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

Town Square
1264

I think these are great insights to grief. If we can see the development process as a grieving process it may help us bring more compassion and skill sets to how to process development and lead culture to acceptance and not despair. For myself, I find the loss of my “white, straight America” a real loss and one that actually has nothing to do with POC or orientations. It’s just the loss of this America that was symbolized by the cowboy, the west, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. An America of self reliance and determination. It was my America. It’s gone, development tore it to shreds.

I can also see that the development was necessary and inevitable, but I still grieve the loss. Imagine if you could not see development and only experienced the loss. Projecting your despair on those that development was not picking up makes total sense to me. Calling them racist idiots is not a skillful or compassionate way to handle someone’s grief. Creating space for the loss matters. Skipping this step and just engaging in endless debate or insults is preventing our grieving process from happening.

I think there is also grief expressing in orange. It will be different, more mental, less heart centered. It is creating more fear, less despair. Again, I can feel into this.

A part of this fight, that is healthy is these stages have not been fully transcended culturally, so what aspects of them are dying is still being worked through. I think this is especially meaningful in orange.

1265

This is great. The question I have for you, social media director, is how we enact these ideas instead of just pointing them out? From what I observe, I see you reacting to the most controversial post, I am inclined to run away, all like he is saying.

I get this is no small task to rewrite these platforms. That’s one real problem, the other is there will be more money made in the capitalism of outrage. I am curious how you see this as someone who has control over a social media site. Is what he is proposing possible?

One last thought…this is the essence of it right. They would have to do this without regulation forcing it, regulation would be regulating free speech. It’s controversial if they touch their algorithms, there is very little incentive. I listened to The Rabbit Hole. The women who runs Youtube seemed very concerned but didn’t have a clear vision of what to do about it, and steps they took to bring in opposing ideas to the stream didn’t really work. I am interested in what you think could be done.

1266

Don’t we all self select the threads we wish to dialog within? The vast majority of threads on Integral Life I watch flow by like watching leaves on the river’s surface or sea foam on the oceans waves. And somewhat rarely, I see the “bottle with perhaps a message” bobbing by and feel the need to read or perhaps even dialog.

We’ve discussed previously the concepts of how we communicate Emotive-Qualitative-Quanitative, Time Horizons of Past-Present-Predictive, Analysis-Assessment-Judging-Predictive. Also it was brought up that there might be communications modes that might better work for visual vs verbal, audible vs textual, feminine vs masculine, emotive vs quantitative. There might be some awesome Startup ideas for communications platforms in this.

What I personally try to assess is:

  • Am I attempting to domain-shift the discussion and why do I feel the need to do this?
  • Am I willing to telegraph when and why I’m shifting domains?
  • Can I let the dialog continue organically or must I attempt to shift? (leaves on the river surface)
  • Does the dialog confront my internal states?

To further complicate things, we each are multi-faceted. I might want to “blue sky” a concept that you want to “historically judge”. Or someone might want to take a single present topic, and then predict future dystopian scenarios - or future nirvana scenarios, and perhaps communicate these predictive scenarios as “obviously given”.

Where we are right now in this thread is a seemingly excellent example is some want to have an External Collective/Teal/Emotive-Predictive dialog in a thread that was very much an Internal/External Present/Assessment thread specifically on current Disinformation. Corey has already started an Integral Journalism thread that would seemingly be a wonderful foundation for External Collective/teal/Emotive-Predictive discussion.

There are hundreds of other threads on Integral Life in which to engage. Just looking at the current dashboard the bulk of threads result in little or no dialog. For some reason this one does illicit dialog. Any thoughts as to why?

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1267

There’s two things that I find interesting about this.
The first thing about this is perceptions. I grew up in Brown America. My Kindergarten and the Apartment building I lived in was mostly Japanese, Vietnamese and Phillipino. Yes, most of America was white. And, I don’t think that has been lost except in perception. The vast majority of America is still White. So the first perception you have is that all of America changed from white to brown, when it may just be your local area or your chosen entertainment that changed. With straight or queer, again it’s this idea that queer people didn’t exists before, but of course they did. It was just dangerous to admit it or allow others to describe you as queer. Gay characters were depicted on TV in the 1960’s and 1970’s - LOTS of them when you look, lol. It’s just we never thought of it that way and the topic was danced around.
Then with nostalgia, there is often the tendency to imagine a world that never was. Cowboys as depicted in the movies are a complete mythology. We can choose to believe that mythology or not, and that has nothing to do with what anyone else believes. Those movies still exist and I still watch them. I still enjoy watching Clint Eastwood’s Westerns, but also understand that cowboys never faced off like that in the middle of the street, and I surely never did.

But this all goes back to the idea of mourning the past. Whether it was a real lost past, an imagined lost past, or an imagined past that we can still experience in movies - attachment to the past is one of the first shackles that has to be busted on the path to Waking Up. I would just barely place it in the spiritual, and say people can’t even experience a full life if they are attached to the past.
The pity here is that Christianity doesn’t teach any methods to overcome this, so people think they are Waking Up when in fact they are still in bed pressing the snooze button. Mindfulness Meditations are becoming increasingly popular, and this is a good import from the East to help people cross the threshold of Waking Up.
Now, what to do if people refuse to cross this initial threshold? Well, I guess they are kind of stuck because you can’t force Waking Up. Do we continue to engage them in debates about the past? No, hat’s kind of a waste of time. Did George Washington have slave slaves - yeah, probably. Heck, since my last name “Bennett” pops up in African American family names, my extended family owned slaves, too.
The question is how much do we dwell on the past? I believe that people on the Left who dwell on the past are just as stuck as people on the Right who do so, and pretty much anyone who continues the debate beyond setting the factual record straight is hindering their own Waking Up process.
My ancestors probably beat and raped slaves. That is probably an accurate depiction of what happened. 1,000 years earlier my Celtic, Roman and Anglo Saxon Ancestors waged war and raped and pillaged each other across the British Isles. I myself am detached from those pasts, and any other dark history of the British Isles and America as a whole before 1970. If someone else wants to either live in attachment to either the good or the bad of those pasts, they can if they want, and I’m also detached from whatever they have to say about events from 10,000 bc to 1970 ad.

Yes, there are people on both the Right and the Left stuck at the threshold of Waking Up. Reparations, affirmative action, shame of their privilege and yes calling people racists for not toeing the line. Yes, of course all that happens. And also, yes, racism is still alive and well also. Both subtle and overt, and many people are in fact racists both on the left and the right.
But allowing that external debate to affect one’s internal state is a pity and unnecessary. It IS. Allowing oneself to be dragged into that psychodrama also delay’s one’s Waking Up.

1268

I honestly see this thread as the “General Chat” Thread, regardless of however it started out.

There is also a lot of trash posts in here, as in this:

Let’s face it - discussing what is and what isn’t Information Warfare, propaganda, etc. and how to tell the difference faded out in the first 100 posts or so, and the vast majority of posts are you just posting Information Warfare and Propaganda without being willing to discuss how to tell the difference.

1269

I totally agree with all of this. It’s the death of the American mythology. I feel like civil rights gave us a new mythology to build on, but that too has been crushed. Globalism was trying to build a world mythos, but that seems to be failing.

I don’t yet see a new myth emerging and worse yet there seems to be a purposeful intent to not create one. Our psyches need mythos. Hopefully the new one will come at some point. I don’t know, but losing your cultural myth is no small loss. When I view the crazy through this lens it helps me have more compassion for those who were most identified with it and more appreciation for the role of myth in our lives.

1270

That’s a theme I find myself often returning to. Here’s a brief quote from a piece I wrote several years back, after the death of Osama Bin Laden:

"…the notion of “American Exceptionalism” has nothing to do with an innate sense of superiority on behalf of the American people, but refers to the idea that America is founded upon abstract concepts like liberty, egalitarianism, and individualism, rather than local characteristics like geography, religion, and ethnicity. In other words… the American identity is manufactured from intangible qualities that can only be sustained and propagated through the shared symbolic matrix that underpins the American way of life—and this symbolic matrix was the true target of the 9/11 attacks. The buildings that were attacked — the two towers of the World Trade Center, and the Pentagon — were themselves architectural representations of the strength, scope, and military might of the American Empire, and Bin Laden knew that their destruction would inflict way more damage than any bullet or bomb ever could. Even the numerical date of the attack—9/11—was itself an act of psychological terrorism, perpetuating the sense of panic and emergency every time the phrase is repeated.

Osama bin Laden did not just attack the American people or the American economy, he attacked the American subconscious. Even as we can breathe a sigh of relief that justice has been served and this monster has been finally eliminated from our world, the fabric of our shared American mythos remains as tattered as ever."

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1271

Well, it depends on where you look. There are new Myths emerging, but there are some problems with them:

  • They are often still based on Literal All of Nothing Truth and Literal Mythic concepts rather than just accepting “we don’t know that part yet”. An example is “Therefore Aliens” or the various Global Elite Illuminati Conspiracies, which IMO has turned Rebel Wisdom into yet another whacko off the rails content producer. We now know there were cities built 30,000 years ago. This is an archaeological fact. Just because Historians didn’t know this previously does not mean Rama was an alien, for example.
  • Similarly in the New Age communities there is this Spiritual Mythology that some special people were living in Orion or another uninhabitable star system and decided to go a special mission to rescue planet earth and the Universe.
  • The Matrix mythos where we are living in a simulation. This also unfortunately people take too literally and believe we are actually physically imprisoned in this reality and need to keep taking larger and larger doses of psychedelics to see 'Reality" and escape.
  • The “We Are One” nonbinary mythos.

And so on.

I think the entire problem with these Mythos is most of the people joining them are not Grown Up or Woken Up enough to understand the subtleties.
Maybe we need still separate Mythos - one for the masses and a secret one for the elites, as existed in previous ages and was only torn apart by the Information Age and the Internet. What is good is that the formerly Esoteric Knowledge was torn out of power structures who tired to monopolize it for their own benefit and power. The drawback is that your average person is not yet developed enough to be able to process the Esoteric or handle the conclusions.

1272

Ah, Corey, I think you are conflating some things.

This WAS the case, and so long as it remained in this light, it was fine. What happened was over time more and more Americans started to believe they were superior, and that American lives were more important than lives of people from other countries.
You seem to be in a bit of denial about what led up to 9/11, and the really dirty aspects of American involvement in the Middle East. I don’t say this to abdicate responsibility or culpability of Arabs and / or Muslims, but to point out that it wasn’t a simple matter of America was Great and Noble and that’s why the Muslim Devils attacked us.

You’re far too educated of a man to deny that the United States did very terrible, vile things in a lot of places in order to support this idea of American exceptionalism morphed to American Superiority. Moreover, I’m sure you are aware that what the United States did next - Invade Iraq on the basis of a complete lie - smashed any remaining concept of American Exceptionalism into tiny bits in the eyes of the world and The United States lowered itself down to just another country vying for political and economic dominance.

1273

I think we are in half agreement here. Which, for the internet, is pretty good! I’ll take it.

I absolutely agree that my own enactment of “American exceptionalism” has sadly become rare, when compared to the sort of tribal jingoistic chest-beating that we see so often. But I don’t thank it makes it any less valid — if anything, it feels that much more urgent to re-assert this frame whenever and however we can, or else we risk totally losing the baby of this kind of “rationally-based mythology” to the bathwater of amber imperial superiority.

So none of this is to deny the terrors and tragedies that Pax Americana has inflicted onto the world, often in the name of this sort of broken and down-sampled “exceptionalism”. However, I do try to make a strong case that without these sorts of shared stories, without this sort of rational mythology that helps plug our national identity into worldcentric streams, we risk further regression as “smaller” amber identities carve the nation into their own image.

This is why I think national identities are important, even while I agree with you that, from a higher stage, they may seem somewhat “arbitrary”. But insofar as we have systems and social contracts that extend to all citizens of the nation, those systems and contracts require shared stories and identities in order to support and sustain. Which is why I continue to see the nation-state as a critical stepping stone toward genuine global interdependence, and the national identity as a healthy stage expression that we must better cultivate, and then better transcend.

And the collapse of this shared identity, I think, is what has led to our notions of “loyal opposition” in our political systems to shift away from “loyalty”, and toward 24-7, all-or-nothing opposition.

1274

@raybennett Or we spin this in Integral terms - We had to resort to Red dialog in order to communicate with Red societies in order to provide the best possible Integral development opportunities.

@corey-devos - How would you rank from best to worst political entities/parties that could reinstill a healthy national identity?

1275

There still has to be a reason.
Can you explain to me the reason for invading Iraq from a 2nd Tier Perspective? Not just “We felt like being Red that day”

1276

Is the Nation the only Organization that can do this?
The thing about the United States is that there are only a handful of things that it does that cannot be done by the states (or States split into two States, like Oregon and Washington could be split culturally at the Sierra Nevadas).

As the 21st Century goes on, there fewer and few stories and identities that I want to share with the United States.
The good ideas HAVE TO come first, then people will gather towards good ideas. It doesn’t work to insist on participating in a group with bad ideas and hope at some point that group will form good ideas later.
That’s my basic issue with the United States right now.
I have shared stories and identity with certain regions of the Untied States, but not the vast majority. If 49-51% are in favor of “America First” - I have nothing in common with and no desire to share that identity or story.

“Coming Together” is nonsense if the group is headed towards destructive goals. I Identify with perhaps at most .01% of the US population as a group I would want to share identity and story with as it is now.
It’s like any other Union - how long do you try to save a marriage when there is no shared vision? It doesn’t work to keep the marriage going because of nostalgia and hope that one day the story will change - it won’t lol.

1277

I’m not going to give a “ranking”, simply because it’s one of those multi-zonal “wicked problems” that requires solutions in multiple zones, at multiple levels of scale.

So I would say, off the top of my head, the most important drivers here would likely be:

3rd person
Governing institutions
Educational institutions
Media institutions
Big Tech institutions

2nd person
Enforcing higher/more inclusive standards in our local and online communities
Cultural storytelling and meta-narratives
Families and parenting

1st person
Personal responsibility,
Personal accountability,
Growth and development,
Personal shadow work

1278

One thing really missing here is inclusion / exclusion rules.

Right now, nations are based on exclusion by location at birth.
What a random way to decide who is and isn’t part of a group.

The idea that “All men are created equal” is true through a Green lens, and so nations incorporated this into their constitutions in the age of postmodernism - one man, one vote. Then communism takes it a step further and says everyone should have the same benefits for different amounts of work.

We as a planet have basically realized the extreme postmodernism needs tweaking - but what about that whole “all men are created equal and get the same vote” Green lens? OK, we wrote in women a hundred years ago. That was nice.

Should citizenship be restricted to place of birth and should citizenship be given regardless of any merit besides being born? Should all levels of citizenship be equal?

1279

Oh surely it isn’t, it simply represents one particular level of scale in a critical sequence. As Jonathan Haidt points out in his recent article, the history of humanity bends toward increasing cooperation. I see it as a broken link in a much larger chain of evolving and self-including identities that take us from family, to town, to state, to nation-state, to international communities/alliances, to global cooperation. Each of these layers generates its own kinds of personal meaning, self-relatedness, shared culture, etc.

The nation-state remains one of the primary self-organizing forces of mutual cooperation in the world today, with its own robust legal and justice systems, election processes, infrastructure, social contracts, etc. that shape the lives of every member of that social holon. Which is precisely what it is — a self-organizing social holon that has its own verifiable LR-quadrant existence. It empirically, inter-objectively exists.

The problem, as I see it, is that while citizens are all undeniably members of this social holon, and while this social holon’s LR systems apply “equally” across all of its members, we have shredded the LL cultural fabrics of shared identity that keeps the social holon intact, and which allows us to continue selecting for these LR systems in the first place. And when we lose the interior referents that keep these exterior signifiers in place, there’s nowhere to go except to regress back to smaller, less inclusive social holons.

When you destroy one holon in a stack, you also destroy all holons above it. Which is obvious — if you kill all cells, you kill all organisms composed of those cells. But it’s a bit trickier for social holons, because the overall space still remains after the governing structures have collapsed. Which means that, if the United States lost its unity, had a civil war, and disintegrated back into 50 competing micro-nations, not only would we lose our ability to respond to global-level life conditions such as climate change, but we end up handing the global economic holon over to the same transnational corporations that are currently generating so much resistance to the emergence of new forms of individual and collective self-organization.

One thing really missing here is inclusion / exclusion rules.

Would you agree that, when it comes to the idea that “the direction of history is toward increasing cooperation”, we are becoming more inclusive, and less exclusive, at every level of scale?

My family is also based on exclusion by circumstances of birth. But my family is also plugged into a larger community, which is more inclusive of more circumstances. And that community is plugged into an even larger community, which is even more inclusive of a greater number of circumstances. And up we go, until we get all the way toward genuine, integral-level “global citizenship” stages of cooperation and self-organization, that are inclusive of all human circumstances, regardless of where you were born. And even that gets plugged into a “kosmocentric” stage that is inclusive of all possible expressions and circumstances, wherever or whenever we find them.

It’s a glass onion composed of multiple, self-transcluding layers of community, each with its own sustaining cultures and systems. And when one of those layers becomes too broken, it begins to fracture and fragment all of the layers that were built upon it.

That’s how I see it, anyway!

1280

I see history as cyclical. There is a lot of historical evidence that borders as we conceive of them simply could not exist even as late as the 1700’s. There was generally freedom for individuals and small groups to travel across borders all throughout history and only in the past 200 years have we have limited this. Romans, Babylonians and Greeks could care less if a traveler was not a citizen of their country, unless they were large armed groups.
So I actually see the opposite as more historically accurate - the Modern Nation State has forced an artificial separation of peoples that was simply impossible in previous millennia.

There is this idea about a Big Beautiful Wall …

While the nation CAN promote inclusion, it also has the power to promote exclusion and further separation.

1281

Can we compromise and call it a “bumpy spiral”? :slight_smile: The short path always goes up and down in fits and starts of progressive and regressive waves, while the long path tends to return us to a similar position, but one notch above where we were. I certainly do not have any romantic longing to live in the world as it existed before 200 years ago. (I’d have to crunch the numbers, but I would be willing to bet that, before 200 years ago, there were more enslaved individuals in the world than there were individuals with the economic means to travel more than 30 miles away from their place of birth, let alone move freely from country to country.)

There is this idea about a Big Beautiful Wall …

While the nation CAN promote inclusion, it also has the power to promote exclusion and further separation.

In my view, while it’s fine for nation-states to have borders, the “big beautiful wall” is perfect example of broken amber solutions that emerge in a vacuum where healthy amber should be. And we create that “healthy amber” by plugging it into the next higher stage — in this case, allowing modern Orange universal values to permeate that amber national identity.

Average neighborhoods were once inclusive of certain kinds of families, but excluded other kinds of families, often based on skin color. Until the values of the next stage(s) emerged, which plugged local self-organization pressures of neighborhoods into the broader national currents of civil rights, which now extends to all members of the national social holon. I would absolutely hate the idea, for example, of civil rights being implemented on a state-by-state basis, rather than at a national level, because implementing them nationally creates an upward draft of moral development with accountability that extends down into the social sub-holons. The legal practice of civil rights as we know it is only about 60 years old, and I regard this as one of the greatest accomplishments of inclusive “increased cooperation” in the history of our species.

So my hypothesis is, a nation without a healthy amber national identity cannot survive for long without collapsing into civil war, because it quickly regresses to small partisan identities and ideologies that do not consider other identities/ideologies to be part of the same civic body.

And that healthy amber identity is maintained (and ultimately transcended/included) by the next stage of development. When that healthy national identity no longer exists, the vacuum is filled by the worst excesses of amber — bigotry, sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. Which results in things like “big beautiful walls” that double down on exclusion. So the only way to combat these “lesser” forms of amber identity, is by promoting a greater amber identity that is properly integrated into orange universalism.

That said, I also agree with you that our nation-states have often become overly calcified, which is itself preventing more global identities from emerging and sustaining themselves. The lines on the map have often become too opaque. I think this problem is actually due to nations burning at both ends — both regressive elements that are deconstructing it from below, as well as unregulated transnational elements that are deconstructing it from above. And of course, in many of our political systems, these sub-national and trans-national powers have teamed up in order to dismantle the sorts of federal-level regulations that hold our society together.

1282

I want to dig into the cultural storytelling and meta narratives piece a bit. This is more my passion than politics anyway. I love what the MCU has been doing with the American mythology. They are showing the way that “the good fight” of American Exceptionalism can have terrible consequences and how hard it is to get around that.

I thought Wanda Vision was brilliant with the conversation on grief and guilt. How do we own the extraordinary power we have and process the immensity of the mistakes made when we use it? Falcon and Winter Soldier examined how we move forward with the American mythos. The MCU is looking at rehabilitating the American myth. I don’t know if we can, but I love their effort. Curious what your thoughts are.

@raybennett It’s important to realize that myths live in the subtle body, not gross body. I think this is where so much confusion lies. I think one real issue we have in the west is that we were severed from our indigenous traditions. Frozen is based on the Sami culture, one of the few remaining indigenous European cultures. I think its success is due, in part, to a deep need for this missing piece. The spirits Elsa encounters are not “real” in the gross world, but they help her deal with gross world issues. Believing there is only gross reality is a very western materialism mistake IMO. From aliens or Orion, are these experiences interpretations of subtle body phenomena that the West doesn’t know how to process, so they create gross body narratives or dismiss it altogether. This narrative may be foolish but remembering how to process the subtle body phenomena may be worth some effort.

The beauty of art is it lets us examine the myths. Another problem with the “new world order” is we are not watching the same stories as much anymore. I think this is true with music too. There doesn’t seem to be mythic storytellers in music now the way there use to be.

Together Wendy, we can live with the sadness
I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I don’t know when we’re going to get to that place
Where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun
But until then tramps like us, baby we were born to run

American Mythos…I miss it!

1283

I actually think there is a new American Mythos emerging, one that balances and fills out and fine-tunes the dying one, and is its analog. Besides our exceptionalism, we are experiencing our ordinariness, our commonness with other parts of the world, other nations: we too can become divided/polarized; we too are subject to the deterioration of democracy; we too can experience inept or corrupt leadership and institutions and corporations; we too can be ravaged by disease; we too are subject to the forces of nature.

We are filling out and refining our commitment to liberty–realizing that it actually requires constraints on rights and privileges; that responsibility and sacrifice are necessary for freedom to actually “work.”

When it comes to egalitarianism, we are fine-tuning that through truth-telling and “owning up,” acknowledging that it has always been aspirational, not an actual lived reality for many despite our proclamations.

And interdependence is the mythos trying to emerge to supplement the emphasis on individualism.

If this myth fully emerges–recognition of America’s commonness, of constraints as necessary to liberty, truth-telling for egalitarianism, and interdependence for healthy individualism–we will be more truly exceptional.

Common, constraints, owning up/truth-telling, interdependence–these are humble words that as of now lack capital letters, are not viewed as lofty. They borrow a little from some Eastern cultures (as some Eastern/Asian cultures could stand to borrow a little more from the West.) But I say, they are to be celebrated at this point in time in the U.S., for they are necessary, imo, for seeing and creating ourselves more holistically, more wholly. And I do think that something akin to this is what is trying to emerge.

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