Can you name three living Chinese people?
A few weeks ago, on a French television programme, the guests were asked this deceptively simple question.
The exercise - known as the "Three Chinese Test" and devised by Gilles Gressani -was intended to reveal something about our relationship with China.
Silence. The guests hesitated. Someone finally answered:
"Xi Jinping."
The demonstration had made its point.
China represents nearly one fifth of humanity. It is one of the the world's largest economy. It sits at the center of global manufacturing, logistics, artificial intelligence, finance, and geopolitics. It is arguably one of the defining strategic actors of the twenty-first century.
Everyone has an opinion on China. And yet, for many educated Westerners, China remains strangely... abstract. The only Chinese a Westerner can easily name is the leader of China.
How could a civilization so large had somehow disappeared from the Western mental landscape?
The problem is not simply that our knowledge of China is disproportionately limited relative to its actual importance in the world. Many of us no longer possess a cognitive model capable of integrating China as it actually exists.
That realization points toward what I believe is one of the largest blind spots in contemporary discussions of cognitive warfare.
Most research assumes that competing actors observe the same reality before attempting to influence how it is interpreted. But what if they don't? What if the decisive battlefield appears before information itself?
This brief is the third installment in an ongoing attempt to rethink cognitive warfare.
The first asked why the concept emerged. The second examined how influence actually operates. This one asks a more fundamental question:
This essay argues that cognitive warfare has largely mistaken its symptoms for its object of analysis. It is an attempt to reconsider the epistemological foundations upon which the field has been built.
The argument unfolds in three steps.
First, I explain why my own operational experience convinced me that competing actors do not begin from the same reality. Second, I argue that the true unit of analysis is neither information nor narratives, and I name what it is. Finally, I explore what follows if that proposition is correct: for intelligence, influence, strategic surprise and, ultimately, for the way we think about truth itself.
Summary
- The hidden assumption of cognitive warfare
- The wrong level of analysis
- Where cognitive warfare truly begins
- Strategic blindness
- Implications for cognitive warfare
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The hidden assumption of cognitive warfare
Nearly every discussion of cognitive warfare follows the same sequence.
The logic seems obvious.
Yet embedded within this sequence lies an assumption: that competing actors begin from a shared model of reality.
I do not believe they do.
I arrived at this conclusion a decade ago, while working as a conflict reporter in Israel and the West Bank.
At the time, I was still young enough to believe that if I listened carefully enough, the conflict would eventually reveal itself. That somewhere beneath the accusations, the propaganda and the politics, there existed a single reality waiting to be discovered.
So I crossed, constantly.
One day I would spend hours with Israeli soldiers, intelligence officers or families living under threat.
The next, I would sit with Palestinian families around a spicy coffee, activists and residents whose daily experience of the conflict was fundamentally different.
I often say that arrived in Israel carrying a thousand questions. I was convinced that, if I spent enough time on the ground, listened, and exposed myself to every side of the conflict, I would eventually find clear answers.
The opposite happened. The closer I came to reality, the less certain I became. Every conversation that resolved one question generated three new ones. Every explanation illuminated one part of the conflict while obscuring another.
Nearly a decade later, I left Israel with ten times more questions than the day I arrived.
That openness, however, came at a cost. I argued with many people. They struggled to accept my willingness to temporarily inhabit the other side's reality.
If I returned from the West Bank describing fears, grievances or aspirations I had observed among Palestinians, some Israeli friends assumed I had become naïve or worse: disloyal.
If I later articulated Israeli security concerns or historical memory to Palestinian interlocutors, I could feel an instant shift. The conversation became more guarded, trust became more fragile. I was no longer a journalist; I had become someone whose position needed to be assessed.
Understanding the other side had made me difficult to classify. And in polarized conflicts, people who cannot be easily classified become objects of suspicion.
Empathy is mistaken for endorsement. Trying to reconstruct the internal logic of another reality can be perceived as abandoning your own.
Over time, I learned my lesson.
Some observations should not always be spoken. Truth enters an emotional landscape that can, in some context be shaped by grief, trauma and memory.
It is true for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as much as it is true with Ukraine-Russia, and others. People in these conflicts have buried parents, children, spouses and friends. Entire biographies are built around irreparable loss.
I did not fully understand the significance of that experience at the time.
Only years later, after leaving journalism and working in HUMINT, did I realize how profoundly those years had reshaped the way I observe and interact with people.
Israel and the West Bank taught me to temporarily step inside another person's model of reality. To understand it, and more deeply to inhabit it.
Many of the HUMINT operations I later participated in required collecting information. And information emerged from proximity, trust. From becoming sufficiently intelligible to another person that they no longer experienced you as an outsider. That required reconstructing the operational reality model through which that individual interpreted the world.
There were also moments when I went too far. Moments when I became so immersed in another person's worldview that I momentarily lost the distance required to analyse it clearly.
Taken together - journalism, HUMINT, successes, failures, and the moments in which I lost myself trying to understand others - eventually led me to a conclusion, that has everything to do with our topic:
Before information can influence cognition, cognition must already possess a structure capable of assigning meaning to information.