Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme!”
1. Scan for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’
2. Identify, unlayer it.
3. Characterise the Mana’s Dimensions. 4. Evaluate them.
5. Make the Call: Positive, Negative or Neutral.
6. Intervene, Act appropriately.
I felt bad all week.
I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:
That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.
I wanted to situate that description of how I see that reality- that the Russians’ war against us will continue after victory. Even if, as I do in this piece below, I can foresee the gentle eradication of what Putler referred to as ‘the Russian Ethnos’ which has, as we see in Ukraine, a remarkable propensity to commit war crimes - 300,000 or so registered war crimes in Ukraine since Feb 24 2022.
The German and Japanese Ethnos’s survived after World War Two because they repented, acknowledged their crimes, surrendered their war criminals and got on with credibly rebuilding their cultures, communities and countries with the help of benign occupation forces of Canada, England and the United States.
Russians themselves say that they are going to continue to prosecute their mental war after the end of the kinetic phase. Russia’s mental war is hidden inside Disinfolklore (qua the narrative form which I am the first writer to identify and name and the analytical theory which I invented and which I’m elaborating upon here for parsing all forms of disinformation).
See here how Galina Rymbo, a poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who was born and raised in Western Siberia and now has found sanctuary in Ukraine wrote about what I call the Disinfolklore Universe:
I am proposing a solution which many of us can integrate into our own mental algorithms. To vaccinate ourselves against the contagion of Russia’s mental war against us.
Disinfolklore, the analytical theory, is supposed to help us in real time.
The challenge I had set myself was to come up with a method that we can all use on-the-fly in our daily lives to parse data/informational units/memes.
I use those words or those terms interchangeably.
The visual memes that we have come to associate with the moniker Meme. I go back all the way back to, I think it was 1976. Richard Dawkins coined the term or the moniker ‘Meme’ to describe cultural ideas that pass around through the ether, as it were. Through human culture.
It’s always fascinated me that that word ‘Meme’ didn’t need to be created until that book.
Actually, when I think about it, the concept of Mana, which I use a lot in my work. The concepts of contagion or medium - something which is passed between us - actually serves the same purpose as Meme does in the English language.
By meme, I mean any visual, audible phenomenon. Anything that affects our energy, our Mana. Anything which comes inside into your Inner Minds through, through or even actually inside our own minds.
Part of this idea of Contagion, in Cultural Psychology and Anthropology (which I mentioned three weeks ago) that once something is lodged in your mind,that it has its own energy and it works away by itself into provoking our own emotions.
we’ve all had sleepless nights over ideas or woken up thinking of something and can’t get back to sleep about it. And in many ways, the purpose of Russian disinformation is to plant these memes in our minds, these informational units, which burrow away and affect our attitudes, our intentions, our moods and our motivations, those four ideas.
That’s how I look at, that’s the kind of the cognitive model which I use in Disin folklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian and any form of disinformation, but also any form of data really coming in from the outside that it affects the cognitive model that I’ve established or elaborated on, which has been pretty stable now for about two years. aspect I added was moods during a trip to Turkey last on the Turkish Riviera last, not last summer, the summer before last. And I’m very interested to see that moods are often used in the analysis of how
fairy tales and various things affect people’s minds. So the cognitive model is that we have an energy, we have a manna, we are human. MN is in human. This is our energy. This is what shines through us. It’s in our mind. And external things come in and they impact this manna.
Mana is the source from which all our moods, attitudes, motivations and intentions flow. This is what I believe Russian disinformation attempts to hack. It attempts to hack our Mana, our energy.
Then this has an impact on our attitudes, on our moods and or on our motivations or on our our intentions. Any of those four elements.
So in that sense, the tool which is most useful on-the-fly to deal with misinformation from my perspective. This mental war which is being prosecuted against all of us. Which, as I argued last week, will persist after the kinetic war has ended. After victory. After Ukraine has these 150 to 200 fourth generation fighter jets. Zillions of different drones and all of that matériel. This mental war will continue in our communities. I take note of what was being discussed today by Genesis Man and Midwest Fella and some of the callers in about how hopefully Orban will lose. That this will hopefully turn the tide on this epidemic of far-right and far-left madness which has which I associate with Telegram as a mechanism, and I associate with Russia, whether in the sense that they’re either creating the division where none existed before, or they’re finding, identifying very early on these divisions in our community wherever we are. They’re exasperating the divisions and making them bigger.
Take this idea of ‘look for the Mana in the Meme.’
Disinfolklore’s (as an analytical method) main Mantra. Look beyond what is immediately given in the particular meme. The Disinfolklore analytical method should be useful independent of the source of the data or the source of the meme. Because you can’t always discern the source. The most conventional methods, I spoke about it, I think it was in the fourth episode, when I set out the European Union’s External Action Service or Diplomatic services Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) framework. Now that Donald has closed down all of the disinformation unit in the State Department looking at FIMI (which is kind of the the grown-up word or an alternative word for what I call Disinfolklore (qua narrative phenomenon sneaking trolls into our Inner Minds millions of times a day these days). Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference is quite a mouthful!
Helpful people sometimes wrote to me to say ‘Disinfolklore is a bountiful. It’s hard to say. Can’t you vile up with a better moniker!’ ‘Try saying FIMI is my usual response!’
FIMI defines itself as ‘foreign’ interference in our information space. Manipulation of our information spaces is okay, according to this model, if it is not foreign. So the same Meme would be okay if uttered by a domestic source. Obviously Russia then just persuades, hypnotised, trolls, manipulates EU nationals to promote its Disinfolklore. That weakness is immanent in the FIMI framework.
In the context of the European Union ‘foreign’ means our enemies China and Russia (and to some extent Iran and North Korea) when it comes to FIMI. Therefore, if you can trace any particular Meme back to those sources, then you know it’s foreign interference, and it’s prima facie wrong.
Obviously, one of the intrinsic features of Russian disinformation (as Galina Rymbo notes above) is that Russia plants its trolls in the voices of people in our own community. So it’s harder to see it.
So this English MP who we’ll all have seen this week, Zarah Sultana whose ‘Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class’ absurdity this week went viral. She naturally name checks that “of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes.” Then she goes on to say: “but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”
So when you’re looking at a Meme like that… Let’s take that as an informational unit from an English MP. She’s saying, ‘of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes,
but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.’ All of us can see through that immediately because we’ve spent so much time in the Ukrainian information space. We’ve seen, I’m not going to say we’ve seen it all, but we have seen a lot of it. Someone like me, for instance, who was a great fan, actually, of Jeremy Corbyn up until that Panorama documentary.
It basically... revealed that this group set up by the Labour Party to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism was stopped at every possible turn. Those committed Labour Party members hired specifically to deal with the wave of antisemitism claims against the party, then blew the whistle. All these very committed young Labour Party officials who reminded me of myself when I worked for the Irish Labour Party, the Irish Green Party, the antisectarian Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and the English Labour Party as well. Just committed to the cause and trying to help it. I lost faith then in leftist, formal leftist, self-declared leftist politics at that point. I had no idea of this whole tanky thing.
I’d never come across the term tanky until relatively far into the war.
It might have been when those American legislators, AOC and co, wrote that draft letter. I think it was in September 2022.
Basically... Donald’s position up until now is their position, which was ‘Blame the Victim’ Ukraine should make peace. Everyone at the time went nuts. That was way back in the historical era of 2022, before Donald had hypnotised humanity with Russian Disinfolklore tropes like ‘Ukraine is an obstacle to peace.’
So I discovered the term tanky. Now I recognize the energy / Mana of tankydom in many memes. The Mana of tankydom. When I hear the stock qualifier of an anti-Ukraine positioning attempting to conceal itself -“of course, Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes….” This is exactly the kind of thing we hear when we hear the Russian opposition.
When then they go on to say, “…but President Zelensky is no friend of the working class.”
There’s been some fantastic... take towns of Sultana on this.
I’m quite optimistic that this whole episode certainly has served to help educate some people anyway into the contradictions of tankydom.
I wondered how I would use the Code of Positive Trolls. There are these 12 analytical tools which are part of the Disinfolklore analytical method, which I’ve spoken about before.
Half of those tools are archetyped into what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. That’s code in the legal sense. It’s also code in the sense of moral code. That if you want to proof outgoing informational units, outgoing memes. The Disinfolklore analytical method is not just to help me interpret Disinfolklore in incoming trolls.
I’ve got my Incoming Troll Radar, which is scanning for the Mana/energy in incoming informational units. To determine whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. It’s also about outgoing.
I don’t want to be like Sultana. I presume she’s well-meaning. She went to this conference in Paris and is a full-on tanky. We certainly have no evidence that she (and nothing I’ve seen about her. I don’t know that much about her. Hardly heard of her before. I did look her up on Wikipedia. Nothing makes me as suspicious of her as I am of say, Farage or Jeffrey Sachs or people who are actually paid to be tankies and have taken money, whether it’s from RT or from other Russia-connected sources. In order to promote particular trolls. Or particular memes).
So she goes to this conference and I read a brilliant critique of some of the people in that conference in Paris which Sultana referenced and particularly of “Ukrainian” people there who are basically Russian patsies.
I’m going to say that. The person who’s analyzed this is Galina Rymbo poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who says she was born and raised in Western Siberia, in the working village of Chkalovsky in the city of Omsk and who’s currently living in L’viv. She was critiquing Sultana and critiquing some of the people who were at this conference in Paris. There is in particular these Ukrainian leftists who are against the war. They want peace.
They remind me of these bloggers Russia used in Ukraine to divide Ukrainian society who transformed from blogging about. Edit/eastern spirituality to becoming anti-bad-Let Covid Rip demonstrators outside provincial government administration buildings across Ukraine while I was working there. To, suddenly, archetyping themselves as “anti-war” Ukrainian “nationalists.”
[see https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2021/01/19/7280367/]
These Manosphere adjacent so-called Ukrainian leftists gave speeches at the Paris conference where English MP Sultana learned that “Zelenskyy is no friend of the Working Class.”
Some of us might have watched those excerpts online. These are a species of people that I encountered as a diplomat in Eastern Ukraine. It took me a little while to discern who was a Russian asset or agent and who was well-meaning and acting in good faith. Who was sane and which activist was a fantasist either knowingly or unknowingly being controlled by his Russian curators.
One person in particular whom I met at a court hearing related to protecting Ukrainian servicemen’s rights - a perfect cover that trolled me into believing this guy was a Ukrainian patriot. As a diplomat building a network, I spent about a year meeting him a few times. To collect information. To take the temperature, as it were, in eastern Ukraine. It took me a year to work out that actually, beyond all reasonable doubt, and certainly beyond my need to take a risk, that he was basically a Russian (knowing or unknowing) Useful Idiot.
Once you know that there are people who profess these views “Putin of course is a dictator and has done war crimes, yet…” And who at the same time may well be pushing informational memes that are contrary to Ukraine’s best interests. Once you know that’s possible. Then it’s easier to understand that if you’re at this conference of socialists or leftists in Paris and you hear someone criticizing Ukraine. Then their words are repeated by a self-declared Leftist English member of parliament as if these people are the true voice of Ukraine. These anti-patriots are not Ukrainian patriots. Yet trying to represent themselves as patriots. They are being representedly archaetyped as Ukrainian. As an example of how not all Ukrainians are in support of President Zelenskyy or his Servant of the People political party. Or of a country which is at war.
The Mana or energy of their memes directly and indirectly being transmitted by Sultana is 100% Russian, not Ukrainian.
Like Jeffrey Sachs, mysteriously they get platformed constantly.
Their memes influence influential people like Sultana. Most of us don’t have the time. Well, actually most of us do have the time here because we spend our days, whatever, even in between our jobs and everything like that, we’re just on this constantly.
Yet most normal people don’t have the time to go through what I’ve just gone through. I did only very cursory research on all of this.
So I went to the Code of Positive Trolls.
The fourth criterion is Mana/Energy. We look for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’ That little mantra that we learn and that come into our mind, we ‘go, okay. What’s the Mana in all that Manosphere meaning from this ‘Dublin Group’? It’s Russia. 100% Russia.
I have a feeling something’s off about “of course, Putin is a dictator and he has done war crimes, but Z is no friend of the working class.”
You immediately have a reaction to this. You think, “It’s quite a clever non-sequitur.” A Both Sidesing.
Then to go on about how to mention that President Zelensky is a dictator or so. I mean, it just so happens I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the apartment building in Kryvyi Rih where President Zelensky grew up. And because I used to visit, as a defendant,
I used to visit a civil society organization which was based in that building. And I went there before he was president, when I didn’t even know who he was. And then after he was president, when the police would be there protecting him. And Krivi Rhee, as most of us know, is like,
Aside from the purely Marxian/theoretical aspects of the formal definition of the working class, if Sultana wants to get into a pissing contest (excuse me, pardon my French) about who’s working class or not. I don’t know anything about where Sultana grew up or her background. Just because President Zelensky’s parents happened to be academics, everyone who grew up, most people who grew up in the Soviet Union grew up in the same kind of apartment buildings. The same kind of apartments as President Zelensky did. His apartment building is what people in London, what people, say, from West London might look at in Elephant and Castle or in East London as being, or in America as “projects.”
They have that vibe about them. Kryvyi Rhih, Dnipropetrovsk’s second city where President Zelenskyy grew up is a very serious industrial town.
In fact, the first time I went there (I have visited Kryvyi Rih for work many dozens of times) was to investigate some far-right guys who had attacked an LGBTIQ campaigner. A really brilliant campaigner in Kryvyi Rih who, like President Zelensky, tried his best to operate in this environment because he’s a really courageous person like President Zelensky.
Some of us will have come across the story about when they built this underpass in the center of Kryvyi Rih. Under this roundabout. It was a big thing. It happened I think when President Zelenskyy was maybe 15 or something.
This was a story one of his best friends told after he became president. President Zelenskyy went out with his guitar to busk in the new underpass. They took bets. His friends took bets about how many songs he’d get to sing before he got beaten up. Well, he got to sing one or two songs and then he got beaten up,and his guitar broken.
So, you know, it’s a really tough, tough place: Kryvyi Rih. This is why it’s completely consistent with the real 3e!, as it were, the real President Zelenskyy, that he wouldn’t run away. Take a ride. Run away. Because he’s a tough, he’s a tough cookie. He grew up in a tough neighborhood. Really tough neighborhood. Really tough town. Steel making town.
Whatever environment Sultana grew up in, I would say his would give her a run for her money.
However, the beauty of the Disinfolklore Analytical Method is that you don’t have to know all of that to intuit that there’s something wrong or something off about what Suktana said.
Let me show you how the Code of Positive Trolls can help us discern the Mana in the Meme: “I’m archetyping myself as more Working Class than President Zelenskyy.”
The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is ‘Generosity.’
This is something I’ve come to realise recently. If you want to archaetype yourself as a leftist, you just profess care about the working class. That’s your Virtue Signal.
Want to archaetype herself as right-wing? Archaetype your concern about migration or how everyone should be able to be as rich as humanly possible without boring taxes.
Its rhetoric. The Mana is: “I’m archaetyping as Right. Or left. Follow me!”
When Sultana talks about President Zelenskyy (or as she says dismissively ‘Zelenskyy’) as being no friend of the working class, this is a self-archetyping. She’s situating herself as a friend of the working class. Using President Zelenskyy.
While she was at, I think it was, Birmingham University. It is now a top university in England. While she was there, her Wikipedia page says, she worked in Primark and various kinds of Fast Fashion-type stores. She would consider herself working class.
Actually, however as a former student or scholar in Marxist, Marxian philosophy, I understand that formally a proletarian is someone who creates value for the capitalist. Their essence. Their being. Their Mana. Their energy is alienated from them. Invested into the product of their labour. Then the capitalist for whom they’re making this widget then takes it from them. It’s that sense of psychological alienation arising from the physical alienation of what you’ve spent four or five hours of your life creating. Out of that comes the need for revolution. The alienation that capitalism provokes in our minds, in our sentiments.
While in the late 19th century, the mid 19th century, there were many people who weren’t proletarians. Today, most people fit into this formal definition of proletarian: creating objects of value which are alienated from them and which contain their Mana / energy.
Sultana is not a proletarian. Because she’s actually a member of the English parliament. Today even people who work in the City of London or on Wall Street or in Facebook. These guys who’ve been recently hired by Facebook for 100 million a year to make AI algorithms, improve them. They are all formally proletarians and in the working class.
So Sultana’s idea of working class is completely anachronistic. Aside from that, the idea of manifesting support for the working class and for the proletarians and for those who are exploited or those who feel alienated from themselves by the system is very generous.
Therefore, the generosity criterion in the Code of Positive Trolls can’t disassociate really generous people from those who are just archetyping as generous. So then the second element is Right / ethical discipline. If you don’t have any information about Sultana, you think, well, she’s in good faith. She’s accepted Putin as a dictator and that he’s done War Crimes (though after 300,000 documented War Crimes by Russia, so far in Ukraine, for which Putin has Commamd Responsibility it’s hardly a huge stretch for Suktana to concede that. Not being a friend of the working class, allegedly, however would seem according to her values equal to 300,000 War Crimes! That’s some exchange rate!). Like, who knows if it’s true or not that President Zelenskyy is a friend of the working class if you don’t know anything about President Zelensky. If you don’t know anything about Sultana, you think, well, maybe she’s “Right.” Maybe that’s Ethically Disciplined. Though that’s me being very generous. As she has equated 300,000 War Crimes with being a friend of the Working Class, which seems pretty off. But I’m trying to be generous here, even if it is not Right to so equate President Zelenskyy who won 64% of the vote and every single district in Ukraine (apart from one up near L’viv), whereas Putin is too scared ever to have gone for election in a free and fair vote without, for example, murdering 1m Chechens so he could archætype as a ‘Hero’ before ballots are cast.
So we go to the fourth criterion, which is Mana / Energy. What’s the energy / Mana in what she’s saying? If you don’t have a concept of looking for the “Mana in the meme,” then you might bother to do that. Most of us listening here, we have a sense of what sounds Right / Ethically Disciplined.
We can smell tankydom because we’ve had so much practice. Our training set is millions of memes that have passed us on the timeline since the 24th of February 2022. So that training set has enabled us to scent in date what smells of tankydom in ways normal civilians who don’t spend every spare moment of every day on helping Ukraine defeat Russia in the information war. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore as an analytical method is to drill down into how am I sensing these matters that we now intuitively can without almost a second thought? What is the smell of tankydom? What is the smell of pro-Russian-ness? Because they disguise it all the time. Fig leafs.
Obviously, if it’s coming from RT today, you can... you know it’s Russian theme or Russian Disinfolklore. When it’s coming from Sultana or from some pro-Palestine activists or from the most unexpected people - from your mother or your child or your best friend.
M’ockers (Volya Radio presenter on X Spaces) has often described the interactions she has with her best friend who comes around to moan about migrants. Immanent in that, if you’ve got these words that I’m trying to communicate like Mana, is the energy of the Disinfolklore bearing stories of migrants colonising M’ockers friend’s mind.
Sadly, the BBC is always repeating it. Everyone’s always repeating it. But underlying all of that are different layers of whether it’s the money that funds GB News (which came from these guys who made their money in Russia in the early noughties from oil via Malta). Or whether it’s Farage getting money from RT or Nathan Gill, the Reform leader in Wales who was convicted and is about to be sentenced for exchanging money from Russia for speaking in the European Parliament.
There you can see these genetic, these causal connections with Russia, and that’s great. Many of us suspected it when we would hear how say Nathan Gill or Farage or others are talking Russian Talking Points. The Mana of what they’re saying is so eerily similar to Russia’s main Mana immanent in its information warfare memes that it can’t be a coincidence or these people, like M’ockers friend is, are not innocently being brainwashed unknowingly by Disinfolklore disguised Russian information warfare memes. It does indeed really help every now and again if someone is outed as actually taking Putler’s shilling, as it were. Then it’s much easier to explain to low-information people like most people in our lives who aren’t following this stuff in such granular detail or my friend’s who it’s hard to explain these things to.
With Mana though, we’re looking for... When we don’t know that there’s a conviction for taking Russian cash to oppose Ukraine in the European Parliament. When we don’t know there’s an actual physical genetic connection between Russia and the speaker. When we don’t know the source of the meme. All we have to go on is the meme itself.
This is what I’m trying to teach and inculcate myself and disaggregate the quick... instinctual, intuitional intuition that many of us have now for when we hear certain memes and certain tanky-esque words.
So for me it’s a six-step process.
I scan for the Mana. I try to find and isolate what is the energy / Mana inside this.
Next, I’m identifying its layers here. So Sultana archetyping as Working Class by othering President Zelenskyy, by saying President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. Slightly cynically putting in that, of course, Putin is a dictator and has done more crimes. Then somehow equating that with President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. As mentioned, this is not Right.
So she’s not merely archætyping herself as a friend of the Working Class. She’s not merely modelling generous, earthy virtue. She’s deceptively equating a dictator who outside the Rule of Law has murdered over a million people, with President Zelenskyy who was democratically elected and who commands an army which, sure, has eliminated over 1m Russians. Yet, he has done so within the law.
States have an inherent right to defend themselves. It’s Article 42 of the UN Charter. By contrast, Russia signed up to respect Ukraine and other states’ sovereignty, security (including their territorial integrity). So Sultana is not only Wrongly equating President Zelenskyy with Putin, she is equating the values of the unlawful mass murderer Putin with her own. That is simply not Right or Ethically Disciplined.
The standard which the Code of Positive Trolls uses to distinguish ethical / truthful or rightful behaviour from its opposite is the post World War Two legal and social order. President Zelenskyy is defending that. Sultana, apparently, equates the fact that Putin is a War Criminal with the (false) opinion she picked up at a Paris conference that, truly, President Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class. That’s simply not Right.
The Mana of Sultana’s troll is akin to a species of meme which basically is justifying genocide in Ukraine by some alleged or perceived failure in virtue of President Zelensky or Ukrainians, which of course is the most famous one was that “Ukrainians are Nazis, therefore just kill them all.”
So many people fell for that troll. So you scan for the Mana. You’re looking for the Mana. You’re looking for it in any meme. You’re identifying the layers immanent in the Meme, as I’ve just done with Sultana’s troll. There’s lots of different layers to even this very simple “Putin is a dictator and has done war crimes. But 3e! is no friend of the working class” meme/troll.
Layers there are on the one hand that’s great, she sees that he’s a dictator and he’s done war crimes, but does she know about Lisa?
Does she know about that poor babushka and her goats?
Does she know about the toddler, the human safari?
And all of these, does she know anything about Izium?
Does she remember what went on and all these things?
So this isn’t just War Crimes. This is 250,000+ of them. Crimes Against Humanity too. Does she know this, as she tritely dismisses President Zelenskyy? There’s lots of layers to what she’s saying, even when she says something as simple as “Zelenskyy is no friend of the working class.”
When I hear, there can be a certain tone in which they say that, and it’s not very respectful. Usually, even when I’m writing. I did go through a stage of saying 3e! (pronounced Z), because that was how he... His party had the sound Z from his name.
Now usually I say “President Zelensky” mainly because I would hear reflected from the right in America and from people like Sultana who know nothing about President Zelensky and have no sympathy for him or for Ukraine disrespect and dismissiveness that is contagious in merely referring to President Zelenskyy as merely “Zelenskyy.” There’s a certain sense of contempt. That’s it. So there’s layers. There’s lots of different layers in it.
Then next to characterize the Mana.
So what is it on balance? Is it Positive, Negative or Neutral?
In this case, supporting Ukraine is the metric. You make a call.
So scan for the Mana.
Identify its layers.
Characterise it.
Make a call.
This is what we do intuitively, a million times a day as we’re scanning our timelines. Deciding whether or not to read on or share dome visual, audible or textual meme. We make a call.
When I talk about Contagion and this aspect of the Law of Sympathetic Magic…
So the formal definition of the laws of Sympathetic Magic are:
“Descriptions of a consistent pattern of beliefs, thoughts and practices observed across a wide range of traditional cultures. Their widespread occurrence suggests that they may constitute laws of human thought.”
So that’s the view from anthropology. From philosophy. Of what these Laws of Sympathetic Magic consist?
They are “laws of human thought.”
As I’ve said before, I can’t go that far. What I can say is: I spend my time looking for mental laws affecting native Indo-European-language speaking people like me whose minds, whose native language is an Indo-European language. There’s certain commonalities between all of us who have our minds formed inside Indo-European structures of thought. It’s these commonalities which Russian disinformation can hack and take advantage of.
So while 19th and early 20th century philosophers can talk about the Laws of Sympathetic Magic because they were looking in the colonies for them. They were looking at what they considered to be primitive peoples. They were trying to discern how they think and how they think differently from so-called “civilized” people.
When I encountered this body of work (19/20c literature on Polynesian use of the term Mana), I realized, ah, this is very similar to what we have in disinformation sphere, where you have these very strange ideas repeating, being amplified, which are different, yet the same. They have what Wittgenstein called a quality of Family Resemblance. When you first encounter them, you are disgusted by them. They seem very strange. Then you go away to a metaphorical desert island (you take a break from the Internet) for six months. Return, now everyone believes them.
Like Brexit. It’s a perfect one. Donald’s takeover of the US Republican Party. There’s lots of others.
We have all of these different journeys, mental journeys, which we have gone on ourselves from disgust to casually accepting something.
When Russian disinformationists or Disinfolklorists or MAGA or Brexit or England’s latest far right corporate lobbying group masquerading as a political party “Reform” or in any of our countries take us on these journeys, they purposefully and manipulate our Mana. They ‘-pulate’ our Mana. Shake it up. That process of changing our attitudes, our intentions, our moods, and our motivations, sometimes it happens naturally.
Yet, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people who are deliberately manipulated, like Sultana, by these people. These Russia-adjacent leftists in Paris at this conference. I’m not making any judgment that she is trying to manipulate others. She may well just be an archetypal Useful Idiot.
We see these processes going on. The three Laws of Sympathetic Magic are Contagion, Similarity, and Opposites. There’s really only two which are Contagion and Similarity. Law of Opposites is usually classified as being a part of the Law of Similarity.
Contagion, which is the medium. So you have a source of Contagion.
You have RT today, which is pumping out a meme. That meme itself, once it leaves the Source, manifests the Contagion (Mana). There’s something in it, a Mana, an energy, which then... gets assimilated into a Target. Source, Contagion (Mana), Target.
If we’re talking humans, it’s going into their brain, it’s going into our brains. Contagion is really what I mean by Mana. By energy. Mana is something that passes between us. So the meme itself obviously is going between us. I am posting it. I am the source. You are receiving the meme. You are the target. It’s actually something in the meme which is the contagion. It’s that word mana which I use for contagion and which I worked out is essential to have a grasp of in Disinfolklore and in Disinformation interpretation before I encountered the academic discipline of Cultural Psychology. The discipline which looks most closely today at the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.
The law of similarity really helped me understand this strange phenomenon that, so for instance, that somehow the fact that President Zelenskyy is a native Russian language speaking Ukrainian, who is part of the Ukrainian Jewish community, somehow with enough amplification, this demonstrates to certain minds that of course he’s a Nazi.
Again, it’s so absurd. There is this strange effect in our brains that we will believe opposites if there’s some sort of similarity in it.
I had been trying to understand the pattern that I had already noticed in data: that the more opposite the truth is, the more likely certain minds will believe something. How the Russians achieve this! Donald and MAGA do it as well. Where the completely anti-intuitive thing like it’s the vaccines cause the harm, not the virus take hold of our minds. Even when we know rationally that the virus is the contaminant inside the contagion. We know rationally. We know scientifically. 400,000 scientific papers show the different aspects of the harm of the virus that caused Covid. Billions of people have taken the vaccine. Only a minuscule number of them have been harmed by the vaccine. Whereas billions of people have been harmed by imbibing this horrible virus.
Somehow people, certain minds can be convinced because virus vaccine are similar, are associated that they can be... that they are associated. Cause and effect become reversed, through association and similarity. So the laws and this exploration as part of cultural psychology, which is the discipline it’s become a part of now, were very interesting to me.
This idea of magical thinking, which was always seen as negative. I first encountered Magical Thinking in the context of Brexit. Brexiteers, and particularly this group of n’er do wells in the English parliament called the European Research Group, who actually never did any research was the joke. They were no joke. They were on our airwaves the whole time for ages.
They were magical thinkers par excellence. Manipulators. ‘We’ll leave the European Union. Our biggest market. We’ll become richer.” That’s Magical Thinking. When you look into the literature… When I started to look at it, I saw that, oh, this is often a stage in children’s development before they get cause and effect right. Whereas now, as mentioned in a previous episode, magical thinking isn’t seen as so negative now. It’s a means of innovation, really, basically. You innovate, because you think magically. Because you think you can put this together. The drone warfare kit that Another Alex Ferguson, are working on, there’s probably a lot of magical thinking there. It’s working, which is... which is good.
So this word magic I think is worth just looking into. It appears a lot. We’ve recently seen that movie the “Magus in the Kremlin. The Magus. This “G” sound was associated in the Greeks in early 5th century BC with singing a wailing song of grief. So the tales of woe which M’ockers is so brilliant at recounting. They are really… They are magic. They are the original meaning of magic. As far back we’ve written records.
This is the first time this verb which is the element in magic appears. So to sing a wailing song of Greek a Greek playwright then uses the words in the Persians to describe songs here I’m quoting “that call upon the souls of the dead to appear to the living.” So that’s what Russia does.
We used to always have May 9th - “Victory Day, Russians call it. I attended a few of them in Ukraine, as part of my job. Everyone holds up placards showing photographs of their relatives who supposedly fought in the Second World War. The Immortal Regiment. The whole institution was revitalised after the 2009 demonstrations against Putin stealing the Russian election. It’s a Soviet-era institution. The Immortal Regiment troll in modern Russia is about calling the souls of the dead.
When Putler is talking about the great patriotic war, that’s what he’s doing.
Then you have in this other play, one of the very early uses of this word Gōes, which goes into magic, is in this play. This guy called -I don’t know anything about him- but he’s called Hippolytus. He’s called a Gōes by his father when he attempts to control his father through clever speech.
Where I first became interested in what I learned was called War Magic, which is propaganda, which was used by the fifth Dalai Lama in Tibet.
Basically it became known by their enemies that the fifth Dalai Lama was doing all of these esoteric spells on the enemy. It wasn’t so much the effect of the esoteric spells themselves which caused their enemy to be defeated. They panicked when they heard that he was doing it.
So it’s this use of War Magic as propaganda when Russia tells us what it’s going to do. People get really scared of the nuclear stuff. That is prima facie war magic in exactly the way that I learned about the concept and got particularly interested in it.
So I just mentioned that to say that that’s why I was particularly tuned into thinking about looking at what magic is rather than um this uh like I suppose every country has them. There’s this guy Paul Daniels who was very famous in England in in the 1970s and 1980s as a magician. Or all of those illusionists. Essentially if we take the Disinfolklore perspective and look at what Donald does, what Putler does, but also what President Zelensky does as examples of magic. Then again we need a way of distinguishing between Pootler and Donald and President Zelensky.
I’ll finish up today on this piece which I wrote a year before I... I came up with the word Disinfolklore in March 2022.
And actually ghost originates from this ghost as well, from magic, same route, because he attempts to control them through his clever speech. And that is what Russia does through its propaganda and its disinformation. But it is also what President Zelenskyy does. But the second element in the Code of Roswell Trails, which is right and ethical discipline.
And I was posed this question by scouts recently, which was, well, how do you determine whether something is proper sort of in war? And for me, the ethical discipline, what’s right is defined by international law, by the Geneva Conventions. And none of us, I think,
or most of us wouldn’t approve of any willful flouting of the Geneva Conventions, which are There were some preceding 1949, but the great body of them came in after the war with the Nazis. And so that’s what sets the ethical discipline. And that’s why President Zelensky, quite apart from the fact that he’s a better troll than Pukler,
because we see again and again, the same old stories got the stuff coming out this week from I mean, their lines, that was all he could come up with in America, that stuff, which we’ve heard a million times before. Whereas President Zelensky, I think he’s been on TV every night. He’s done that.
He does his thing from his iPhone every night. Every night the presentation is different. Sometimes he does these really inspiring things which help all of us, keep all of us motivated. So that kind of innovation, that’s the kind of innovation you need if you’re going to build the USSR’s most successful independent TV production company and be one of the most successful actors and a household name in Russia even, before 2013. When he, I think in December 2013, he pulled out of Moscow and left.
This kind of look at how you can affect people’s emotions is precisely what we’re doing when we’re looking at disinformation and propaganda. I’ll leave it there for now.
Just quickly end up with the the idea that which I saw it somewhere else, but I’m quite interested by it, which is just this idea that the left, that Sultana can somehow bring about peace in Ukraine by disarming Ukraine.
This is a perfect example of how the law of similarity and the law of opposites operates. It’s such a bonkers idea. It makes no sense. You just have to think about it for three seconds. Ukraine gives up its arms and then peace will come. But the emotion, the calmness that comes over us when we hear, oh, peace, this is a recipe for peace. We’ll just stop arming them. And I hear it from friends as well, who are properly equally well-educated and intelligent as Zoltana. They’ve fallen for the troll. It’s very hard to break them out of it. But that is our challenge. I’ll leave it at that for now.
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