Archetypal Disinfolklore

Figure 1: Thatched cabin in Luhansk, near Stanitsia Luhanska, eastern Ukraine.

I first noticed the Disinfolklore Universe¹ now spreading through our neural networks, like triffids rewilding the garden of Eden, when it was in a more primitive form. In 2016, 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 in relation to security incidents related to 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.

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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 identities² of the Mother and the Maiden. The perfectly pitched troll for a specific emotional reaction 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 This book is to help you learn the tools I use as a professional Disinfolklore identifier and interpreter. So that you learn to counteract the Disinfolklore Universe descending upon humanity, like a curse. Honing our Incoming Troll Radars to identify trolls which have the potential to affect us in manipulative ways before we allow these trolls into our Inner Minds is the first tool in our Archetypal Disinfolklore arsenal.

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Tool 1 - Incoming Troll Radar

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So let’s call our Incoming Troll Radar “Tool 1”! 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 4 in any aspiring Counter Disinfolklorist’s tool box). By the end of this book, you’ll be a fluent Counter Disinfolklorist, like me. 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 traditions⁴ 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.

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Tool 2 – Our “Look for the Mana in the Meme!” mantra

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In Archetypal Disinfolklore, we don’t care too much about the intention (mens rea) of the purveyors of Disinfolklore, 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 Troll Radar – Tool 1). Other times it can be our family member or trusted news source conveying the meme into our minds, unintentionally furthering the Disinfolklore Universe designers’ ends. Since the effect is the same – manipulating us into activities that accord with the Disinfolklore Universe’s malignant designs for us and our communities - it’s better that we learn to start looking for the Mana / energy inside memes and informational units - rather than worrying about the intention of the communicators of specific items of Disinfolklore, 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 2 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 folktales 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 both 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.”⁵ Disinfolklore transports its carriers into promoting activities which unknown to we who are infected by it furthered the strategies of Disinfolklore Universe’s designers.

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Tool 3 - Inner / Outer Real switching quality immanent in items of potential Disinfolklore

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 moment, 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 3.

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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 sense of selfhood may be genuine and if so we need to react accordingly. 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 or our child, 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 Disinfolklorist the item of Disinfolklore’s true meaning - surrender your liberty to the Big Bad Wolf - has worked their contagious magic and become embedded inside our Inner Minds. The moment you feel your emotions being engaged by a story or meme, be extra aware. Be mindful. Mindfulness is the essence of our Incoming Troll Radar.

Figure 2: Brexit Disinfolklore: Lock up your daughters!

I derived Tool 3 - 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)⁶ 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 Gruff⁷ brothers attempt to migrate from their Outer to the bridge troll’s Inner Realm in order to consume the Inner Realm’s food); 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, they will face mortal danger; best to stay inside the LFR Inner Realm inside the protective embrace of their Russian prison guards) 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, an entirely bogus political entity wrought of Disinfolklore that created an illusion that it was real and that Outer Realm Ukrainians who were supposedly trying to kill, maim, hurt LFR’s population were monsters). In each category, communal integrity and survival is threatened from the Outside…”⁸

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 3 - to identify and interpret any item of Disinfolklore, whether emanating from the Russian, MAGA, Brexit or perhaps any Indo-European Disinfolklore Generation and Propagation Apparatus.

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 our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations.

As we approached the cottage in the woods where the Mother and the Maiden supposedly were, I texted the Mission’s head of security in Kyiv:

“Confirm manager’s order to approach house 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. 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.

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Tool 4 - 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 ethically and properly. The Code of Positive Trolls (Tool 4) which we’ll learn more about later is our means of ensuring we do not ourselves become Disinfolklorists. Thankfully, the head of security wasn’t hypnotised in the manner of that Bulgarian general or my boss into falling for the troll. He immediately saw 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. The head of security, mercifully, aborted the operation before we reached the cottage in the woods.

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. See https://www.disinfolklore.net/p/outgoing-troll-radar

4. Lincoln: Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction

5. Adamsky: Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art of Strategy

6. Dumézil: L’idéologie tripartie des Indo-Européens

7. Asbjørnsen: Three Billy-Goats Gruff

8. Tangherlini: From Trolls to Turks: Continuity and Change in Danish Legend Tradition