Welcome to the battlefield: your mind

Preserve your critical faculties as though they were ammunition and you were in Stalingrad in 1943.

Christmas is almost upon us! 🎄 And this will be my final lengthy Substack of the year. 

I was planning on doing something light and frothy, as the festive season makes concentration on serious things rather difficult for me. But then, the other day, I read something that truly lit up my mind. It sent me back a decade to when I was doing a Masters in terrorism, at the Department of War Studies at King’s College in London. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I was starting to be drawn into thinking and writing about the culture wars, which ultimately led me here, to Substack. A lot of the academic work on terrorism at the time was — to me — rather superficial and unsatisfactory. It focused on things like ‘root causes’, or response paradigm debates: law enforcement versus military. Most of it seemed to miss a key element of terrorism as a strategy, and that is emotion. 

I sensed at the time that emotional responses to emotion driven campaigns, whether they were waged by terrorists or journalists, were a key new frontier. Apologies for quoting myself, but in one essay I wrote:

“Media frenzies are not entirely new either. What is new is the unceasing slipstream of emotion – most often outrage and righteousness—that has replaced other structures of belief…Our current zeitgeist is a lack of certainty, perceived discrimination, overabundance of images both of extreme suffering and opulent wealth, triggering a steady flow of anger and longing, respectively.

This wildly overheated and media-saturated culture is what we have inherited from the age of insurgency and protest. Whereas before we had structures (military, cell, student organizations) today we have lone wolves, leaderless resistance, and drone strikes. Insurgency has devolved to the point of being simply fragmented movements of emotion, part of the hum of traffic that reaches us through our phones, in our social networks, in our schools and workplaces.

Little did I realise just how, to borrow a word from today’s young people, extra it was about to get. Seemingly endless American mass shootings in schools, the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks, the horrors of ISIS, Trump, Brexit, MeToo, cancel culture and attacks on free speech, Twitter, the sudden onset of ‘trans’ kids, and then grandest of grand finales — the era of COVID: these last ten years have given us all cognitive, moral, and intellectual whiplash. And heartbreak.

Over and over again, people ask: ‘what is going on?’ Nothing is as it once was. Everything feels off.

The essay I quoted above was written in 2012. Turns out I was describing the transition from fourth to fifth generation warfare.

Thanks to a Pakistani legal scholar by the name of Dr. Waseem Ahmad Qureshi, and his appearance in Robert Malone’s Substack this week, I now have what I suspect is the correct intellectual framework for processing our confusing cultural moment. We are all living through, and are combatants in, fifth generation warfare.

“5GW is the battle of perceptions and information. In 5GW, violence is so discreetly dispersed that the victim is not even aware that it is a victim of war and the victim is not aware that it is losing a war.

…

5GW is also a cultural and moral war, which distorts the perception.

…

5GW exploits cultural icons and religious sentiments.

…

Sun Tzu defines this tactic of altering the perspectives of the world as the ‘acme of skill [victory without fighting.]’ The effectiveness of 5GW depends on its disparity: it does not require any unity in its efforts and instead, the more a warfare is dispersed in its efforts, the the more immune and effective it becomes. Wars of perception are 5GW, with information being the weapon, due to increased technology of cyberspace, media, social media…these tactics of deception and propaganda backed by identity construction and misperception, and the power of shaping the will of the adversary.” [emphasis mine.]

This illuminates so many of my passing observations and enduring preoccupations that I don’t have the space to list them here. But to name just a few big ones: how has the mainstream culture has persuaded us we don’t know what biological reality is? How is it possible that the arguments of the “left” are an exact mirror image of arguments on the “right”, leaving zero space for substantive dialogue and causing us to live in two separate but parallel realities? How is it that suddenly governments across the world started using the same phrases over and over, like “Build Back Better” and “flatten the curve” and “safe and effective,” and regular people started repeating the same phrases over and over again — like ‘I believe in science’ or more recently ‘stochastic terrorism’? How is that at some point in the last few years, suddenly everything that came out of formerly trusted institutions just felt like a massive lie?

Writing in the Handbook of 5GW, L.C. Rees says: “any sufficiently advanced 5GW is indistinguishable from magic.”

Just last week I wrote: “Because we live in a secular, mechanistic society, we no longer believe in the casting of spells and of dark, psychic powers. Our education and civilisation have rendered us helpless against them.” (Quoting myself twice in one essay? Yikes! My apologies.)

When I was a teenager, at that age where everything is embarrassing, I had a thought that greatly helped me tamp down my normal teen fear that my secret interior life might be discovered by my peers. I had what almost amounted to a vision: that my thoughts (the things I felt I could not say to others because it would make me weird)  were sealed in a clean, bright, egg-shaped vault that was my skull, and they would never be accessed or revealed without my permission. My mind was my ultimate safe space, it was mine alone, and if I had to play along with my fellow teenagers so as not to stand out from the crowd and invite unwanted scrutiny, I knew at the end of the day I could return to my thoughts. Where I was truly myself and fully in control. It was private. What a relief.  

That was thirty years ago. Today I hear from parents and teachers that many young people have the exact opposite relationship to their minds: they suffer from intrusive thoughts, extreme, debilitating anxiety, and as a result lack the ability to function. They have symptoms akin to PTSD but without having lived through the physical battles.

 What on earth is going on? Could it be that our culture has turned on us, with social media as an atom bomb on our senses? Do any of us feel like we are fully in control of what is in our minds now? How can we? It turns out, our minds are the government’s newest theatre of war.

I grew up in a family where heated arguments were the norm, over politics, culture, sex, anything controversial. Offence was often taken. So trust me when I say that what is happening now in our rancorous discourse is not that. There is a subtle but discernible difference, which I can only describe as like stepping onto invisible trip wires by using words, phrases or names that, without your knowledge, activate an angry response in another person. This has happened to me several times, all of them with men that I knew to some degree personally. And in each case, these big burly men reacted to my writing (which was in no way directed at them as individuals, or even written with them in mind) in extremely emotional, personal and high pitched ways that just didn’t bear any resemblance to the way grown ups (especially grown men) used to argue.

Both on the left and the right, people get deeply attached to their own opinions and the opinions of their own clan. I have done this myself. Belief and meaning are essential parts of the human experience. But in today’s war-scarred cultural landscape, our beliefs are never directed toward the eternal, or the beautiful, or the moral. Our beliefs are more akin to a dumpster fire full of hospital waste than the Sistine Chapel.

It’s no wonder that reading about the moral and cultural aspects of 5GW resonated with me so greatly — morality and culture are two concepts I keep returning to in my writing. If the new battlefield is our interior emotional and intellectual landscape, and the weapons are influence and information, then I am a soldier of minor rank. A lieutenant, perhaps.

And you, dear reader, are right there with me. These small but consistent communications between us, being repeated across thousands of Substacks and Patreons and Signal or WhatsApp groups and even in physical meet-ups, are the last thing standing between what organic human experience once was and what some malevolent power wants our digitised future to be. This is the Alamo. And it’s all in your head.

The main — if not the only — defence is to practice detachment in all things — or as many things as possible. Preserve your critical faculties as though they were ammunition and you were in Stalingrad in 1943. Save your ardour for only a select few cultural or political issues, and let the rest of it go to your grandkids, your life partner, or your dogs. Husband your emotional resources, for they can and will be used against you — in the theatre of war that is your mind.