How Disinfolklorists create borders inside our Inner Minds
Why Donald’s new National Security Adviser introduced a Bill to bomb Mexico. "Counter Disinfolklore ~ Controlling War Magic" Episode XXII
Disinfolklore, by contrast to pure entertainment that also uses stories to manipulate our emotions, often conceals its comparable artificiality.
Disinfolklore is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that uses wolves in sheep’s clothing to smuggle emotions into our minds which it then seeks to use to manipulate us into inaction or kinds of actions that benefit the Disinfolklorist’s programme, rather than ours, or our community’s interests.
Disinfolklore’s purpose and effect is to affect our Moods / Motivations/ Attitudes / Intentions in ways which benefit the objectives of the Disinfolklorist (or those who stand behind them). Since our Moods / Motivations/ Attitudes / Intentions are the wells from which all of our activities spring, Disinfolklorists know that by affecting our sentiments they can manipulate our activities, in ways that benefit the (in most cases) ne’er do well oligarchic elites and authoritarians whose diabolical work Disinfolklorists execute.
We are told in an authoritative voice, say, as an item on the news about a “caravan” of Outer Realm immigrants heading towards our borders - implicit in this is the threat to our Inner Realm’s sovereignty, security, and fertility/Prosperity which those Outer Realm immigrants pose.
Reporting breathlessly switches between aerial film of hundreds of bedraggled refugees and talking heads speaking about the potential harm to our community’s sovereignty, security, or prosperity/fertility if we do not repel them.
An abhorrent Disinfolklorist (masked as a pillar of our community) dehumanises a pregnant member of the so-called caravan by saying:
“If she is putting her child’s health at risk, why should you care if we bomb the convoy? Only an Outer Realm woman would do this. If we let such people into our Inner Realm, they will adulterate our culture with such sick morality.”
The meaning of such rhetoric is precisely to situate the humans in the caravan as Outer Realm non-humans whom it is emotionally easy to target for inhumane behaviour. Sadly, this kind of Disinfolklore is all too common these days. See for example this dehumanising troll from a former national newspaper editor in England:
One recent book claimed that a Trump White House immigration advisor suggested a drone strike on a migrant boat supposedly heading to the United States[1].
In this case the author of that book may, if the story is not true, themself be engaging in Disinfolklore: they may be wanting to trigger in us the consumer of the fable a feeling of disgust against the person supposedly suggesting the drone strike.
Or their intended audience may be those who would welcome such a drone strike, so their story may be intended for that audience. Then because of whichever feeling we experience when we hear this story, we respond by disliking the person alleged to have suggested the drone strike or we support Trump (who appointed the supposed drone strike proposer) ever more intensively.
In 2023 two senior Republican members (including Donald’s new National Security Adviser) of the United States Congress introduced a bill proposing to allow the United States to bomb Mexico. This is how one of the representatives who introduced the Bill justifies it:
“The cartels are war [sic] with us – poisoning more than 80,000 Americans with fentanyl every year, creating a crisis at our border, and turning Mexico into a failed narco-state,” Rep. Crenshaw said. “It’s time we directly target them. My legislation will put us at war with the cartels by authorizing the use of military force against the cartels. We cannot allow heavily armed and deadly cartels to destabilize Mexico and import people and drugs into the United States. We must start treating them like ISIS – because that is who they are.”[2]
Mention of the “border” which in concrete reality marks the boundary between the United States and Mexico also conjures into being the interface between the Inner and Outer Realm.
“Intrinsic to all Otherworld entrances is the idea of the borderlands, the edges where two ways of being interpenetrate each other to form liminal space. Such borderland places where water touches the land, times of dawn and twilight, dense primeval forests, sacred mounds, caves, and deep waters, all belong to the gods.”
“Borders” between Inner and Outer Realm in Disinfolklore are so commonly referenced that, just as soon as you hear any politician or rhetorician talking about “borders” be on the alert for Disinfolklore.
Merely by speaking of borders, wannabe sovereigns are asserting their power. We think of the border they are speaking of a boundary crossing (like the bridge as Stanitsia Luhanska) as the kind of physical location we might have encountered as we go between two states.
This helps populists disguise what they really mean when they speak about borders.
There is another aspect to populist politicians attempting to capture the sovereignty function in an Indo-European culture by promoting anti-immigrant discourses. It has long been held that, as Sylvia Perera wrote, a human who aspires to being monarch in the context of a Celtic culture (but the insight and archetype extends to all other Indo-European cultures) must be
“conscious enough to face the ugly, pain filled reality of the outer world … they must be strong as a warrior, productive as a farmer, and wise as a druid.”
By modelling willingness to drone bomb or drown prospective immigrants populist politicians are staking a claim for rightful sovereignty. In dealing with the Chef of Disinfolklore in later chapters we will return again and again to Indo-European culture’s tripartite archetypes embedded in our Inner Minds relating to the conception of the qualities sovereigns need to qualify for leadership - warrior (Security), farmer (Fertility / prosperity), druid (Sovereignty)…
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/stephen-miller-donald-trump-immigrants-1234778491/
[2] https://crenshaw.house.gov/2023/1/reps-crenshaw-and-waltz-introduce-aumf-targeting-mexican-drug-cartels
Continued:
This post is a continuation of:
I was a guest on
recently. Great reaction to our chat about, among other things, Disinfolklore’s origins in Herder’s insight that led to the unification of (some of) the Germanic peoples - 50,000 people watched and 3,000 people ‘Liked’ what they heard of our conversation:First in series: