeds and protects you, and which team are you trying to get into?"
For anything that touches power, money, or safety, "belief" is a side effect of coalition membership under constraint.
If you want to understand or change what people "believe", stop pushing more arguments into the front of the theater. Walk backstage and rewire:
- who pays them,
- who can punish them,
- who they're performing for.
The rest of the "belief journey" will mostly take care of itself.
In other words — when you want someone to see the truth, change what truth pays them.
Trying to "blue-pill" or "red-pill" someone while leaving their dependencies intact is mostly theater.
They need a direct incentive shift:
- Give them a new coalition: new job, new customers, new patronage, new audience.
- Remove personal risk: legal shielding, financial runway, anonymity, alternative credentials.
- Once their safety depends on a different story, their mind will "discover" that story's correctness.
An audience swap almost always gets the job done. People don't speak to "reality". They speak to an audience.
If you want them to change, change who's listening and who they're afraid of:
- Move them from a room where accuracy = status,
- To a room where dissent = exile.
They will quickly learn the new speech patterns.
What gets measured, gets believed.
If their performance is measured on:
- prediction accuracy → they'll slowly gravitate toward more truthful models.
- compliance metrics → they'll "believe" compliance narratives.
Switch the KPI, and watch their belief vocabulary morph to reduce their fear of being punished.
Most people don't change beliefs — they change teams.
