Podcast | Disinfolklore in Executive Orders and National Security Memos

The United States government has published an Executive Order and a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) (h/t Ken Klippenstein) that use Disinfolklore about an entirely fictional character called ‘Antifa’ to justify entirely un-American activities by the Federal government. Both documents are premised on entirely fictional (Disinfolklore) accounts of so-called Anti-Fascist plans for violence against the Right.

Only evidence we have about plans for violence is from messages from Young Republicans (aged 18-40 years-old) that demonstrate they’re planning to exterminate Americans using gas chambers. Accusation in a Mirror (accusing the future victims of the crimes you’re planning to commit against them) is common to all genocides. It’s a pretext for murdering or displacing the scapegoats. A motivation. Reveals intentions.

The policy framework for oppressing anyone the Federal Government chooses to is now completely grounded on fictional events which never happened. For example, the U.S. President alleges falsely in NSPM-7 that the bullets used by the alleged murderer of his father’s Far Right hero, Charlie Kirk, were “engraved…with so-called ‘anti-fascist’ rhetoric.”

This entirely false and unfounded accusation in a formal document used by the US President as a policy basis for persecuting supposed members of an entirely fictional organisation called “Antifa” signposts the arrival of Disinfolklore into the heart of US government and society.

It’s precisely the pattern I watched the Russians use in Russia-occupied Ukraine (where I worked as a diplomat 2015-2018). It’s a new level of “Disinformation.” It’s why, as I argue in this podcast, we need a means - the analytical method I invented to parse Russian and MAGA - Disinfolklore to understand what is going on here.

In my work as a writer, what I try to do is provide the tools to analyse phenomena in real time. To find a way of looking at them, of cutting through the rhetoric.

If Both Sides, for instance, are saying, are Othering what they term disinformation. The political ‘Right’ is claiming that what Antifa is talking about is Disinformation. Antifa -not that it is anything anyway. It’s a set of inchoate individuals… If Antifa is saying what the Right is talking about is Disinformation.

Then we need what I call an ‘evaluative framework/dimension. An evaluative level/layer with which to define what is Disinformation. That’s where my Code of Positive Trolls came into my life in February 2020.

A set of six criteria, six elements that you can use to parse any meme, any linguistic or any piece of data and any informational unit. It’s an attempt to objectively define what is disinformation or non-disinformation, i.e. what is good, what is bad, what is positive, what is negative.

That’s what I use in terms rather than going for sinister/left and Right or writ or any such divisive wordings or self-declared labels.

So I just go for the positive, negative, neutral, which is also in the word neutral, neutral, no movement. That evaluative dimension, then that led me to, I was looking at, for the reasons I’ve spoken about before, that I was in eastern Ukraine on this bridge in this very folklore-like situation, which had structural elements like folklore. Also the whole setting was just folklore about the whole thing. That made me interested in folklore before I realized actually Russia was using stories to troll people into particular attitudes, moods, motivations, and intentions which suited to them.

We see today this horrific footage, which I would not recommend anyone watch. I certainly won’t be watching it. I can see a Disinfolklore without experiencing it of Russia hitting the World Food Programme convoy in Kherson.

I think it was our very first episode with the release of the UN Commission on Ukraine, which was set up immediately after the full scale invasion and which has done amazing work reporting and cataloging and recording the many war crimes of Russia.

I think our first, maybe it was our second episode coincided with the release of the UN Commission’s report. It’s based in Vienna and is part of the Good UN. They released their report on Kherson and the human safaris and set out evidence which will be used in court in war crimes, the crime of aggression.

One of the things which I highlighted there to explain what I mean by Disinfolklore, is again what we see with this footage published by Russia of its war crime of destroying by a drone this convoy. I believe no one was killed or injured, which is fantastic.

They are creating, the Russians are creating the crime and then publishing it using Telegram, presumably, so Russian state-controlled media (which now these young Republican self-declared Nazis are also using). The purpose of this, the glorification of these war crimes is something new. It’s something which I saw in eastern Ukraine. And... it’s quite stunning for people.

It was that recognition without quite knowing what was new about it or what it was that led me to search for a new word, a new term for what I now call Disinfolklore. That is archetypal disinfolklore: releasing the footage of these war crimes, trying to flood the zone with so many crimes that it will be hard for anyone just to take it in, to interpret them.

The last figures I saw we were on, which were from about 2023, that Ukraine has registered something like 250,000 war crimes, but we won’t be distracted. We see Kaja Kallas, the EU High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Deputy Head of the European Commission in Kyiv this week. The European Union dispersed or is dispersing 10 million euros for to try Russia for the crime of aggression. I think we talked about this before briefly. This is the crime of aggression, which is the most serious crime in humanity, in our culture, in our civilization.

The tribunal which will be run by the Council of Europe, which is a distinct organization from the European Union, they are set up to hold the Russian leadership to account over that. So that’s all ongoing and these reports and Russia’s catalogue of war crimes will not, I don’t think, it’s not going to overload the system.

So last week I talked about I was thinking myself a lot about magic. There is something oddly magical about why Russia thinks there’s something positive for them, from their perspective, about filming, for instance, the bombing of this convoy or the killing of... of over 100 people in Kherson with the drone safaris and the burning of buildings and hospitals. Equally, there was something magical in how certain minds were being captured and captivated by what seemed to me transparent nonsense. Yet it caught hold in people’s minds like this, the Antifa troll. The smear if you like, or the troll, or the woke, the anti-woke troll.

If you had said to me, in 2020: We’re going to plan this campaign. We’re going to captivate the minds of the entire political Right. We will use this as an organizing fiction in every country. It will attract certain personality inventories, people and people with power. They will organize around this concept of wokeness against the post-World War II legal and social order.

They will support the abolition of, this will gather together everyone who supports the abolition of equality legislation, which protects people from being discriminated against on certain protected grounds (like sex, sexual preference, political viewpoint, etc.). We will vilify refugees. Like in the UK, there’s no legal way for anyone to claim asylum in the United Kingdom anymore. So as a result of that, you have all these what they call Small Boat People, which is kind of a Disinfolklore moniker, coming in across the water.

You have all of these things, which when I was studying law in the late 90s in Cambridge, in England... studying European human rights law, international criminal law and the rest, conflict of laws. This was unforeseeable and impossible. This would never have happened. Yet it has happened.

(https://medium.com/@StephenDougla.s/https-medium-com-stephendouglas-what-was-studying-at-cambridge-like-2b1f69f6c93b)

Now it’s normal. And now not only is it normal, most people haven’t even noticed it’s happened and have no idea of how unusual and extraordinary this is.

So the word magic often came to my mind because even you think about magic, it is really, it’s about…

In psychology, there’s this phase that children are often told to go through. I first came across it with the Brexiteers in England, magical thinking where you try and think something into being, which sometimes happens.

This is a great song by the amazing Norwegian band Aha, which I always loved as a teenager, which is Dream Myself Alive, which is this idea that you can create reality through your dreams and work towards them. So that’s valid. There is something equally quite magical about that. But the magical thinking was, for instance, in the Brexit sense, was they thought they would just become richer by leaving. And there was nothing, there was no cause and effect. Children, before they understand cause and effect, they go through the stage of magical thinking. And it’s often seen as quite negative consequences.

There’s a positive side to it, which is this idea that you dream yourself alive. So that kind of interested me with what Prighozin was able to do and was able to achieve with the Internet Research Agency when I started to look into it and look into the reports say by the Senate Intelligence Committee after the 2016 election and what Cambridge Analytica was doing.

There was something quite magical about how Trump himself could get into office after all his crimes against good taste and the rest. Something anti-intuitive about him talking about Mexicans and immigrants and then successfully trolling exactly these immigrants to vote for them.

In some ways, there’s a mechanical explanation for this. Say in the migrants thing, the message is, oh, “it’s only criminals who are migrants. If you’re not a criminal, you’ll be safe.” So people, Mexican or Cuban migrants, heard that message very, very clearly. It was repeated ad nauseum. Palestinians in different parts of America, voted for Donald rather than Kamala.

So there is something causal, something mechanistic we can explain about it. The manipulative con-man element.

There’s also something slightly magical in the sense of it doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of our rational thought processes as they existed in, say, 2010. It’s just nuts.

The whole thing is nuts. So much of what is going on is nuts. I think Putler himself is giving a bad name to magical thinking because even the dogs on the street who pay no attention to anything and who we have never been able to get interested in Ukraine for the past four years, they are noticing these petrol queues. They are resonating with people much more easily than watching... Mariupol be bombed from the air. So Putin’s attempt to magically think Russia into victory itself is giving a bad name to magic. And I thought, and one of my early drafts and a lot of my early writing on Disinfolklore was focused on this idea of war magic, which is propaganda.

It’s part of my origin story for Disinfolklore because it really pushed me to justify and explain why It’s these stories underlying not only our cultures on a macro scale. The stories which are underlying what the frogs, the inflatable frogs, the stuff around Kirk and the stuff around George Floyd’s murder. It’s these stories which out of this has generated the support or not support for Ukraine.

Ukraine itself, I’ve long maintained before I even understood how important Ukraine was for our culture history, that it has been the very center of US politics. Invisible to many countries since President Trump’s first election. As manifested in the impeachment and all of that malarkey leading up to it. The Hunter Biden troll.

All of that stuff. Ukraine was absolutely central to it. Now it is central again. In a much more central way with a lot more agency. Telling that story and framing it in that way, I think, is very important.

One of the things I’m talking about tonight is why I felt it necessary to create a new moniker, Disinfolklore, as a substitute for what most people understand to be disinformation. I mean, it just so happens, as I’ve spoken about, I discover or I created the moniker Disinfolklore around the 14th or 15th of February. I marked it with a tweet, which is there, which is 830,000 views now by accident.

Because I had this folder, this ‘folklore’ folder on my computer from which I established, I think, in April 2020, where I started putting in stuff about trolls and about trolls as folkloric trolls. Then all of the work which I was doing, looking at trolls and trolling, which I talked about two episodes ago when I went through the Factiva series. Dow Jones Factiva database for 45,000 or something media sources globally and I got back to my query 65,000 returns.

I Went through each of them and I still have them. I talked about the ones where M’ockers (presenter on Volya Radio) this week has been, I think it happens to her quite a lot, but she just posted it.

She kind of named and shamed this person who wrote the most horrific abuse to her on a DM. You know, this is so normal now. she wouldn’t even think about reporting it to the police.

As far ago, as long ago, in a land that we all lived in in 2010, as the Web 2.0, as Twitter and Facebook were beginning.

This was police reportable. There was the right-wing media and the right-left-wing media was all jumping down the throats of the social media companies. The police were investigating and people were brought to court for things which are said today a million times a day without any without any punishment, criminal, even though these are criminal offenses.

That itself is a story which is important to tell and remind people.

The Disinfolklore moniker emerged when I found that ‘Folklore’ folder. Then I had another folder of disinformation. I was like thinking, I need a new moniker because I’m talking about something that no one really knows about. Not even the people I worked with in eastern Ukraine and Russia-occupied Ukraine recognized what I recognized as something strange, weird, new.

So I know that no-one else recognized it. I need a new name for it. And when I put the folder, I put the folders together, folklore and disinformation, it just popped out of me.

It just so happened that there’s so many shape-shifting dimensions which I, too, Disinfolklore as a narrative form, as a description of what Russia, for instance, is doing by filming their attack on a World Food Programme convoy in Kherson today and which the UN Commission referred to this nightmare circle where, and again, I worked this out very early on in the war in Ukraine, because I was part of some of the stories that Russia was creating in 2015 on this bridge, which I worked on in eastern Ukraine, where I realized there was this fluidity between events on the ground.

I spoke about the sausage troll episode, I think, in a previous podcast. Russia plants two tons of sausages in this place. Then it creates a whole story about it involving unconsenting participants like myself as a foreign diplomat. Even a Russian colleague as well, who was ridiculed inside and by the Russian media archetyped as smugglers ourselves. We had brought, as the international community, we had brought these two tons of sausages.

Now Russia was going to destroy with artillery and just a whole. This sparked months of stories in the Russian occupier media. So that was just one of thousands, millions of different stories, of different artefacts, which all went made up, all aggregated.

I saw after the full-scale invasion, the purpose of it all. The relentless othering of Westernness, of Ukrainians. The justification of genocide.

So this is new. So there’s similarities with what happened, but it is also new.

So this is why Disinfolklore, I realized how important it was to to have a new word for it. For instance, when people say the Democrats aren’t as clever or as effective at creating these monikers, and then amplifying them relentlessly. Such that they enter the minds of all of humanity - like ‘woke’ or ‘Antifa.’ This is branding. What I can Archetyping in my work.

Take this now ubiquitous word ‘disinformation,’ for instance. A 1972 top secret KGB dictionary defined:

“disinformation data as especially prepared data used for the creation in the mind of the enemy of incorrect or imaginary pictures of reality on the basis of which the enemy would make decisions beneficial to the USSR.”

So this is a perfect example of that. Even if you are talking about disinformation, you’re inside the troll. So if you’re talking about Russian disinformation, I read a document which was published recently on... disinformation in Georgia and disinformation in former Soviet republics.

Basically it depends on you and I agreeing what is negative and what is disinformation. Then we can talk about it.

We can’t really have a discussion unless we have an evaluative framework about why this is disinformation. We can do what the European Union’s External Action Service does with its brilliant work, in creating an alternative framework for a whole discussion about what it calls FIMI, foreign information manipulation by enemy actors.

If you have designated enemies like Russia, like China, which are seeking to subvert our democratic ideals and destroy our right to participate in public life. Then if you can trace any particular item of information, any informational unit to Russia or to China or to Iran, you can designate that as disinformation or FIMI or disinfolklore.

I was looking for some other means of doing this. A means of doing it on the fly. Also a means of expressing the system-wide dimension to having... billions of these memes blasting out of us, at our sensory perception from everywhere, from the television, from the internet, from social media, from our mothers, from our fathers, from our friends, from our children, from video games, from cartoons, from YouTube. Of seeing a continuity between them all.

This led to what I’ve spoken about before - the realization that Russia, either by accident or design, had discovered what the early European so-called nationalists like Herder in Germany had discovered, which was that you needed to create a story around which the 10 historic German tribes could unite.

In order to do that, you needed storytellers and artists and composers. You needed Goethe to write Faust, a very old, ancient Indo-European tale present in practically every culture with the devil tempting someone into things you needed to. The Grimm brothers and their teams of people to go out and collect stories and villages and words and language. You needed Wagner to create operas based on Germanic legends collected by the Roman Tacitus.

Out of that soup of memes and ideas, you could create a sense of national identity, which was so strong. that after two millennia of disparate Germanic tribes wandering around the forests and having fights with the Celts and the Gauls, you could turn them into one nation state in 1870. A similar process happened in Ireland. In the modern state of Greece. In Spain, with the Civil War. In France. In almost every modern European country. Herder himself, this guy from 1777, Germany, he looked at England and saw it uniting around Shakespeare.

So what Russia accidentally discovered was that you could artificially create the sense of identity using disinfolklore. And there is something magical about that in the ordinary sense of the word, magic. Obviously disinfolklore stories, folklore stories have lots of magical elements to them. There’s an element of magical thinking to say, Simonyan, sitting on the dace at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum in June 2022, with Putler sitting beside her. She’s dressed as green, like a little green man herself.

She’s just talking matter-of-factly of what they’re saying in the offices in Moscow about how All our hope is in the famine. We’ll famine Africa and then millions of refugees will pour into Europe. Europe will stop supporting Ukraine. They’ll realize that we have to be friends because we have no choice not to be friends. There’s something childlike about this. It’s like it’s Russia and Europe, famineing millions of people. Then just like you, you know, you used to have fights with your best friend when you were six years old. Ten minutes later, something happens to unite you. You’re happy again.

So there is something childlike folklore like and magical, magical thinking like also. It’s out of these crazy ideas have emanates this war.

These ideas are expressed in stories like I’ve just told about St. Petersburg. But he’s also telling a story in St. Petersburg to move people, move millions of people to explain to us what Russia’s strategy is, because it’s not enough just to do it. They need to put a story around it.

So that’s just a little introduction. We don’t have time to talk about, to go on. So next week we’ll talk about Contagion and how the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic comes into this. But thank you for listening.

I think you’re thinking of what’s called, it’s called the executive office, which is run by our friend Sachs and one of Donald’s sons, where you pay vast amounts of money. None of those people who were banging on about Hunter Biden troll for the last 10 years seem to care anything about any of this. Anyway, that’s an aside. As you say, we need to move on find a way of stopping it.

Accusation in a mirror, which is something that I learned from reading about the first New Lines Institute did its first report in early, about a month after the full-scale invasion began, dedicates a chapter to accusation in a mirror, which I then became familiar with.

I was able to see that structure, which is you accuse your enemy of precisely the behavior you’re planning as a pretext for what you are going to do. All of us who are tuned into the Ukrainian info space have an edge over people who aren’t. We have had a masterclass in this what I call provocation logic cycle of Russia revealing its intentions, its mens rea, Mana and the energy in it is what it’s going to do by accusing Ukraine of it. Now we kind of, we can read this. We’ve become literate in it.

When I was reading earlier today this memorandum, national security memorandum that Donald signed, which uses this, you know, for instance, the troll about the cartridges used by Ukraine this guy who was trying to kill his father’s idol.

It’s my psychoanalytical explanation of Charlie Kirk’s murder. The casings containing antifa messaging on them. Basically, if you’ve come across the term accusation in the mirror or you understand what Putin has done, it’s a projection. It’s a revelation of intention. What is going to happen. It’s predictive data.

We’re reading in a certain way and the people minimizing this and saying ‘The sun is going to rise tomorrow.’ This is what’s happening. That’s what for genocide scholars is very ominous because this accusation in a mirror precedes and has preceded every... I accept no blame for this and the entire national security memo is accusing people of crimes which it is only MAGA’s adherents who have been doing, including the attempted assassination of Donald, if we understand where those people came from and their beliefs.

Say within the Ukraine thing, and I think Ukraine is a really useful train. It’s a good training for us. To help our compatriots cut through this nonsense. Again, just this term nonsense, which the North Atlantic Fella Organisation (NAFO), I just loved it because it just archetyped all of this as just nonsense because you avoid getting in the woods.

For me, the framing in, say, the Ukraine situation, not both sides between Russia and Ukraine, The two sides, and President Zelensky has, as a lawyer, as a fellow lawyer, brilliantly always got this. He has taught so many people this. The side is international law, the post-World War II legal order. That’s one side, You’re either in favor of protecting that or you’re in favor of Russia, whose entire job is to try and get rid of that.

You can map that framing onto MAGA and what it’s trying to do. It’s immanent in every single one of these memos. Even the idea of Antifa, because human rights are universal, protected by these instruments, these post-World War II instruments. That for me is my framing that’s immanent in all of my work. These are the battle lines. We are either fighting to preserve the post-World War II legal and social order, or we’re fighting to revert to the 1930s.

They’re not hiding this. They haven’t hidden it. Donald hasn’t hidden it from the beginning. The unified Reich stuff. He says what he’s going to do. If you can’t parse data for the nonsense and the non-nonsense. And obviously there’s gray area stuff, which he says. There’s certain things which he and his followers and the entire amplification network produce, which are predictive and reveal their intentions. Anyone of normal intelligence who is constantly looking at data and improving their mental algorithms to interpret it, should be able finally to work out what’s going on.

Here an example we have, say, with Putin’s attentions. So there may have been people in February 2020, in fact, I knew people in February 2022, who even after the full-scale invasion began, they were saying, “oh no, it’s just a small scale one.” That thing President Biden was accused of saying where he said, “oh, our response would be different if it’s just a small incursion over a big incursion.” Some of those people who in February 2022 fell for the troll have, through watching this entire, this nightmare for the past four years, or three years, have altered their algorithm. Now they understand that Putin doesn’t desire peace.

Well, actually, we’ve seen this on an accelerated scale over the past six months, perhaps among Donald and his supporters, which, of course, we didn’t need this journey because we’ve been watching this from the beginning.

So there is this way we can predict the future. We can look at certain kinds of data and go, okay, that is what’s going to happen unless we somehow stop it. I suppose we can all get better at that in different ways in our life. The signs here are very clear because they’re not trying to hide it. They can’t archetype themselves as Nazis… well, I’ll put it this way, they can more easily archetype themselves as Nazis, as right-wing authoritarian followers, by speaking as those young Nazi Republicans were speaking on Telegram.

That’s how you do it. You don’t speak in euphemisms. You just say, look, send them to the gas chambers. Straight away, that’d the signal. I’m on the in-group. I’m arching myself as one of you and against them. That’s how they’re doing it.

So it is helpful to us when we see that out. I mean it’s a double-edged sword because they are used to recruit people as much as they are used to uh to put off people but constantly reminding um people of it I suppose what I try to do is, yeah, well, it’s created there.

Those are, I mean, that’s archetypal disinfolklore. It will be used as lore within Republican circles. Some people will be fired, others will be promoted as a result of it. Looking at it as a signaling, as an in-group signaling, There’s so many dimensions to it.

There’s infinity of stories to distract from the Epstein files from MAGA so that we have no expectations that this story, which should end, finally end everything. All their careers probably won’t. Because there just seems to be infinity of rage cycles. Our best hope is that Ukraine can become, it can lever itself into place and be the only good thing that Donald ever does and becomes the means through which Donald really distracts from Epstein continually. But from the... Yeah, I don’t. I mean, there’s journalists who are doing great, amazing work, and Politico, obviously, here is doing amazing work.

I did notice Donald saying two days ago he cussed Politico. He singled it out in some context, and I was wondering, what’s going on there? Because my perception is Politico has been quite helpful to him. But clearly he knew the story was... was coming along.

I saw a comment today, which I think probably is right, that this is the logical, the belief systems of these people, of these radicalised young Republican Nazis, is the output of people who were trained purposefully by Charlie Kirk and others. And And they’ve gone global. They’ve got their plans to activate the far-right everywhere.

My insight with Disinfolklore is that Groypers, these are all monikers. These are all folklore. It’s all folklore, basically. And as far as I know, no-one else has made this connection between these disparate discourses between the present and the past and the constant eruption of it.

I do now realise that I need to use a moniker ‘Infolklore’ to describe positive, non-mean stories that are generous, that are ethically disciplined, that are... that have an energy, an identifiable energy, that are focused, that are insightful. And there are people, there’s filmmakers making stuff using using AI.

There’s a great article in Wired this week on the first AI auteur in Hollywood who’s just been able to voice so many different voices and all well scripted, brilliantly scripted. So we need to be making our own Infolklore and emotionally resonant memes. The situationists did this. The Russians do this. Arranging and provoking protests themselves as situationist interventions like protests. Pussy Riot for example. When you read the Surkov emails setting up all of these demonstrations and protests all around Ukraine.

You see the back and forth.

“Well, for $2,000, I can get you this number of babushkas. If you give us $5,000, I can get some younger people. We can have signs like this. We can have an effigy of Poroshenko if you give us this much money. And all the answers coming back saying, okay, this.”

So perceiving as the people in Portland are doing and as the people you’re referencing are very cleverly in America because people are so highly educated, especially grad students, into understanding the spectacle, understanding postmodernism and hypermodernism and looking at this. Well, maybe that’s also kind of a meta thing. So Donald is the perfect, and MAGA, exemplar of hypermodernism, which was summed up by his niece’s biography, “Too Much, Never Enough.”

“…the hypermodern approach highlights acceleration and excess as defining qualities of the contemporary moment.”

If postmodernism is cynicism. Irony (it’s way beyond Irony that Donald accuses Others of very crimes his own supporters have in store for us). Cynical reason. There is no God. There is no truth. Then hypermodernism exists. Is just too much, never enough. Acceleration and Excess.

And

I think we all understand what the fact that most political violence in the United States emanates from far-right supporters of Donald, so his accusation in formal documents that the opposite is true, is verifiably false.

So we need to kind of get on that. Understanding MAGA and what we’re seeing as a spectacle, as art, as an art, as drama, as story, as folklore, as folklore stories, that is an edge anyway over how most people are seeing it. Archetyping it as like Lost (TV series of constant cliffhangers that never climax). As a spectacle gives an edge, because that’s the realm they’re operating in. It’s all just about emotional resonance and trolling. All my work - I consider myself an artist and a writer primarily. So all of my work is about trying to do that.

Of course, the Nazis, they were against certain kinds of art. But then other kinds of art like Wagner and classical music, they loved. Used to justify their horrific crimes.

So we probably see the whole idea of blogging. It’s a new medium. The influencers. These are all the artists. The MAGA artists. Charlie Kirk himself, an artist, magician, priest. These roles are always fulfilled in any Indo-European community. Great art will be created out of this moment. It is the responsibility of the artist to find joy and provoke joy as well, because otherwise it could all be a bit grim. So I do try. To miss the joy is to miss all. It’s one of my very early mantras, which I try to recall all the time.

Next time we’ll talk a bit more about the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic, which gets into of what does this cognitive dissonance consist? And as a taster, I’d give you just this, I mean, from the, from a, very basic cognition way that our brain will aggregate lots of things and form patterns in them.

It’ll arrive at a Good Enough conclusion at what this thing is. What this phenomenon is. It will make decisions on the basis of it. In the jurisprudence of sympathetic magic, which was written about and archetyped first by Marcel Mauss and Fraser and various others, and now by cultural psychologists. In the law of similarity, it is the key definition there since the early 20th century, is that if something looks like something, if something looks like an elephant, to use the Lakoff term, Then it probably is an elephant.

Before the advent of multimedia and images, this was a Good Enough way of getting through life and through society and through the world. If it kind of looked like good food, you could eat it. If the person looked nasty, they were nasty. Then now with the advent of digital imagery so prevalent, we see a picture of Putler in his bare-chested and we think, oh, strong man, he must be strong. We mistake the substance for the image.

This is a cognitive dissonance which we can use, which we do use in our daily lives the whole time which most of us, we used to get through fine. It is also used by malevolent forces to troll and trick us into making bad choices. So the law of similarity/ of association is one of the two main constituent elements in this jurisprudence of sympathetic magic. So that’s a good lead-in to maybe what we’ll talk a bit more about next week. Out.

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