Stop blaming your dad for being a Trumpet: He’s been hijacked by military grade propaganda
Modern propaganda is no longer about lies; it triggers dangerous psychological manipulation of the natural protective features of our brain.
Russia pioneered the new model of psychological abuse of our cognitive abilities. The goal is to keep people in a state of rage, division, and confusion about almost anything.
When the founder of modern Russian propaganda method, Vladislav Surkov, came to Moscow in the nineties, he caught the eye of the newly formed clique that came to power together with Vladimir Putin. This group managed to subordinate the army and state services to the dictates of organized crime under the rule of Vladimir Putin. Surkov studied theatre science and devoted himself to experimental propaganda based on psychological gaming of human mind, similar to those seen in the theatre. Emotions play a key role in creating and consolidating the image of an enemy. Surkov, like his American epigon Bannon, was convinced it is no longer necessary to create one leader and one enemy. To reach a state of complete dullness and detachment from reality, you need to find camp leaders, loudest voices and hostilities on many sides. Human mind must be driven towards a total lose of orientation. The first experiments of this kind took place in Moscow in the nineties in a theatrical environment, where Russian oligarchs financed both vulgar avant-garde theater and violent fascist militias against these performances. People quickly caught on and started to split into two camps. Surkov then repeated and perfected the same experiment many times around other social themes. When Vladimir Putin came to power and the mad prophet of Dugin began to dominate ideas distributed by Russia worldwide (basically mystical fascism with elements of traditional Russian imperialism), the Russian army began to adopt the doctrine of the so-called Hybrid Warfare. That was in the late nineties. The Russian hybrid doctrine says it is cheaper and less risky to practice propaganda and psychological operations than to let your own troops bleed and destabilize your political situation at home. The first blueprints of the doctrine occurred in 1996 in the speech of the head of the Russian General Staff, General Samsonov. In twenty years, Russians have made a huge leap forward in military preparations for the conquest of the West, mainly thanks to greedy Western military subcontractors in the field of digital technology and psychology. Western expert companies simply allowed themselves to be bought, like Lenin's famous capitalists, who “sell the gallows rope to the enemy”. One of the methods used by the propaganda machine, was the research of the psychology of disgust. It sounds a little bit strange, but it's cutting-edge research into the neurology of our brain. The study published on this topic in the prestigious journal Nature 2012 was lately updated by newer research named “Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations”. Both studies focus on special correlation between conservative thinking and the so-called pathogenic stress of the organism. What's the point? Nations or even communities more vulnerable to pathogens (viruses, bacteria, parasites) tend towards forming more conservative cultures and rely on time-tested cultural patterns. At the same time, everything new, unknown, and unverified is associated with the subconscious emotion of disgust, which is a neural link that is transmitted through culture and education and whose goal is to maintain the health and safety of the population. Translated into simplistic and maybe even ignorant language, this means that in a risky environment, conservatives are better equipped to survive than liberals.
The downside of this advantage, however, is the fact that the culturally learned pattern of disgust can be easily used to stimulate hatred and create an image of the enemy if you create an urgent feeling of a dangerous environment.
It is no coincidence that the war propagandists of all time kept painting a picture of enemies as parasites, ugly insects, disgusting animals, perverts, pedophiles, mentally or physically ill, and use adjectives such as "smelly, dark, dirty, repugnant". They were simply making new connections in conservative brains to rewire them and make them feel disgusted and threatened. The study shows that conservative people tend to fall victim more easily to this type of behavioral propaganda. Today, it is based on an algorithmic spreading of disgust and fear online. Learned cultural patterns, once excellent for survival, can be "hijacked" in favor of the aggressor and diverted from the real danger to a fiction.
New research in behavioral psychology and Big Data analysis was purchased by the Russian oligarchs, along with several libertarian American and British billionaires. They’re buddies, their interests meet in many points starting from the future of oil industry, through the denial of climate change, to the destruction of state institutions which make them pay taxes and stick with the rule of law (how annoying!).
The experts created a new type of propaganda based on the worldwide collection of social, psychological and health data of our moms, dads, and aunties (see Cambridge Analytica, for example). Today, it is possible to determine which people are more susceptible to which type of propaganda and who can be forced on them as an acceptable "enemy" so that they stop perceiving real threats and turn to conspiracies instead.
Social media owners have a real time psychological analysis of all of us on a silver plate and can use this knowledge against us in their morally and legally dubious psychological testing. There have been found countless division lines: British patriots against Eastern European workers, Europeans against refugees, American patriots against "pedophile democrats", working people against lazy intellectuals, pro-life versus pro-choice, traditional family versus LGBT community, militia against woke people, countryside against cities, elderly against young people, women against men, Vaxxers against the Antivaxx movement, New Age against science, white against black, American Latinos against newcomers. Everything you need to do is to throw a bloody piece of fresh flesh into the social media arena every single day. It is easy to gradually impose a totalitarian form of government on a society that quarrels over a new dog bone every single day. People will either engage in civil unrests or become completely obtuse and stop seeking consensus on public affairs and reality. This creates a good time to envision an autocracy that "arranges everything and puts things back in order." No society can endure chaos forever. Russians have been playing long game ever since. Their entire plan has been always built on a cornerstone of perception control. Whatever they planned and did, they always prepared our brains and soaked them in info ops to create confusion and boiling frog’s effect. This is how to get away with it.
Perception has the power to create impunity. Russians and their fifth column always knew, that one day, a confused and traumatized society will give up and accept a tyrant who "simplifies" things again. Fascism is not new. The tailored propaganda on data steroids is. We should stop it. Our clock is ticking.
Many thanks to my twitter friend Vince Scafaria (@scafaria), who made me aware of the entire research on psychology of disgust.
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Alex Alvarova is Canadian author, recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on bannonist behavioural BigTech propaganda. The story features the events of the American election 2016 and how the propaganda machine was established to destroy America. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda.