Intelligence

John Thornhill’s reflection on SpyGPT (FT Weekend) and modern intelligence is not, at its core, about spies or machines. It is about what happens to judgment when trust collapses. That lesson travels easily from the world of states at war to the quieter, but no less destructive, theatre of family feud.

In intelligence, the failure rarely lies in the absence of information. It lies in the inability to hear it, to believe it, to interpret it, or to act on it. Richard Sorge did not fail because he lacked insight. He failed because the system around him no longer trusted truth that did not flatter power. Family conflicts follow the same pattern. By the time lawyers, advisers, and forensic accountants are called in, the family is already drowning in data. Emails, documents, valuations, messages, recordings. What is missing is not evidence, but trust in interpretation.

As feuds escalate, families enter a state of internal war. Conversations turn tactical. Silence becomes strategic. Every word is parsed for advantage. Each party begins to build its own private intelligence apparatus, feeding selectively chosen facts to advisers who are asked to confirm positions rather than test them. Information is no longer shared to resolve. It is weaponised to prevail.

Technology accelerates this drift. Digital records, instant searches, AI assisted analysis, and endless documentation create the illusion of objectivity. Like SpyGPT, these tools promise clarity and speed. In reality, they often deepen the conflict. They reward pattern hunting over understanding, correlation over context, and certainty over restraint. The signal is overwhelmed by intent.

In such moments, wisdom does not disappear, but it is pushed aside. As in war, survival instincts dominate. Winning replaces understanding. Being right replaces being whole. Families begin to behave like rival states, convinced that any concession is weakness and any pause is risk.

Conflict is inevitable wherever power, money, memory, and identity intersect. The tragedy is not that families fight. It is when feud becomes permanent, when the family loses the ability to return from war logic to civic logic. At that point, no amount of intelligence, human or artificial, can restore coherence.

The real work, as in intelligence, is not gathering more information. It is rebuilding the conditions under which information can again be trusted. Without that, the most sophisticated tools merely make destruction faster, cleaner, and harder to reverse.

W.