For the first time I feel as if I understand what it means to read a misleading intelligence report about a looming catastrophe. The text is superficially true; there is not a single false word on the page. But the meaning of the text doesn’t survive scrutiny: one sentence diminishes a particular aspect of the horror, and the next offers an explanation for it out of proportion to the description. What comes next suggests a course of action that doesn’t follow. Description is euphemism. Suspicious of everything now, you’re no longer reading the text, you’re inspecting it for clues to ulterior motives, stripping out discrete facts and recontextualizing them. You read a meta-text.

Until a deeper suspicion emerges. The text is what it is because you have indicated it is what you are prepared to accept. You have jumped to suspicion of its motives because you are not prepared to entertain a different explanation than a comforting one — even a horrible explanation, comforting in the familiarity of its horror. The text is less responsible than the customer. Nothing can be trusted, least of all your senses and perceptions. All that remains is a looming disaster which you vaguely perceive. Only now, without a sense of proportion, you are more deeply vulnerable.