Reverse-Engineering PsyOps
We all know we are being targeted. With ads, news stories, rumors, inuendos, and somehow divided from each other. Somehow set against each other. Somehow agitated into genuinely hating and fearing each other. Not just disagreeing with each other.
But it hasn’t been clear exactly what the mechanism is.
It’s clearly not just lies. It’s lies that go deeper, somehow. Into our brainstems. Into our hearts and guts. And get us reacting unreasoningly to each other, like wild animals. Like snarling, rabid, curled-lipped hyenas.
And I think it might be PAIN. Maybe pain is being weaponized.
Not just the normal pain of life being lived, but also the deep, systemic pain of injustices and injuries from a society tilted against us, in one way or another, on the basis of race, or gender, or sexuality, or some other characteristic or vulnerability.
If you’re black, it might be the pain of a lifetime of being marginalized, attacked, shunned, paid less, not hired, denied loans, called lazy, called stupid, refused housing, thrown in jail, threatened daily, hour by minute, to the point that you’re afraid to send your kids to school, or even sit in your own apartment. Not to mention the searing genetic memory, and family history, of being dragged in chains, used like cattle, whipped and tortured, ripped from children and partners, raped, mutilated, murdered. And marooned in a hostile world, no way to build family or future, being disproportionately poor, paying for your own poison, participating in your own destruction.
After a lifetime of that, built on lifetimes of that, your antennae might, quite understandably, be quivering and attuned and sensitive to any HINT of the danger of anything that could cause any more of that same pain.
If you’re female, it might be the pain of being leered at, cornered, harassed, paid less, talked over, passed over, your work stolen, your body ogled, your parts mauled, taken for granted, taken advantage of, risking pregnancy at every turn, and the massive responsibilities and commitments that entails, all of which might fall on you. Being abandoned, being blamed, being denigrated, dismissed, and disrespected. Being beaten or domestically abused. Not to mention the lifelong terror and trauma of having been sexually abused, which one in four women are. As CHILDREN.
If you’re gay, it might be the pain of being shamed, forced to suppress your own feelings, faking your own life. Being targeted, singled out, mocked, beaten, tormented, even killed. Being ostracized, unable to marry or socialize. Not to mention being stricken with an epidemic untreated or prioritized for years. Being outed or closeted, rejected by your very family, society, and self.
And so on. Across all groups and identities. We all have it. PAIN.
And that pain can be weaponized.
That pain has power. Fueled by fear. It is VISCERAL.
That pain can be ATTACHED. To a PERSON. A public figure, maybe. A candidate, for example. Through ASSOCIATION. Association to an event or remark, real or made up or somewhere in between, that causes your perked-up feelers to sense DANGER, and instantly know, ‘This person is not safe.”
And then that PERSON instantly comes the embodiment, the representative of all that PAIN, the stored lifelong agony and fear and anger and frustration and rage, living in your body. And you associate that person with that pain, and hate them with the same intensity that attends your deepest injuries.
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It’s an umbilical cord of terror they plug into your worst pain, and connect to the person or people they want you to hate most.
So if you read a headline that Bernie wrote an ‘essay about rape’ long ago, the immediate association is between ‘Bernie’ and ‘rape,’ and the boiling rage of the barely-contained fear and loathing and pain becomes ATTACHED through that headline, instinctively, automatically, permanently, to that person. And your lip CURLS at Bernie. Or anyone supporting him. Especially ‘men.’
If you hear that Warren used a claim of Native American heritage to cakewalk her way through academia, it may inflame your stored rage at the anihilation of your ancestors, at their stolen pride and purpose, and the outrage of a white-presenting lady standing on their graves to get up in the world. Or anyone faking it to step over you.
If you hear that Mayor Pete fired the black police chief, and that only 4% of his officers are persons of color, and that he had to fly home to ‘oversee’ a ‘police-involved shooting,’ you may imagine him choking Eric Garner to death with his own bare hands, and the fury flares up fierce in your belly.
If you hear that Tulsi once opposed gay marriage, it might trigger a flash of terror at the agony Matthew Shepard must have felt, tortured and mortally wounded, left to die slow on a back road in Laramie, all for the crime of simply loving what his heart loved. And the fury might well up inside you, attached now to the face of a veteran from Hawaii.
I think that’s the mechanism.
1) Identify vulnerabilities, violations, outrages, and injustices in many different subgroups of humans, all holding different fears and furies;
2) Systematically attach, through the distortion and magnification of partial truths and outright smears, those fears to specific people or other subgroups you want to target;
3) Watch the chaos and conflict explode.
Voila! A society incapable of unified action on anything.
Climate change? No consensus. Healthcare? No agreement. Money out of politics? No political will. Truth in media? No interest whatsoever.
A society is captured. By turning the deepest pains we all suffer into distrust and perceived danger in each other.
And as a visceral mechanism, it’s a BACK-BRAIN circuit, an amygdala link, that bypasses all reason, and plugs into survival modes, meant to leap us away from existential threats, fangs bared.
And that prevents us from assessing allegations factually. Checking out these suspicious stories. And seeing our actual overseers. Who both caused the original traumas, AND are sowing the current discord.
The only antidote is to cut the cord they’ve constructed between our deepest pains and the people they want us to hate. Reach out to our estranged fellow compatriots. And share both our pains AND our hopes.
And tell Big PsyOps in the ether: You can’t have either.
