Information Warfare Education, Propaganda, and How to Tell the Difference

Town Square
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I know I repeat myself a lot, but when we come across worldviews that are incompatible with our own (which absolutely will happen, some views simply cannot mix), I think a useful strategy is to then take the next step and shift awareness to the values and polarities that are animating those views to begin with. For example, I disagree with many of FermentedAgave’s stated views (as much as I understand them anyway), but I often feel a very strong resonance with the underlying values, because I can find them within myself as well.

It continues to be my naive hope that, if two people can muster enough curiosity, empathy, and anti-fragility to identify these shared values, then maybe some new views can emerge between us. It’s an uphill battle, here on the internet where each of us lives in our own custom-tuned information bubble that manufactures and mediates the majority of our views for us, but I still have hope :slight_smile:

I think @FermentedAgave’s views about “Marxism/Maoism” are short-sighted and polarized, but I think I can understand the underlying values those perceptions are coming from, values that cause him to be biased toward “rugged individualism” and suspicious of any/all forms of collectivism. I personally find this particular view to be limited, partial, and the result of a broken polarity (comparing the negative qualities of one pole to the positive qualities of another pole). But again, I can resonate with the values that are animating that view. I am also suspicious of collective-oriented solutions that ignore or diminish the fundamental dignity of the individual, just as I am suspicious of our present “late-stage capitalism” that has emerged after four decades of fetishizing individualism, competition, and extrinsic value over intrinsic value.

This is what informs my overall political compass — constantly rethinking my own polarities and preferences, and then applying what I see to the actual pendulums and conditions of the real world. In an integral space, we should probably be automatically suspicious of any particular narrow ideology, because all ideologies are operating within a larger polarity matrix, and emphasizing only one pole over another. (For example, Individualism/libertarianism/rights needs to be integrated with collective welfare/social programs/responsibilities).

So my personal political compass is almost entirely “both/and”, though sometimes when I apply that philosophy to the conditions on the ground, it necessarily takes the form of “either/or”, because “integral politics” is in many ways the art of being skillfully and deliberately partial, and because we are forced to constantly reconcile our ideals with the real-life wrecking ball inertias of the political pendulum. This overall meta-view is what allows me to talk with people who have somewhat different views than myself – libertarians, christian fundamentalists, socialists, CRT-advocates, and yes, even Qanon folks who are still waiting in the streets for the return of JFK Jr. so he can anoint Trump as President :rofl:

As for a reminder of what these fundamental political polarities are, which we should be using to constantly rethink our own political philosophy, check out this discussion here:

We live in a time when our political views are rapidly becoming our primary religion. I remain convinced that meta-discussions like these are the only way we can prevent this sort of cultish regression.

tl;dr: Shitty views should be negated, but the underlying values should be transcended/included.

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I think also that things are shifting, particularly in certain “cells” within Progressive communities.
I believe this is due to the 4th Major Scale, as more Progressives move from Green Tier into Teal and are forming Teal communities, either structured and formal or ad-hoc flexible communities that ebb and flow organically.

Internal / External - For the past 20 years or so I have been practicing a variation of Internal / External. I first learned the idea and started practicing that we are responsible for our own internal state through NLP about 20 years ago, and this has expanded recently in my awareness and practice of Kriya Yoga and also with shadow work. The last two communities seem to attract more “lefties”, but that may just be my perceptual bias.

Agape - Another growing trend are communities that practice some kind of “Earth Mother”, “Divine Feminine” with a more “allowing” or accepting approach to transformation in progressive communities.

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I was actually stunned with admiration as I read your comment, “The question being asked is “Am I the bad guy?”. It’s a completely different question and goes much deeper.” Quite profound actually.

Your views and style of interacting are quite good and often poignant @raybennett :slight_smile: … Inquiry is my communication style and many people call it passive aggressive. I invite you to judge me and my views, critique them please, let’s grow together. ~ Peace :slight_smile:

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I try to avoid judging people, but it’s not an absolutist “never judge” kind of thing. Feelings and emotions I also try not to judge.

But I think ideas are fair game for judgement - as in intellectual reasoning and concepts.

I’ll have to think a bit about “values”. I see values as emotions linked to an intellectual concept.

I think a lot of people believe that their ideas are them, and I recognize that people often feel negative emotions when their ideas are judged or criticized, because they see that as a judgment of them as a person.
The trade off is that if some ideas are not challenged, it can be detrimental to an individual or community.

As an example, let’s say you work at a place and are late a few times. But someone keeps telling everyone that you are “always late”. everywhere and in every discussion, he makes a joke about how you are “always late”. It’s human nature that if if you do not take care of this, people in the office will start to actually think you are “always late”, and notice it more when you are late just as often as everyone else. If you try to correct this person but he still continues to repeat other exaggerations about you (you take longer breaks, you are always in the bathroom, you steal office supplies, you are always upset, you are crazy, etc) you have to escalate it a bit, because just the nature of typical organizations is your boss might start to believe these things. You might even start to believe him, lol.

It’s one thing to judge the person making telling these tales about you as a person, and a completely different matter to just set him straight with increasingly firm language or other actions.

This is how I saw it a few months ago with @FermentedAgave when he was in he stage of flooding the forum with a constant stream of what I think is propaganda. Now, I think most people have been fairly well “inoculated” against the idea that Integral is a branch of Maoism, and all the rest, lol. Now I’m kind of just wondering if he will see it himself, but I don’t have a great stake in the outcome if he does or doesn’t.

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Thanks for the long thought out reply @raybennett I do appreciate it. :slight_smile: I agree with this observation entirely. I would like to expand on your observation through inquiry, if you’re okay with us doing so?

I often suggest there are two polarities … that the connection points between them are holistic or integral. With that as a preface may I inquire; is there another tactic or technique that could be employed other than challenged?

If yes what might they be and how could we encourage a communication dialog to explore these? Have a conversation on what the positive and negative effects of each might reveal to us as individuals or to the value of our community?

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Yes. In an online medium there are fewer options than face to face.
I’m not saying I’ve exhausted all efforts or “nothing works”.
But online I’ve noticed that particularly in political discussions and particularly on the right, there is a certain dynamic that does not exist when discussing history, for example.
The tendency seems to be to make assumptions about the other side, and give a whole personality and background. You know, liberal men are soft and wimpy and have their emotions easily hurt (snowflake and so on). I’d say a large majority of people oriented towards the Right have a straw man image of people on the Left, and even moreso people in the Center, such as myself. The tactic I am using is to remove the straw man Liberal as a debate target from the get-go.

Note as a young man I was very much in predominantly “right” communities. My experimentation with the left only started after I was around 30 and I was watching where the right was headed after 9-11 and the lie revealed about WMD’s in Iraq.

Other tactics and strategies I use face to face - I guess look at my post here:


That’s a tone I adopt specifically for men on those specific topics, and the poster invited bringing things out of the shadows and discussing them.

It’s my opinion that this kind of dialogue is sorely lacking in modern culture, and it’s also my opinion that men crave it. Both men and women are completely unbalanced in modern society, but each has different needs to bring them into alignment.
The point I think relevant to this discussion is boundaries and accountability. I think “green tier” approaches are extremely lacking if an individual just refuses to accept others’ boundaries and accountability for themselves.
I think I read somewhere that Ghandi recognized that his strategy and tactics worked specifically because the British had achieved a certain level of awareness of themselves, and might not have worked against Nazi Germany, for example.
What I see in the past 20 years is almost a disappearance collapse of Orange Tier in political discourse at the extremes of the Left and the Right. On the right we see it descending into Amber or Red. In my judgement, it’s more efficient to engage in a strong Orange debate when a person or group refuses to engage in good faith in Green methods.
Also in another case - if they are engaging in good faith but seem to have shadows that are impeding a true Teal discussion, then again I think we have to go back to Amber or Red and address those shadows.

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Hi @gnosisman

The Integral community either as an offshoot of or by coincidence aligns very closely with an elite run collectivist based philosophy. Most would call this a Marxist derived ideology.

You say Democratic Republics have caused comparable harm to Socialist/Communist “experiments”. While I agree that our very own Democratic Republic has committed some, by modern standards, horrific injustices, would you also agree that our Western Democratic Republics are also the avant-garde at progressing out of these very same developmental stages? What would be examples of others large scale societies eclipsing our Western societies in progressive development?

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Thanks for the detailed political view @corey-devos
I would say that I have been looking deeply at Integral Theory - and Integral Life - for this both/and that you talk too, but only seem to find a Marxist drumbeat to Collectivism. I think among your peers on the Left, you might have the view that you are “Inclusive” when in dialog about only how fast, how radical, how forceful that implementation of Collectivism. This not if by how fast would also seem to show in the lack of breadth and depth across the domains of “making the world work”. I know you think you’re curating some materials that bridge Right and Left, Individual and Collective, but the IL audience doesn’t seem to find this genuinely expressed here based on posts and discussions.
So likewise, I think your views might be wrapped in an ever deepening and divergent web of Integral lexicon based upon attachment to a very specific contextual underpinning upon which you base both your extrinsic and intrinsic values.

I know that that Left has for the most part dropped religion as an outdated at best, destructive at worst concept. It’s quite easy to do this as we deconstruct everything, then justify spinning new variations utilizing critical analysis (remember x, y and z?). It is becoming quite apparent to those on the Right, as well as many on the Left that the Left’s embrace of Politics as Religion and Scientism’ish as Religion is exactly the cause of angst, division in the world today. The world is cluing in to the negative impacts of looking for Spirit in Politics, as opposed to having the experience of and offering a balanced wholistic individual choice based society.

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I’m very curious what exactly your motive is for continued discussions?
Really, I’m curious.
Are you hoping to convince Corey that you are correct, or others that you deem are all part of this “Marxist Drumbeat Collectivism”?
In the beginning I was thinking you might be open to actually receiving data or other views, but after perhaps a thousand posts it’s obvious you don’t want to see it any other way than the perspective you had when you entered into the discussion.
I am trying to find a reason for you to be participating in these forums and I’m coming up completely empty.

Except this - maybe you know deep down that your entire point of view is on fragile thin ice and completely … wrong. And maybe, just maybe if you repeat your narrow mantra enough times you might just even convince yourself?

Other than that I just can’t see why you are here.
Can someone enlighten me?

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Honestly you display the same basic personality traits that I witnessed in dozens of interviews with communists in Eastern Europe from 1998 - 2008. It’s the tactics of a person saying things they are told to say and think they believe but when pushed on details you experience cognitive collapse and use a variety of dodgey techniques to get out of actually responding to what people are asking you. It’s perfectly obvious to everyone except yourself. The only one marching to a collectivist drumbeat in here seems to be you, but it’s in your shadow so you throw it around against everyone else to divert your own brain from having to think of your own faults.

Back to this thought - can you face yourself and understand that you actually are the communist (catch-all term used in NeoCon-speak for “bad guy”)?

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Agape. I love you Ray and feel your angst and thrashing about in life and spirituality. Together we grow.

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Education or Propaganda or disinformation?

Seems Change.org gave it an overt shot to cancel Thanksgiving for us. Further proof of Systemic Racism in America? Or simply a Marxist playbook tactic to destroy a secular national holiday that creates common bounds within our society?

Excerpt:
we live in a new era when the left sees nearly everything through the reductive lens of identity politics. It sees much of American history as a racist project that should be erased. This is the motivation of a petition campaign to censor the Pilgrim editorial.

The effort comes via Change.org, a website that calls itself “the world’s platform for change.” It mobilizes campaigns to promote progressive causes. The petition driver is Randy Kritkausky, an author who writes about Native Americans.

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Disinformation, Propaganda or English Education?

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Conservatives trying to ban Toni Morrison from schools — education or propaganda or disinformation?

It’s odd to me, to complain about censorship and “cancel culture” while engaging in blatant censorship and cancel culture.

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I’d say you really haven’t looked very hard then :wink: Do you actually watch or listen to the member discussions we put out every week?

Unless of course we are calling everything to the left of Ayn Rand “Marxism”, which I am sure you would agree would be a very silly thing to do.

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Seems Virginian’s think their Educational Apparat needed to be reeled in a bit so parents voted out the CRT candidate and in with someone they felt would listen. Isn’t that exactly how our Democracy is supposed to work?
If reading material causes undo angst, nightmares, distress in kids perhaps perhaps it should be reevaluated for age appropriateness.

Do you think it appropriate to expose our children to the worst atrocities of Sinaloa Cartel, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Castro, Andrew Jackson, Civil War, WW I, WW II, Mexico, MS13, Khmer Rouge, Fentanyl, CCP/Xi Jinping in order for them to get an education? At what age would you consider it Integral to teach the horrors of really anything?

Aren’t you being a wee bit melodramatic equating this to “Cancel Culture”?

The New Republic isn’t biased at all…

image

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I do tune in and keep waiting for a crumb :slight_smile:

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Well again, you must not be watching very carefully. Have you watched our Social Justice episode of The Ken Show? Have you read or watched his comments on Marxism? Have you heard him criticize woke identity politics in nearly every episode we do? Have you watched our discussion of the major and minor scales of integral political theory? It really seems to me that you will label any attempt whatsoever to understand, integrate, and regulate the collective dimensions as “marxism”.

As for the bias check, as I’ve said before, bias is fine as long as it isn’t extreme – what is most important is their High Factual Reporting score. We can more easily account for bias in our info terrain than we can straight up lies.

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100% yes. We should absolutely teach the horrors of human history to our students. Why shy away from our history? Because it makes us uncomfortable? Better to learn our history and all of its brutalities, while also learning about the long arc of moral and epistemic progress.

“If reading material causes undo angst, nightmares, distress in kids perhaps perhaps it should be reevaluated for age appropriateness.”

I am pretty sure it’s causing undo angst, nightmares, and distress for un/undereducated parents, not for the students.

If we have the expectation that young 18 year old adults can defend our civilization for us, then they should have the opportunity to be fully educated on what it is they are being called to defend, warts and all, by the time they reach the age of enlistment.

No, I do not think it is melodramatic to equate this with cancel culture. I mean, if the right is going to say Dr. Seuss was an example of cancel culture, while trying to remove one of America’s truly great authors from school curricula, then I’m going to point out the hypocrisy. Just like I call out the hypocrisy of the left when they engage in traditionally conservative strategies of censorship.

BTW, I also see the following as examples of conservative cancel culture:

  • calling for government censorship of CRT
  • kicking Liz Cheney out of the state GOP because she is unwilling to repeat the lies about a stolen election
  • Colin Kapernick
  • The Dixie Chicks
  • Boycotting Nascar
  • Burning Nikes
  • Burning Beatles albums
  • Burning witches
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Is Qanon burning witches again? Or are you just being melodramatic? :slight_smile:

As of today, we have a mostly sort of free market economy where you can spend your money where you want to spend it, for whatever reasons you want.

Yeah, Cheney has gotten herself into a political kerfuffle like politicians often do. I don’t think she’s cancelled, but she’s deviant enough from her party that they don’t want her representing them. She can easily switch party affiliations if she likes.

Kapernick was given 11 starting opportunities his last season AFTER his protests and recovery from 3 shoulder surgeries. He went W1-L10 fumbling 9 times. Was he “cancelled” or “cut”? Or just a pouting prima donna past his prime and milking the race huckster circuit for a bit of juice?

The massive government bureaucracies are eventually accountable for what they do, as slow as it might be. So the citizenry will provide their feedback via the ballot box - and possibly the courts. It’s a slow feedback process but I do believe the United States was founded on citizens having this feedback. It’s only in Socialist / Communist societies that Citizens are stripped of their input, influence, opinion, and power.

I would think an Integral approach would be to honor our citizens, their needs, and to incorporate into how they are “served” even if they are a lower development levels. Almost sounds inclusive. If the professionals in the swamp know what’s best, I think the citizens would cheer in support. If the swamp pro’s are off track, it’s not a big deal. They’ll just get some “feedback”. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?