Podcast | Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic’s Law of Similarity and Law of Contagion.

One of the more interesting areas of my research these days is on what Cultural Psychology calls “the Laws of Sympathetic Magic.” These laws or mental routines are very relevant in my Finding Manuland project (particularly the Law of Contagion), as well as in Decoding Trolls. However , the ability of Disinfolklorists like MAGA or Russia to convince us, using Disinfolklore, of the complete opposite of what is true (MAGA will make America great; Ukraine, rather than Russia, is full of Nazis; vaccines not viruses harm us;…) is a phenomenon so common and so attractive, it calls for explanation.

In the past I have written about how the Chef of Disinfolklore Prighozin financed the Internet Research Agency’s successful campaigns to get Donald elected the first time and Brexit done. I wrote about how, through amplified Disinfolklore, that apparatus was able to convince many people to muddle Cause and Effect. However it was not clear to me which aspects of our psychological made us susceptible to such trolls. Economists are more or less agreed that America’s economy in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election had never been healthier or stronger. Yet MAGA Disinfolklore convinced Donald’s voters that not only was the opposite of that true but also that Donald’s tariff troll would make them richer, even though empirical evidence belied these trolls. Nevertheless millions fell for this troll and how and why they were susceptible to it is fascinating.

The two main sub-laws in the Jurisprudence of Sympathetic Magic, which find their most ready application in the realm of consumer/market research, are the Law of Contagion and Law of Association.

I first noticed how in Disinfolklore we can be convinced to believe quite easily the opposite of what is true (for example, that vaccines cause the effects the virus the vaccine protects against actually causes). This is an example of what Fraser in the Golden Bough referred to as the Homeopathic Principle in the laws that govern our modes of thinking. A smidgeon of plausibility amplified by Disinfolklore can serve to dominate our thinking so much so that we neglect, in this example, to vaccinate ourselves against a disease.

The Law of Similarity, which particularly anthropologists like Levi Strauss and Marcel Mauss identified, which is that people think the... So for instance, this thing about with the COVID vaccine, mistaking the solution to an empirically, visually you can see it using certain kinds of instruments, uh, virus, and that the response to that, uh, is actually the cause of the problem. This mode of thinking is almost mainstreamed into our minds. I remember the first time a neighbor talked to me about how it was the vaccine causing the problem, not the COVID. And I tried very earnestly trying to explain to him, um, how literally billions of people have taken the vaccine and there’s been a problem with a few thousand or a tiny percentage, whereas everyone who had got the COVID had suffered harm and damage. We can see it and all of that. Now however I don’t even bother trying to explain to people because it’s just been mainstreamed. There’s a ‘logic’ which seems to go into this law of similarity that it’s a central element in most culture, in most mental models of the world. And disinformationists use this. They riff off this by mixing cause and effect. You can confuse people into muddling these things so that for some reason, people will believe that the vaccines is what’s causing the harm and that it’s not the disease the vaccine is designed to fix.

We see that a lot in Russian propaganda. We see it actually on that paper or on that poster where NATO, in this sense, is the vaccine. But it’s the vaccine against Russia invading and killing everyone. Yet it’s being blamed for causing the war. It’s the complete opposite. So this is the law of opposites, which they’re riffing off. It’s just being aware that this exists as a mental guideline in our minds, whether it’s universal or not, I don’t know, but, but, but it’s, it works and it’s in, um, uh, it’s in stories as well. Levi Strauss’s entire anthropology, was very much on the opposites and what he called the Law of Association.

We see it in our information space all the time. This what Orwell did in 1984, probably unknowingly, that you say, you know, ‘up!’ is ‘down!.’

Donald does it the whole time where, you know, he says it’s China will pay the tariffs, not us. And it’s the opposite of what’s true. And for some reason that is believed by certain kinds of personalities.

Probably all of us believe in things which are the opposite of what is true in different contexts.

So for me, a meme, it can be linguistic, audible to any informational unit, whereas I do recognize meme as this. So for me, meme is back to its original meaning from Richard Dawkins, I think, created the term meme that we understand. Basically the cultural equivalent of a gene. But obviously in a contemporary parlance, most of us think of memes as a visual image itself. But with that in mind, what I do in my work is I have various memes meaning linguistic artefacts, which usually have an image as well on them. Because these same themes pop up again and again and again, I then, as part of my communications strategy, I repost these memes. Many of you will probably see that. And thankfully, in two years of it, I really haven’t got that much bad reaction from it, you know, because from my perspective, people just ignore it. They don’t have to take it seriously. But I get very little, very little pushback.

So one which I’ve been thinking about this week a lot is the meaning of the drone, how drones have changed the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

So basically now you have, and this meme is popping up a lot in our information space that “Ukraine is trying to provoke a nuclear war.” We hear all of the talking points coming from pro-Russia voices, even if they’re dissidents in the West, trying to model rationality, saying, oh, Ukraine shouldn’t have hit the part of the nuclear triad in Operation Spiderweb when Ukraine destroyed one third of Russia’s strategic nuclear bomber fleet in one night.

So for me, whenever that meme pops up, I have my response to it, which is that under the doctrine of mutual assured destruction, until the last few months, as a non-nuclear power Ukraine could not participate in the Mutually Assured Destruction dialectic which has governed International Relations and global strategic thinking since World War Two. So Putin then designated Ukrainians as terrorists. So this inner / outer realm switching, which I’m sure you remember from my work, is the key immanence in, is a key way we can spot what I call Disinfolklore as well. Russia is the terrorist state yet it tries to designate the country lawfully defending itself as Outer Realm Terrorists, the opposite of what is true. Because whether it’s talking about migrants being criminals or Ukrainians being terrorists, it’s creating this inner / outer realm division using memes. Out of that, that creates the community.

This is partly what led me to my discovery of Disinfolklore in Eastern Ukraine, where I was working on this bridge, which geographically separated the other world of Russia-occupied Ukraine from the rest of Ukraine. So it was a geographical separation point, a bridge, literally a bridge, not just a metaphor. A physical bridge. Across the bridge, it wasn’t like crossing from Romania into Bulgaria or Slovakia or Greece, from Bulgaria to Greece or into Türkiye, where you’re just basically crossing into two different modern European countries. It was going into this world, this other world of all of these mad competing logics inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. It didn’t make much sense to me when I first went there. I saw people gradually inculcating these Opposite Logics from taking into their minds memes and stories (Disinfolklore) from the information space. That’s exactly what Russian anmd other kinds of Disinfolklorists always do. They create this community in the inner realm (MAGA, Russians) and the enemy (Liberals, Trans, Democrats, Ukrainians, the West), using the enemy, the outsider, the transgressor of the norms that Disinfolklore defines for whichever inner realm is being legislated into existence by the Disinfolklore.

I noticed that this is what is in many folk tales or færy tales. In the archetypal troll tale, which is “Three Billy Goats’ Gruff”, which is basically responsible, when I did the research, that is responsible for the really for most of the appearances of the term trolls in our culture. I came to this conclusion after going through the Dow Jones Factiva database, which has something like 45,000 different sources in it. I went through every appearance of trolling and trolls since 1970. It was about 85,000 entries when I did it a couple of years ago. I could trace the term, the metaphor throws to two main common meanings. One, it’s a meaning, a word in American English, which isn’t in English English.

It’s a form of fishing where the bait wanders around in the water and fish come and catch it. It spread from that meaning into police trolling for criminals, so looking for people.

Then the other meaning is from the folklore, which comes from this archetypal troll tale, Three Billy Goats’ Gruff.

The tale itself is Three Billy Goats. They’re brothers. They’re migrating. So three is significant to me. They’re migrants. In the children’s tale, they’re just crossing... They want to cross the bridge to go to a new pasture. This is the archetypal migrant tale. This is what all of our forebears have done a thousand different times because of famine, acquisitiveness, epidemics or war. We have traveled and migrated across the river, across the bridge into another land to look for fresh pastures.

Of course, when your five-year-old or six-year-old child is reading it, they’re not thinking about this migration. That this is a tale about the archetypal migration. But it’s nevertheless immanent in the story and in its attraction.

The troll who’s guarding the bridge, who interestingly is the, so basically he is fooled by the first two goats crossing the bridge. They say, oh, I’m quite thin. Wait for my fatter brother. And then the third brother comes and he kills the troll.

We don’t really find out in the tale what happens. Basically we assume then that the three migrant outer realm goats ate all the food in the inner realm that the dead troll was trying to protect.

So it’s this structure of going over a bridge from the outer realm so that the goats are in their outer realm. They’re trying to cross into the troll’s inner realm. He’s guarding. He’s trying to stop them.

This is the tale in every MAGA meme. This is the tale in English political discourse at this precise moment. Really over the past seven, eight years, the whole migrant troll, migration troll, has become endemic in most political discourses. The structure is the same everywhere, whether it was for me in eastern Ukraine or in modern political discourse.

It’s someone building community in what they define as their inner realm, by reference to a threat from the outer realm. The outer realm threat, threat, is often a migrant who’s coming to take the sovereignty, the security, and or the prosperity, fertility of the inner realm. They build political support, uh, and community around this external threat. That is the archetypal Indo-European structure. It’s the structure in all our minds. It works, even when you explain to people that this is the structure of, this is what they’re doing.

So this is when Donald announced his, uh, his run in, in, 2016… When he came down the stairs, the golden stairs in Trump Tower. Again a Disinfolklore meme integrated naturally into concrete reality: the man who lives in the tower, the golden tower. He came down and he called the migrants criminals, the Mexican migrants who are coming to steal your daughters. So affecting the fertility of the inner realm. Then he lures the actual migrants who vote for him by saying, oh, “but you’re not a criminal. These are the criminals. These are the (I’m not going to use that horrible word again) R-A-P-I-S-T-S.” That’s about affecting the fertility of the inner realm.

So these are all very common structures. It’s immanent in everything I do in Disinfolklore. It’s immanent in all folklore. We take in these archetypal structures from, I believe, from Disney or from folktales, but we also take them in from news and now from Donald and from Putin. When he’s calling the Ukrainians Nazis. These are the patterns of association that expert Disinfolklorists integrate into their memes, using the laws of sympathetic magic.

Get full access to Disinfolklore at www.disinfolklore.net/subscribe