Recursive deception can reach a point where no truth about agents’ intentions exists

Evidence

The baroque structure of these intrigues, in which an agent might act to create the impression that a second agent was acting so as to create the impression that the first agent was engaged in a conspiracy (for instance, that one), must surely have resulted in a situation in which no one really understood what anyone was doing; and this lack of understanding will also have affected the situation to be understood. Since such a situation is structured by the agents’ intentions, and their intentions are conditioned by their increasingly confused grasp of others’ intentions, there comes a point at which there is no truth of the matter about what they are doing. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 115

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting claim: when behavior is constituted by beliefs, error compounds until the situation itself has no determinate truth. This resonates with Saramago’s blindness—the society’s own corrupted expectations constitute its collapse, not just its cause.
• XREF: Connects to the Luhmann infrastructure theme: when mutual observation becomes unreliable, the ‘familiarity’ substrate is not merely degraded but impossible to reconstruct.
• QUESTION: Is there a real limit to how many recursion levels a social system sustains before truth dissolves? Could map to a measurable threshold.