Disinfolklore
How to Detect and Defeat the Disinfolklore Universe Before it Destroys Civilization
Now that the Executive branch of the United States government is openly defying a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling,
’s analysis that the U.S.’s founding fathers “didn’t envision that the people would be anaesthetised that they would throw away our system of government” seems prescient. It’s time to look closely at the nature of what has so anaesthetised us - Disinfolklore.When brilliantly astute analysts like
, , and the struggle for a new vocabulary and adequate metaphors to describe our current epoch, we know we have a problem. It’s time to understand what is different about this age over previous authoritarian twilit moments.I only see the systemic nature of the Disinfolklore Universe enveloping us, because I lived in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. Today, comparing Druidey Don Disinfolklore Trump’s Made-for-TV Cabinet meetings with the Office, the Apprentice or even the Truman Show is the best we can do. Until, that is, we begin to understand the totality of the system enveloping us inside a Disinfolklore Universe.
While what we are experiencing emanating from Russia and MAGA has some family resemblance to television, art or previous eras’ Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatuses, humanity has never been confronted by a Disinfolklore Universe of this scale, ambition, and power. The is why we need a new means to describe, explain and understand what is happening to us. Here’s how to detect the Disinfolklore Universe’s emanations in memes and how to defeat its weaponisation of our minds, before it destroys us, our communities and our civilisation.
In 2016 I first detected the Disinfolklore Universe[1] now creeping through humanity’s biological and computational neural networks, like translucent triffids rewilding the garden of Eden. Then, the Disinfolklore Universe threatening to encompass us was in its infancy. I was a diplomat posted to eastern Ukraine. Russia’s army, cosplaying as Little Green Men, Polite Folk and Odin-worshipping soldiers from the Nazi inspired “Wagner” corps, had occupied part of Ukraine in 2014. My job was to establish the facts about security incidents caused by Russia’s Disinfolklore-justified military occupation of part of Ukraine.
One Saturday, my manager phoned me from inside the Russia-occupied and Russia-designated “Luhansk Folk’s Republic” (LFR). According to him, a “doctor” in LFR had walked into the MGB (Russian occupiers’ “internal security service” – so-named to conjure up the folk memory of the Stalin-era forerunner of the KGB: MGB). The Walk-In said his “common law wife and her underage daughter,” located in the non-Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province (where I was that day), were about to be “cut into pieces” by a Ukrainian “Nazi.” He tasked me with checking on the two damsels in distress.
Something, intuitively, sounded artificial about the linguistic formula “common law wife and her underage daughter.” Working in that Steppe-land Locus Amœnus, I had already realised that I perceived part of reality through cognitive lenses (archetypes) that had entered my mind as a small child from folktale-inspired stories. Here, Russian Disinfolklorists were leaning into this aspect of Indo-Europeans’ cognition and riffing off what Karl Jung suggested are the primordial archetypal identities[2] of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction, using an artificial-seeming set-up, in protective males who would undergo any ordeal to rescue from an ogre such damsels in distress stirred my suspicion; triggering what I now call my “Incoming Troll Radar.”[3] The first tool, then, in our arsenal is Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy – Tool 1.
Tool 1 – Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy
Disinfolklore, as an analytical method, enables us to perceive how those seeking to manipulate us use archetypes immanent in ordinary-seeming stories to create contemporary legends masquerading as, for example, news or political speech. The character whom I call Duncey Putin (for to combat archetyping at the kind of scale Russia and Make America Great Again (MAGA) archetyping works, we need to take ownership of our own archetyping) said of Ukraine four days before Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022:
‘Like it or not, take it, my beauty.’
Duncey Putin was archetyping Ukraine as a woman who needed to submit to her man (Russia). Duncey Putin is, like his fellow Saint Petersburg lawyer Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, an archetypal folkloric dunce who seldom learns from his mistakes. His image imprinted in our minds is wholly a creation of careful archetyping – bare chested man on a horse; bare chested man trolling for fish with his bendy rod; nurturing father figure posing with a (anæsthetised) tiger;… Duncey Putin is, like Druidey Don Disinfolklore himself Donald Trump, one of the greatest archetype salespersons we have ever known. Understanding their power / Mana / energy as archetyping shaman-tricksters, without learning to see how they archetype practically every time they speak is, for us mere mortals, a superpower. It is this book’s purpose to teach you how to perceive archetyping in any kind of data, and to use this power to protect our communities from those who wish to sow division using manipulative tropes. International lawyers, because they are unconsciously literate in Archetypal Disinfolklore, interpreted correctly that line by Duncey Putin as a reference
“to a vulgar Russian rhyme about necrophiliac rape, implying an intention [mens rea] to inflict similar destruction on Ukraine and a view of Ukraine as a [feminine] corpse.”[4]
The “vulgar Russian rhyme” Putin was referencing has obvious Disinfolklore connotations – Sleeping Beauty is one of the primary archetypal characters in Indo-European culture and folklore. The song comes from a Soviet-era Russian band called “Red Mold.” The exact song lyric is:
“Sleeping Beauty in a coffin, I crept up and f**ked her. Like it, or dislike it, sleep my beauty.”
Becoming literate in Archetypal Disinfolklore will help you to learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you might learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity like a witch’s curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify archetyping trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways, in real time, before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the second tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.
Tool 2 – Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars
So let’s call our Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars “Tool 2”! Later we’ll learn of what our Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars consist – their elements - and how they work (clue: it’s all about the Code of Positive Trolls - Tool 6 in any aspiring Counter Disinfolklorist’s tool kit). By the end of this book, you’ll be a fluent Counter Disinfolklorist, like me. This won’t mean you’ll always recognise when you are being trolled or when, unconsciously, you’re trolling others. It will though maximise your chance of avoiding being caught in Disinfolklore-wrought cults like MAGA, Russkiy Mir, or some worse abomination that’s yet to emerge out of our current Disinfolklore Universe. So expect a bit of repetition which is a feature in Disin/folklore, and any good teaching material.
The “cut into pieces” aspect of the threat facing the two damsels in distress also seemed off. Such primeval savagery outside Russia-occupied Ukraine only existed inside story-borne artefacts of Russia’s Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus (which it was, in the manner of a nineteenth century Antiquarian folk-tale collector, my job to gather together, analyse and parse into patterns that helped us understand the security threats facing us on the front-line). Later I discovered the primordial foundation myths in several Indo-European cultural traditions[5] involved universes being created out of bodies cut into pieces. It is not clear if the Russian manufacturers of Disinfolklore items like this tale about the Mother and the Maiden are consciously reaching back into millennia of Indo-European tropes and trolls, or if, as is much more likely, they’re just following instructions in their Combat Propaganda - the name Russians give for what I call Disinfolklore – manuals.
Tool 3 – Look for the Mana in the Meme!
In Archetypal Disinfolklore, we don’t care too much about the intention (mens rea) of the purveyors of Disinfolklore, or even who the source of the items of Disinfolklore are. Instead, we focus mainly on what’s immanent in the memes, informational units, or stories we hear, see or feel. Sometimes it’s a Russian Disinfolklorist designing a meme to hack our rational thought systems (to bypass our Incoming / Outgoing Troll Radars – Tool 2). Other times it can be our newly indoctrinated MAGA family member or trusted news source conveying the meme into our minds, unconsciously furthering the Disinfolklore Universe designers’ ends. Often we ourselves are, unknowingly, communicating onwards Disinfolklore which affects the moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations of those whom we’re influencing in precisely the same manner as the originator of the item of Disinfolklore imagined we would. Since the effect is the same – manipulating us or others into mental and physical activities that accord with the Disinfolklore Universe’s malignant designs for us and our communities - it’s better that we learn to look for the Mana / energy inside memes and informational units - rather than worrying about the intention immanent within or origin or ultimate source of the specific items of Disinfolklore. So we “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” (in this context, “Mana” means power or energy or immanence– we’ll, also, come back to this). Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra, then, is Tool 3 in our analytical arsenal for spotting and then countering potential Disinfolklore trolls.
Yet, in those details - the use of the archetypal bogeyman villain (having worked in eastern Ukraine at that point for over a year, I knew rationally that the “Ukrainian Nazi” was wholly the creation of Russian propagandists (Disinfolklorists)); the mythological sounding “cut into pieces;” and the folklore-borne archetypal characters of the Mother and the Maiden (manifesting in this Disinfolklore item as the strange-sounding “Common Law Wife and Her Underage Daughter”) - I intuitively detected part of what distinguishes the Disinfolklore genre of folktale and contemporary legend from others: artificiality, strategic construction from archetypes, stock characters and tropes selected for their power to move Disinfolklore consumers’ emotions in predictable ways. Disinfolklorists sculpt and aim their trolls according to where their potential victims chart on, for example, the different dimensions on the Openness Conscientiousness Extrovertness Agreeableness Neurotic (OCEAN) or Myers-Brigg psychological personality inventory models’ scales. If you are lower than average on the “Conscientiousness” and higher than average on the “Neurotic” scale, you’re a perfect potential recruit for Make America Great Again (MAGA) Disinfolklore about migrants coming to eat your pets. Disinfolklore is a mechanism that effected what Russian military theorists call “Reflexive Control.”[6] Disinfolklore transports its carriers into promoting activities which unknown to we who are infected by it furthered the strategies of Disinfolklore Universe’s designers.
Tool 4 - Inner / Outer Realm immanences
In such a Disinfolklore Universe as the LFR (as in the MAGA Disinfolklore Universe occupying the minds of millions of Americans today), the fabric of every dimension of our lives - work, personal relationships, life choices, fates - is infused with an Inner / Outer Realm division communicated through a polyphonic All Channel (media, mental, interpersonal) memetic onslaught. Once the Inner / Outer Realm division immanent in the item of Disinfolklore passes from that Informational Unit / meme into our minds, we begin to perceive the actual world through the threats to the sovereignty, security and / or prosperity / fertility of whichever Inner Realm this particular item of Disinfolklore has manipulated us into believing that we must defend. Our moods, motivations, intentions and attitudes are further formed by constantly iterating and repeating Disinfolklore so that the Inner / Outer Realm division passes from the items of Disinfolklore (and their component memes), through our minds, into the actions we take In Real Life. The power of Disinfolklore to create Facts On The Ground out of entirely made-up memes is then further mobilised by the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s designers and operators (whether from MAGA, Russia or those behind Brexit Disinfolklore) to entrench further division between those in the Inner and Outer Realms and community among those inside the Inner Realm (who are expected to resist the threat by whichever witch or scapegoat is being featured in whichever item of Disinfolklore is being propagated or consumed at any particular moment). In our hyper-modern age, Too Much, Never Enough characterises the Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus’s inexhaustible firehoses of falsehoods. Since this paragraph depicts the engine of the Disinfolklore analytical method for parsing Russian and other forms of Disinformation, Misinformation and propaganda, we shall label learning to see this Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of Disinfolklore as Tool 4.
Throughout this book we’ll learn to identify as potential Disinfolklore any story, unit of information or meme (whether visually, audibly or linguistically communicated through any medium – air, text, video) which contains threats to our Inner Realm community or personhood from outside invaders in whatever guise. Naturally, threats to our community or our feelings of self-sovereignty, self-security, or self-sustainability may be genuine. If so, we need to react appropriately. Disinfolklorists – particularly in the guise of populist politicians - however, use this evolutionarily necessary aspect of our cognition to hack our minds. As we’re focussed on the bogus threat that a migrant will consume our daily bread (threatening our self’s prosperity) or our bodily integrity (our sovereignty and security) or our child in some nefarious way (our fertility), we allow the Disinfolklorist to smuggle trolls passed our Incoming Troll Radar. Before we’ve Looked for the Mana in the Meme our emotions are so engaged the item of Disinfolklore’s manipulative meaning - surrender your liberty to the Big Bad Wolf - has worked its sympathetic, contagious magic, and become, like a parasitic troll, embedded inside our Inner Minds. Watching pantomimes to learn to see how the villain is ‘Over There,’ while we’re focussed on the ‘Over Here’ is a good counter Disinfolklore education for us and our children. The moment you feel your emotions being engaged or your mood being altered by a story or meme, be extra aware. Be mindful. Mindfulness is the essence of our complementary Incoming and Outgoing Troll Radars: as counter Disinfolklorists we aspire always to engage in conscious memetic engineering and conscientious memetic warfare.
Figure 2: Brexit Disinfolklore: Lock up your daughters!
I derived Tool 4 - these three defining archetypal identities immanent (in whole or in part) in items of Disinfolklore - from a fusion of Dumézil’s three socio-religious archetypes that underpin Indo-European language speakers’ cognitive structures (sovereignty, security and/or prosperity/fertility)[7] read in conjunction with Tangerlini’s three archetypal structures in the contemporary Danish legend-telling tradition:
“Interaction with the Other falls into three broad categories in the contemporary legend tradition… [1] Sexual contact with the Other (e.g. Outer Realm-based common law wife of Inner Realm LFR “Doctor”)… including kidnapping and threats to the fertility of the Inner Realm (e.g. cutting her underage daughter and the “Doctor’s” step daughter into pieces harms the sustainability and fertility of the Inner Realm community); [2] The Other’s attempts to disrupt the food of the Inner Realm (e.g. in the archetypal troll tale, Three Billy-Goats Gruff, the three migrant Billy-Goat Gruff[8] brothers attempt to migrate from their Outer Realm to the bridge troll’s Inner Realm in order to consume the Inner Realm’s food. To cut a long story short, the archetypal heroic self-sacrificing Bridge Troll dies defending His Inner Realm from the migrants, pour encourager les autres. Thereby, like Jesus, Brennos, Odin, Donn, Yama, Yima, Bran and Ymir in a variety Indo-European traditions, acting as a model of the archetypal self-sacrificing monarch founder of a culture established in His honour); and [3] Narratives in which the Other attempts to maim, hurt, or kill an immediate threat to the individual (e.g. the function of the Ukrainian “Nazi” Disinfolklore archetype threatening to cut the two damsels into pieces is to entrench the idea in the minds of the LFR population that across the Donets river in non-Russia-occupied Ukraine (the Outer Realm, from their perspective and from the perspective of the Russian Disinfolklore they’re consuming constantly), they will face mortal danger; best to stay inside the LFR Inner Realm’s protective embrace) and the social order (e.g. Russian Disinfolklore featuring bogeymen threatening to invade LFR had the effect of creating community and a sense of communal identity in LFR, like MAGA an inorganic political entity wholly wrought of the complicity of Disinfolklore with negative emotional contagion. LFR, like MAGA, had mastered the art of generating illusions which got attached to pre-existing fears in individuals’ minds. These fears, illuminated by Disinfolklore, focussed on an ever-switching array of witches (migrants, Ukrainians, trans, Polish mercenaries, cosmopolitans, NATO, European Values,…) portrayed through archetypal characters in items of Disinfolklore as Outer Realm monsters threatening the sovereignty, security, and / or fertility / prosperity of the LFR’s population). In each category, communal integrity and survival is threatened from the Outside…” [9]
Gradually, on the basis of my ongoing analysis of thousands of items of Disinfolklore collected from the media in Russia-occupied Luhansk (and from hundreds of interviews with those living inside the occupation (and who were living in that evolving Russian Disinfolklore Universe)), I began to see that I could use this synthesis of these two complementary analytical schemes of archetypal structures immanent in Indo-European culture – Tool 4 - to identify and interpret any item of Disinfolklore. Over the years, I have used this Inner / Outer Realm immanence in informational units / memes to triage them in the ante-room of my mind. In other words, my Incoming Troll Radar has detected their potential as Disinfolklore! A well-honed Incoming Troll Radar works on trolls emanating from the Russian, MAGA, Brexit or perhaps any Indo-European Disinfolklore Generation and Propagation Apparatus. It’s complemented by its divine twin: our Outgoing Troll Radar. Learning how Archetypal Disinfolklore works is a responsibility. The second element in the Code of Positive Trolls (see Tool 6) is ‘ethical discipline.’ This means we have a duty to check our outgoing communications for their potential negative contagion effects too. By the end of this book, you’ll be really good at spotting this structure’s immanence in memes in real time too.
I recounted the contents of the phone call with my manager to my colleagues. I noticed the immediate change in intention and motivation that came over all of us. My aim was to avoid going to check on the damsels – it was a trap, I thought. A retired English Police officer colleague, with whom I usually never saw eye-to-eye, scoffed:
“What does he expect us to do if we find them being cut into pieces?”
with characteristic scorn for our office-based manager. Another colleague - a Bulgarian army general - was motivated to rush out to rescue the damsels in distress from the ogre’s jaws.
Figure 3: Handwritten request by the Walk-In, handed to my boss, in order to troll us into addressing its contents (and English-language translation)
I was surprised that my manager had treated as truthful the testimony conveyed to us by the MGB, famous as it was for its falsifications of history, manipulations and terror. But that’s how Disinfolklore operates. It changes our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations in ways which are foreseen by the originator of the Disinfolklore but which are unforeseen by us before we allow the item of Disinfolklore’s constituent elements into our Inner Minds, where they work to alter and contaminate our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations.
Tool 5 - Trigger, Experience, Reaction
Inspired by my English police colleague, on the way to the cottage in the woods, I had phoned my manager to make one last try at trolling him into cancelling the operation. I asked him what exactly we were supposed to do if we found the two damsels being cut into pieces. I had hoped to wake him up out of his Disinfolklore-induced stupor. I had hoped to trigger an emotional experience (empathetic fear?) that would troll his own mind into seeing how mad it was to send us, unarmed, into the jaws of an ogre. He was however too far gone. He was enmeshed in the MGB-wrought micro-troll universe. He perceived my question as impudent questioning of his authority as my manager. His testy reaction had been: Call the police!
The fifth tool in Archetypal Disinfolklore comes from a joint project by the Nobel Peace Prize winning Dalai Lama and the psychologist Paul Ekman. Their Three Step “Timeline of Emotions” model helps us find a pattern in the oodles of emotional journeys we are stimulated to participate in each day, hour, minute and second. Almost all the stimulations in our environment trigger an experience of an emotion, and often a concatenation of emotions we sometimes have difficulty interpreting the meaning of in real time. How we react to such triggered experiences has a huge impact on the way we live. We can read this “Timeline of Emotions” model - Trigger, Experience, Reaction - into a huge variety of emotionally resonant story telling forms - from Russian Disinformation to contemporary films, advertising, courting strategies and, really, any accidental or strategic measures that we (or others) use to affect emotions.
Step 1: Something in your environment triggers your emotions (one of your patrol leaders, say, rings you to ask what to do, if they rock up to a house to find a maniac cutting a mother and her daughter into pieces).
Step 2: You experience a feeling / feelings with a certain (set of) qualities: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, or enjoyment (you feel anger that your supervisee is second-guessing your orders.)
Step 3: You react in a particular way, either reflexively (automatically) or carefully, to that feeling (So your angry manager doubles down: ‘Continue the operation. Stop calling me about it. If there’s a problem, call the police.’).
My final effort at halting our patrol was more successful. As we approached the cottage in the woods where the Mother and the Maiden supposedly were, I sent an SMS to the Mission’s head of security in Kyiv:
“Confirm manager’s order to approach cottage in the woods where Mother and Underage Daughter are reportedly being cut into pieces.”
That linguistic formula, replete with its primordial archetypal identities triggered the normally reticent head of security to call me immediately. Clearly I had engaged his emotions. Possibly, his disgust at my amateur-hour manager’s negligence was an experience which called for a reaction to countermand my manager’s command. This was the first time I had consciously created Counter Disinfolklore using precisely the same archytypes Disinfolklorists use to further their nefarious schemes, and it worked. The head of security listened to my story about how my manager had been trolled by the MGB into sending us to the cottage in the woods. He experienced a mixture of fear (losing his job if we got cut, along with the mother and the maiden, into pieces, and it was discovered I had informed him beforehand) and disgust (it was hard to persuade competent people to manage teams of diplomats inside a Disinfolklore-addled war zone. Even taking that into account, my then manager’s incompetence disgusted the head of security). He reacted in the exact way I hoped he would. He called off the operation while we were still on the outskirts of the woods.
Tool 6 - The Code of Positive Trolls
Archetypal Disinfolklore is a powerful method for destroying our civilisation. Using those same means and memes to preserve our post-World War Two communities governed by the Rule of Law and human rights protected as a matter of law is also a powerful tool. So we must use it righteously, ethically and properly. The Code of Positive Trolls (Tool 6)which we’ll learn more about later is our means of ensuring we do not ourselves become Disinfolklorists. The Code of Positive Trolls is an algorithm with six elements – (1) Generosity, (2) Right, (3) Patience, (4) Mana / Energy, (5) Mindfulness, and (6) Insight – that we can use to analyse any item of potential Disinfolklore and any incoming or indeed outgoing potentially Negative Troll.
Thankfully, the head of security hadn’t been so hypnotised in the manner of that Bulgarian general or my boss into falling for the troll. I had been able to troll him into reacting righteously (as I saw it) to the MGB-sourced item of Disinfolklore. He had immediately seen how unwise it would be for us, unarmed, to go to the cottage in the woods. I imagine he, like me, also understood it was so ridiculous that it must be a set-up. You see, we all have Incoming Troll Radars! The point is to surface them, fine-tune their sensitivity and learn, over time, to integrate them into the way we process any information.
We never heard of anyone there being cut into pieces. The MGB’s agents would have seen that we almost made it to the cottage where who knows what fate awaited us. Meanwhile, the MGB’s archetyping of itself as protector of the folk it was imprisoning manifested in many iterations of the story of its attempt to troll us into going to the cottage in the woods.
Figure 4: One of many stories spun of this tale by Russia's Disinfolklore Propagation Apparatus
[1] I first used this term in public in a speech delivered in Munich at the time of the 2025 Munich Security Conference – for a video / audio of that speech please see https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/our-disinfolklore-universe, or any podcast platform.
[2] Jung’s introduction to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
[3] https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/outgoing-troll-radar
[4] “An Independent Legal Analysis of the Russian Federation’s Breaches of the Genocide Convention in Ukraine and the Duty to Prevent”(https://newlinesinstitute.org/an-independent-legal-analysis-of-the-russian-federations-breaches-of-the-genocide-convention-in-ukraine-and-the-duty-to-prevent/)
[5] Lincoln: Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction
[6] Adamsky: Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy
[7] Dumézil: L’idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens
[8] Asbjørnsen: Three Billy-Goats Gruff
[9] Tangherlini: From Trolls to Turks: Continuity and Change in Danish Legend Tradition