The Soviet Union was so mysterious for many of us, as was Eastern and Central Europe. I was 17 when the Berlin Wall fell down. I went as soon as I could - spent time hitchhiking to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, went around those places several times because I was just fascinated by it. What is it like? How do they live?
So I always imagined it would be really interesting working in the former Soviet Union, because it was such an interesting and alien place. And I think we, certainly in Ireland at the time, we did learn a lot about Russian politics. I think we learned more truth about Russia and the five-year plans and Stalin and all that than they learned about us when it comes down to it. So it was planted as a seed of interest.
But I never thought I’d end up going around villages and being able to just talk to people. And the joy in that never left me, no matter how hard some experiences were there - when it was really cold, when it was minus 20 and having to be out on the bridge for seven hours or fiddling around with camera systems and thermal shutdown computers and all that.
Having said that, it was one of many ambitions I had, many of which I’ve achieved. So it wasn’t like I was obsessed by it because I’d never looked for it. It just kind of landed on my lap through accidental events - like a Grail Tale or Don Quixote. My life in that sense has been more picaresque than a tightly planned novel. I didn’t decide when I was eight I was going to work in Ukraine and got there in the end. That isn’t what happened. But then when it did happen, I was aware that this was one of the many things that I really wanted to do.
Episode Five: Battling Archetypes and Disinfolklore
So this is, I think, episode five of going over the basics of battling archetypes - disinfolklore analytical method. We were on the bridge and we went through the luxury sausage troll saga. And then last week we went through some of the folkloric resonances of my experience as a diplomat on that bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, the passage to the other world.
So I wanted to move onwards with archetyping.
Donald Trump and the Madman Archetype
I had an interesting discussion with someone today about whether or not Donald is compos mentis. And some of us may be aware there’s been a bit of a divorce between Michael Cohen and the liberal media this week. I don’t quite fully understand it, but I think it’s something to do with one of the documents that was released in the 1% of documents released in the Epstein files.
That document attests, apparently, to Michael Cohen’s lawyers offering something to the New York DA and/or AG during his case - I think this was during the case in 2018 when he ended up in Otisville, in prison for campaign finance violations. And unindicted co-conspirator number one is Donald.
Basically, Michael Cohen has been, in his podcast for the last couple of years, promoting the narrative that he knows for certain that Donald knew nothing about Epstein - because, as is true, Epstein and Donald had divorced before Michael Cohen came on the scene. But also Michael Cohen was very strongly attesting to his very strong belief as the person he believes who knows Donald best of practically anyone in the world, that Donald was not involved in really bad stuff in the Epstein files.
And anyway, there’s been this divorce. And so I’ve had to reassess almost everything I learned about Donald from Michael Cohen and try and think about it and think about whether he was lying about that or not, whether he was trolling us. There were a few things I was pretty clear he was just banging on about, but it doesn’t mean everything he ever said about Donald is incorrect.
And one of the things he’s been very clear about Donald is that he is acting. He does not have dementia - that he is acting this role of someone who’s completely nuts.
So as in the background of my mind, I’m recomputing all the data I collected over listening to Michael Cohen’s podcast every now and again over the past couple of years. And I had this discussion earlier today. And certainly what Donald is doing, he is archetyping as the archetypal madman.
Game Theory and the Madman Strategy
Any of us who studied - who had the misfortune, even though I did have a good teacher - to study game theory at college, will know the kind of archetypal example of the madman is Khrushchev at the United Nations in 1961, banging his shoe during the Cuban Missile Crisis (which seems like a very tame crisis, to be honest with you, at this point).
The people who established game theory as a science in political science - I think basically Harvard is the beginning of all of that, and it’s a big player still in IR, in international relations - they established this idea that you could play the madman. And Donald is certainly a very convincing actor in that role, whether or not he has dementia or is at death’s door, I just don’t know. And I’m not convinced he is.
Obviously, we all wish he would just retire peacefully somewhere, preferably somewhere else. But I was pretty sure after Jan 6th that we wouldn’t have to deal with him again because he seemed so unhealthy.
The Epstein Connection
And if you set out in your political career to try and gain immunity from whatever is in the Epstein files - and I do kind of think that the Epstein, his experience with Epstein and his knowledge that the stuff would come out, is possibly the main motivating factor in his entire political career.
Again, Michael Cohen is a source for this: Donald did not intend to win the presidency in 2016. He was doing it to build his brand and it got out of hand and he won it.
But if in the course of running for the 2016 elections - the Epstein case, certainly in 2018, I think that’s when it kind of broke really, early 2018, mostly, but obviously people in the know knew about it - and he appointed as his minister for the economy, Acosta, who as I understand it, arranged the plea deal with Epstein in Florida. So Epstein and all that stuff was very much on his mind.
And if Donald is willing to threaten to invade Greenland over whatever there is in those files and sacrifice the whole of Ukraine, then it might be pretty horrific. And if he knows this is there, then that could well have motivated his going with the political career.
Ukraine at the Center
But I think the other thing is Ukraine has been central to Donald and to republicanism and to American democracy since 2015 and certainly since 2016, when it’s always been my belief that Russia bet everything on Crimea. And then it doubled down again on Luhansk and Donetsk. And then it doubled again on Syria. And then it kind of ten-tupled its bets on the full-scale invasion.
But I think everything Russia does and has done really over the past decade has been motivated by its animal and completely irrational desire to subjugate and kill and destroy Ukraine - which of course is the vulnerability which President Zelensky and General Budanov and everyone and the Ukrainians, I think the leadership in Ukraine have been using, trolling, knowing this vulnerability, trolling Russia to its doom.
Introducing Archetyping
So all of this is a way of introducing one of the central ideas in disinfolklore and the battling archetypes. Part of it is the idea of archetyping.
And I’ve spoken before about how Donald used Alphonse Capone - he would always say Alphonse Capone as part of his campaign speeches - and how Melania’s meme chic costume at his inauguration earlier this year (feels like eternity away) were deliberate acts of archetyping, as was all that stuff with Batman and Robin and Musk and him and “Daddy” in the White House earlier this year.
And so if Donald is archetyping himself as the archetypal madman from game theory, then yes, he’s very convincing at it. And he may well be suffering dementia. But when I reflected on it, I’m not sure I’d even heard of narcissism until maybe 2017, 2016 as a psychiatric disorder. And so basically everything I know about narcissism is from him. And you know, when I reflect on it, he could just be playing that role. So I just don’t know.
But all of this is introducing the idea of archetyping. And if Donald is archetyping himself as the dementia-ridden, Alphonse Capone admiring, kind of crazy guy, and now he just has to keep on doubling down and tripling down - again, parallels with Russia - then my idea of the element in archetyping which applies to memes and overall strategies, I think is central to understanding what is going on. It’s even central to having a conversation about it.
And my jury, you know, I swing both ways. Like yesterday, I was arguing with this particular person that Donald was strategically illiterate because there is this argument: he just goes for things like the dog who catches the car - Venezuela, then what? And then they kind of ad lib, improvise. But of course, improvisation is a central part of modern… And there was a lot of improvisation, I assume, in The Apprentice as well.
The Reciprocal Nature of Archetyping
But we can have a conversation at least, if we’ve got this vocabulary, about archetyping. And I give, as the example: archetyping is a reciprocal process. It’s reflexive. It works both ways.
So I imputed into that scene at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska, where I worked between January 2015 and January 2018, I imputed into that scene at the bridge folkloric tropes. Long before I thought deeply about folklore - as I kind of talked about last week - and I looked into what folklore is, and I looked into my immediate impression that there was something folkloric about the situation, but I didn’t really know what it was.
And all I knew about folklore was my memory of tales read as a child about forests and Hansel and Gretel and all of that. And as I talked about last week, it’s actually a lot deeper than that the more I looked into it and unraveled what was folklore and what was folkloric about that situation. And then eventually to the idea that actually disinfolklore as a narrative form can be used to signify the entire universe of brainwashing, information propagation, propaganda, combat propaganda apparatus that the Russians were running in Russia-occupied Ukraine - because it’s always using storytelling.
Russian Media and Disinfolklore-borne Realities
And another person I can’t quite work out, Konstantin of Inside Russia, who I was just listening to this evening, he was talking about how - and I enjoyed him talking about his memories of the end of the Soviet Union - towards the end, the stories which were being told in the media were becoming more and more divorced from reality. And he’s drawing the parallel with today, and according to him, and his looking at regional and local media sources inside Russia, they’re really in the shit, as it were, in terms of power stuff going down.
But the mass media, the mass propaganda media is painting a really rosy picture of Russia constantly making gains at the front and all of that malarkey. And so he was drawing that parallel with the end of the Soviet Union.
And so these are all examples of disinfolklore in the Russian media landscape. And so that insight obviously didn’t occur to me - that didn’t occur to me for years until after I got there.
My Own Archetyping of the Bridge
But I archetyped the scene at the bridge through folkloric tropes. It was my way of seeing something about it and folkloric identities of the people I met and the gardens I visited.
I remember once being brought to see this garden of a couple who lived very near the bridge, an elderly retired couple who had retired from Luhansk City. And she showed me around her garden, which was about two acres. And it was something like 24, 25 different crops in there. I wrote them all down at the time in my notes. And their house, everything about it was like something from folklore. And it imprinted the scene into my mind and the folklore into my mind.
And so this is common of all forms of archetyping in disinfolklore. And now the elements of that bridge situation which were blatantly folkloric struck me. But what was truly disinfolklore about the scene was then invisible.
And as with all great discoveries - and all modesty to disinfolklore as a narrative form, and then what I’ve made of it is a great discovery - because there’s no end in sight for me to unravel that insight, nor is there an end in sight for me to be able to use it in my daily attempts to understand what on earth is going on in the world and in all the stuff that we’re looking at at the moment.
Following the Accidental Insight
I accidentally followed - it was an accidental insight. And the trail that I followed from that insight that there was something folkloric about the bridge scene became a lens through which to perceive many new things, many unexpected insights and things which I couldn’t have imagined at the time. So it’s kind of an organizing fiction as well, the idea of disinfolklore and the idea that there was something folkloric about that bridge.
And maybe there were probably zillions of different dimensions of that scene on the bridge which might have led me to many of the same conclusions. But as I mentioned, I think it was two weeks ago, I was looking for something new, a new way of describing what was new about what I did perceive in Russia-occupied Ukraine, which was the use of multi-vector, constant information flows to manipulate people’s minds such that their identities were transformed.
Because I believe that insight is still not generally well understood in our world.
MAGA and Brexit as Examples
However, I often use and we often use here MAGA as an example or Brexit in a slightly weaker way, as examples of how completely normal people we knew went doolally because of information overload, information, strategically directed information.
But in 2015, we didn’t really have those examples. We just had, say, the Nazis or the idea of brainwashing or cults. But now at least we have a common resource in that everyone sees how MAGA has driven the entire world mad. And that’s a positive thing.
But I’m still - I still don’t think it’s generally well understood how inorganic MAGA was, how strategically well planned it was, according to my main source, Chris Wylie’s account, who with Steve Bannon basically invented the method of recruiting and building the movement of MAGA through those Facebook groups.
The Cambridge Analytica Method
Through the use of the Facebook questionnaires, those surveys, which were part of the psychological inventory methods, the OCEAN scale of:
∙ Openness
∙ Conscientiousness
∙ Extroversion
∙ Agreeableness
∙ Neuroticism
As a means of charting how people would be susceptible to certain kinds of manipulation, manipulative information. And the insight by the assistant professor from a university in St. Petersburg who happened to also be a research assistant at Cambridge University at Judge Business School - but at the time, they didn’t know he was associated with St. Petersburg apparently.
But it was he who had the idea that you could back-propagate, you could use these questionnaires, these surveys - which many of us may remember seeing on our Facebook back in the noughties, in 2008, whatever it was, 2014, 2013 - where he realized by getting certain answers to these stupid 30-question surveys, you could infer where people charted on the neuroticism and conscientiousness dimensions.
And if you got highly neurotic, low conscientious - if you could identify those individuals, and they ran tens of millions of these Facebook tests, and you could identify a group of them in particular local areas, and then bring them together in real life in venues which were smaller than the number of people should require to be comfortable, you could then, with clever curating of the scenes in the rooms, ignite a movement which became MAGA.
And that is what Chris Wylie and Steve Bannon did with Cambridge Analytica in certain targeted counties across America, which they knew that they needed to win if they were going to win the election.
And then I’m not sure whether - I don’t think Donald Trump was on the scene at that point. They were kind of, Steve Bannon was in search of a product, in search of someone to run.
Radicalization Through Storytelling
So this idea that you could use storytelling - as we’ve seen since them develop and basically radicalize people - they started off in those rooms in counties across America in 2015. And they believe in “America First” and all this stuff. And then before you know it, sort of eight years later, they’re talking about conquering Greenland and destroying NATO and very anti-Ukraine.
And that’s all done through, I believe, through storytelling, or at least - to explain this without reference to storytelling, what I call disinfolklore, I think is very hard. Or to put it another way, I think it adds to our understanding of what is normally called disinformation or propaganda or is posited as a mystery.
If we look at the narrative form, we look at the commonalities in the narrative forms used in whether it’s MAGA or what Russia did in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And it just so happened that because I was there and I collected these data, I have a data set from which I tried to find patterns.
And I found these structures in it. I inferred that these structures were intentionally implanted - this inner-outer realm othering, for instance, and the idea of archetyping as well. And those same structures I can find in MAGA disinfolklore as well.
The Value of This Work
So to put it in a positive sense, and I don’t really see anyone else talking about this - and I try to keep up with the latest research, the latest analyses of disinformation - and so in that I find the value, to me anyway, of my work and my attempt to make it more common and to make it a kind of a toolkit that many of us can add on to our existing toolkits as we navigate the world and information.
Universal Aspects of Archetyping
So if we zoom out from the particular space at that bridge and even Russia-occupied Ukraine, we zoom out from that to the universal aspects of it. And so what I was doing there was archetyping the scene as something folkloric. But I wasn’t doing it intentionally. This was just something that rose up in my mind one of the first times I was there because of the forest, because of the river, the characteristics of the locus amoenus aspect of it, that this was a pleasant place with breezes and songbirds, and yes, militaries and death and horrid things and just horrific stories. But there was something folkloric about it.
And looking into that insight, one vector of how I’ve come to realize is that many of us perceive - I’m not going to say everyone, and I only ever speak for people whose native language and structure is Indo-European because I don’t have any experience of the other or any major experience of the other - so I’ll say most of us, to a much greater extent than we imagine, perceive reality through archetypes and folkloric, through the folkloric resonances that we imbibed as young children.
Recognizing Folkloric Structures
And because I had this insight, and this isn’t the whole thing, it’s an interesting aspect of cognition that I’ve identified, and I’ve collected these references. And we see it all the time from the Russians.
Even when someone like Simonyan - people who should be in prison for the rest of their life, convicted by international criminal court for inciting genocide, public and direct incitement of genocide - there is something naive, childish about them in some ways. The way she, for instance, Simonyan, dresses like Robin Hood or Maid Marian in green. And the way, for instance, this guy Dugin obsesses about Cheburashka or whatever his name is, that little cartoon character - at the moment, he’s running a cultural war against this cartoon character. The way they archetype Russia as a bear.
But this also applies when you get your eye in to your own perceptions of reality and reference points, especially when you come across new experiences. Like for me, the bridge was like Ukraine for me. It was something I had never - in my wildest dreams, I’d always wanted to live in the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union. But to end up where I ended up there, to go from working in the parliament in Dublin and in Belfast and in London, to ending up on this bridge with loads of army and police people, it was quite a journey for me.
And so the whole thing about it was new. So I guess my mind was looking for references and somehow something I’ve noticed is we do revert to these folkloric - something about childhood maybe - and then they’re all around us.
Folklore in Culture
Like I notice also in indie music, indie rock music - once I got my eye in, I realized, wow, so many references to folklore and folkloric tropes.
And even the example I always give of Putin on the 20th of February 2022 likening Ukraine to a dead woman, a victim of necrophiliac rape, which he got from a song by Red Mould which was a Soviet era hard rock band and the song was called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin I Walked Up.” And that is used by international lawyers as evidence of Putin’s intention to genocide.
So even there, Putin’s thinking - when he’s talking about little piggies, he’s likening the European politicians to little piggies. It’s again, it’s like “Three Little Piggies Go to Market” to the slaughter.
The Pig Story
And I also remember this incident near the bridge in a village where two Ukrainian soldiers got drunk and they stole or they drove their armored car basically through this kind of perfect archetypal Ukrainian market garden. And I went there the next morning and we cataloged the damage. And in the end, the individual Ukrainian soldiers repaid this family for the damage.
But one of the things I remember was the APC, the Armoured Personnel Carrier that the drunk soldiers were driving around - they drove through the barn on this thing. And I remember her saying to me, “Oh, we’re so lucky that the door on the other side was open because the pig who we’re going to sell to pay for my daughter to go to university was able to run out the other side.”
And that is quite, you know, people in America, you know, they save the college fund for 20 years or whatever. But in these kind of folkloric situations in Ukraine, real people fatten up pigs and sell them and then exchange that for their child’s university education, which is quite alien. But there was something folkloric about that.
Grail Tales and Their Origins
And we have - so when I went into, so I then was going through my memories of archetypes learned from folktales. So, for instance, the Grail, the whole Grail tales, which most of us will have accessed through Monty Python and King Arthur and all that stuff. But they originate in Chrétien de Troyes’ Grail Tales, where you have Lancelot and the characters Perceval going around on their horses and having all these adventures.
And it’s been pretty conclusively established, as far as I’m aware, that the origins of the Grail Tales are in Irish mythological texts that found their way through West Wales, which had Flemish migrants, to Flanders. And then they became, as the first folklore tale became really famous - the Ossian Tales in Scotland by MacPherson, which he faked, which I talked about last week - so did the grail tales and this idea of a wasteland, which I mentioned also last week, which manifests in the grail tales.
But they are kind of folkloric - they really are before the collections of folklore. It’s all about horses and archetypal characters and damsels in distress and these kinds of things.
Gogol and Ukrainian Folklore
Then we have, of course, the great Ukrainian writer Gogol, his folk tales. And Gogol himself was used - as I understand it, he went to Russia to try and educate them about Ukraine and what the Russians took from his work was that Ukraine was full of little kind of fairy tale characters. It was like their little brother.
And his tales are very - and his stories, as discussed in many Maria things, particularly with Ming the Merciless, are very brilliant things. You know, his “Dead Souls” on faking population statistics, which are still going. He really gets Russia in a very arch way.
And almost every, probably every city - I lived on Gogol Street in Gogoloya in Dnipro, and every town in the former Soviet Union has a Gogol street, but probably for different reasons.
The Folkloric Restaurant
And I remember at the Christmas of 2018-2019, when we were going for our Christmas dinner in Dnipro, one of the national staff members had booked this restaurant which - it’s kind of, I think they’re all over Russia and Ukraine, I don’t think it’s just a Ukrainian thing - where they are kind of folk and they try and pretend it’s like a peasant’s kitchen or something but actually it’s all very chichi and they have people dressed in peasants’ costumes and they were playing this Christmas film, this Gogol Christmas film perpetually in the background.
So that gave me a hint that folklore was very much part of the folklore of the Soviet era, because this was the equivalent of what in America or in Britain or Ireland might be Scrooge. You know, every Christmas you’d watch Scrooge on the TV, and this was the Russian equivalent. But it turned out it was a Ukrainian writer.
Other Literary Examples
Tolstoy’s village stories, which I’d read as a child and which my mother introduced to me. And then Dostoevsky’s struggles and his kind of folkloric, you know, the idea of three brothers and one of them kills the father in the Brothers Karamazov. There are really folkloric archetypal caricatures in almost all his books, yet we look at them as unjustifiably so as high art.
But they, as with Dickens, as with Balzac and all of the great 19th century writers, they really integrate folkloric elements - and not least stories from servants and these archetypal characters.
Collecting Stories in Russia-Occupied Luhansk
So I was collecting the media, the stories inside Russia-occupied Luhansk. And in the spring of 2015, these stories were all full of how institutions were being founded, state institutions were being founded in Russia-occupied Luhansk. “We have a new national bank” and then the next day there’ll be a story about the new court system. And at the beginning they would invite us - i.e. OSCE, Organisation for Security Cooperation in Europe monitors - to go and watch these institutions in action.
But it was all a shadow play. It was all a Potemkin thing. And it took me a little while to work this out. And so the stories themselves - just as Konstantin is talking about the stories in current Russia, where if you’re, according to Konstantin, if you’re reading the national newspapers in Russia, you wouldn’t know anything about electricity cuts, rolling cuts, and all of the kinds of things that we know a little bit about because we listen to Mockers and Genesis Man and This Week in Absurdistan.
And we’re really tuned in to many of the people, Ukrainians or Pruun, or people who are really monitoring closely, or Beefy’s monitoring closely Telegram. So we’re tuned in to this kind of stuff. And we know zillions more of this than most Russians do.
Local vs. National Media in Russia
Konstantin makes the point that the local papers do cover it, because they have to tell somewhere, a local media source, they have to tell somewhere locally when your electricity is going to be on or off, or your heating off and on. But if what he’s saying is true, and I have no reason to doubt this, and it also brings me great joy to hear it, then if you’re in one part of Russia, you’re not going to know that in the next region, they’re also undergoing similar problems.
Because the entire national disinfolklore apparatus is spinning new stories of massive victories in Pokrovsk and villages in Ukraine and portraying Russia as always moving forward and how Donald is working for Russia and all of that.
Disinfolklore as a Narrative Form
And so disinfolklore is the key as a narrative form to describe that subset of mind-altering articles and media stories that do not correspond to reality. They are illusions and they take on the pattern of being reality.
And also, long before I realized that what the Russians were doing in Russia-occupied Ukraine was spinning stories about the foundation of the state, I was monitoring all of these stories. But eventually, my credibility monitor became much sharper. And I was like, “This just isn’t happening. You’re just saying the High Court and the Supreme Court of Luhansk has now been established. It’s got three judges and it’s just made a judgment in this case.”
And it was all faked, absolutely all faked, not just for us, but also for the local population.
Purposeful Archetyping
And what Russia was doing there was archetyping a reality using references and tropes, which meant very little to me then. I hadn’t grown up in the Soviet Union. So tropes from the Great Patriotic War were invisible to me, this constant trope of the Polish mercenaries, which we still see in our information space.
And Putin and others talk about Polish mercenaries. And when most normal people hear “Polish mercenaries,” they think literally Polish mercenaries. But actually, “Polish mercenary” is an archetypal character, a complex of ideas and tropes under the guise of this quite normal-sounding “Polish mercenary.”
But when Russians or people who grew up in the Soviet Union - and maybe someone listening did, and maybe they’ll have a comment on this - this means something differently. It conjures up the scary war-like Second World War imagery.
The Polish Mercenary Troll
And so when my bosses, the people, the heads of operations, were trolled through various information sources that 50,000 Polish mercenaries had established a camp two kilometers west of the bridge or east of the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska on the Ukraine government-controlled side of the Donetsk River, they would then send us there to go and look for 50,000 Polish mercenaries.
And of course, I and my colleagues, knowing the villages and the areas, knew this was highly implausible. But the head of operations, sitting back in the office 150 kilometers away in Stanytsia Luhanska, thought this might be real. And they completely fell for the troll.
And then when you’re sent on maybe your first couple of these operations, you just think this is ridiculous. They’re not going to be there. But then this “Polish mercenary” character kept on coming up again and again. And I’m like, “Oh, there’s something more deep going on here below the surface.”
And lo and behold, to this day, we see “Polish mercenaries” popping up every now and again. And perhaps that’s one of the reasons why Poland is so emphatic about not sending troops to Ukraine, because they’ve been trolled into being quite defensive about the idea of Polish mercenaries.
And the ridiculousness of this when you know, we hear these ridiculous stories of how most of the Russian soldiers end up signing contracts when they’re drunk or under false pretenses and all of that, that they’re the mercenaries and the Ukrainians are quite the opposite.
Collecting Stories Like the Brothers Grimm
But anyway, so like the Brothers Grimm did in answer to Herder’s call of 1777, I was collecting these stories and then reading them every now and again, reading these media outlets, just to try and make sense of it, to try and work out what was going on there and what were the structures inside it.
Inner-Outer Realm Archetyping
And one of the most common structures in almost every one of these stories, and this also goes for MAGA disinfolklore or Donald disinfolklore, is this inner-outer realm archetyping.
So what Donald is really doing with Greenland and NATO now is we always thought - we as the European Union, we as NATO members - thought we were inner realm and then the outer realm was, say, Russia or the Warsaw Pact or China. But now Donald is re-archetyping that archetypal structure and he’s making Greenland outer realm.
And when they have dogs, huskies, they’re kind of turning it into this cartoonish place and using cartoons to articulate what are grave threats and violations of the UN charter and making fun of huskies and making fun of world leaders who are taking this seriously by publishing their private correspondence.
MAGA’s Inner-Outer Realm
But just as the MAGA cult did by bringing - you know, if you wear the hat, if you go to the campaign rallies, if you fall for the trolls or if you have this kind of arch view of Donald and his 3D chess, then you’re inner realm. And all of his long speeches at his campaign rallies were all kind of inner realm identification, inner realm reinforcement operations.
You’re waiting to hear the story about Alphonse Capone or the Jan 6th martyrs or hostages. And everyone else is a liberal or a Democrat or an enemy of true Americanness or whatever.
Russia’s Inner-Outer Realm in Occupied Ukraine
And of course, this is also what Russia did in Russia-occupied Ukraine through the medium of all of these stories, most of which - and thousands of these published every day: video, text, and visual images - archetyping those across the Donets River as outer realm Ukrainians.
And almost automatically, that re-archetypes your identity as a Ukrainian inside the occupation as Russian.
And so this inner-outer realm switching, which we see when the Russians talk about “liberating Kupiansk,” they’re switching it upside down.
Recognizing the Pattern
And if you’re aware that this is what is going on, then when you come across strange things like saying “liberating,” you immediately understand, “Ah, this is what they’re doing.”
And so that’s part of what I try to do, which is make people aware - and most of us are now aware because we see so much of this data - but we know many people in our real lives who don’t tune in that much and aren’t quite aware and don’t know that this is the subtext. This is the systemic effects of individual stories.
Looking for the Mana in the Meme
But if you see this imminence, if you’re looking for the mana in the meme, if you’re looking for the energy in particular memes, then it doesn’t matter where the meme is emanating from, whether it’s your mother, your girlfriend, your son, your daughter, or your friend, or someone in your milieu, or Medvedev.
You know for definite if it’s coming from Medvedev or a distinct Russian source that it’s probably disinfolklore. But what I believe we need to become better at as society, as civilizations, is finding - independent of the source of the brainwashing meme - we should be able to look into the meme itself, whether it’s a flick of an eyebrow, a visual meme, or a sentence, or a tweet, or something we flash by on Twitter, and look for its energy.
And if you see this inner-outer realm dividing or archetyping imminence in there, then we can be on guard.
Staying Alert to Trolls
And obviously we need to be on guard or have incoming troll radar - if we can keep that on, at least when we’re, say, on X or when we’re listening to something that might be propaganda - then the inner-outer realm switching imminence, we may notice that in memes and texts.
With Donald, it’s easy because you know it’ll always be there. But the hard thing is seeing it in our friends and then learning - maybe sometimes quietly noticing, “Oh, I see what you’re doing there. You’re archetyping immigrants as dog-eating outsiders who don’t deserve human rights, who let’s lock them up in ICE or deport them to some terrible prison somewhere.” That’s where that’s leading. I see what you’re doing there.
Or sometimes you just keep that quietly to yourself, your perception. But at least you’re looking inside data, you’re looking for this archetyping and this inner-outer realm imminence, which is in many folktales and every Disney film.
Folklore’s Inner-Outer Realm Structure
You know, Cinderella, the poor girl that meets the prince, that’s inner-outer realm. Sleeping Beauty - this structure is in there, is in so much folklore to the extent that this is probably where we first learn these structures - or when I say we, I mean Indo-Europeans learn these structures.
Intelligence Behind the Stories
And so in the case of MAGA or the Russian disinfolklore, there was and is an intelligence behind what is happening inside the minds of those consuming what was masquerading as news. Whereas it had been me archetyping the scene as something folkloric kind of automatically, what was going on in Russia and Russia-occupied Ukraine was there was something behind it. It was a very purposeful archetyping of Ukraine as outer realm and threatening and Russia as saviors.
Challenging the “Accidental” Theory
This is why when I brought up that case last week - what’s his name, Niall or something - that Natalka from Ukraine had written, I was very grateful for resurfacing it. When he says he thinks this was just accidental, that the Russians had by accident ended up brainwashing themselves into annihilating Ukraine. And then he used, in his way of illustrating, he said, you know, this is like going down a dark set of stairs. You go down one step and you’re deciding to atomize the whole of society and it’s quite dark. And then you go down the next step and you decide, “Oh, okay, we need a bit more violence and coercion.” And then, you know, a few steps down, feeling in the dark, you end up with where Russia is today.
But I, as mentioned last week, I don’t really - I don’t think it’s as accidental based on what I saw in Russia-occupied Ukraine. There is an intelligence behind it.
Druidy Don and the Dementia Question
And this is with “Druidy Don,” my archetyping of Don. When I have these debates, as I did today, is he demented? Well, clearly he’s demented. Does he have dementia or is he doing this on purpose? There’s a bit of a mix of both.
If I apply one of the elements in the disinfolklore analytical method which I use is that if I find myself - and this is where mindfulness comes in - you’re looking in at your mind and what you’re thinking about and processing, which is hard to do and hard to remember.
The Transportive Nature of Disinfolklore
And the point of disinfolklore and part of its power is it transports you. It helps - it makes you transcend the moment. It makes you hate your parents or your siblings because they’re just liberals or they don’t understand Don’s genius or Russia’s 4D chess. So it does transport you.
Mindfulness as Defense
But if we can keep in mind the objective of at least sometimes mindfulness itself, in the sense of looking in at our mind and trying to go, “Why am I thinking this way? What am I thinking about?”
One of the signs I use is that if I find myself questioning, “Is this person doing this on purpose? Is this person not?” And I have this debate with myself about Konstantin, for instance, or others. Then I’ve learned that if I’m questioning this too much, they probably are doing it at least partly on purpose. They are partly manipulative.
A Practical Defense Mechanism
But that’s just - that’s as much a trick to stop me wondering too much about it. So I don’t want to spend my life reading that race car driver guy’s tweets. So when I found myself thinking, “Is he a Russian patsy or not?” for too long, I just blocked him and then I haven’t thought about him in months until this very moment when I thought of this example.
So I’m not making a determination about whether or not that person is or Konstantin is - I’m just thinking, well, if I’m wondering too much about whether they’re doing this intentionally, whether they’re operating or not, then I can easily block them and then move on to other things and make my mind space available for other things.
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