Anatomy of a Psyop

The Neo-Ciceronian Times ^ | Nov. 4, 2022 | Theophilus Chilton

[Yashcheritsiy]

By now, everybody on our side of the aisle knows - or at least ought to know - that pretty much everything you see at “official” informational levels is fake. And keep in mind that by “official,” I don’t just mean governmental sources but also the type of public-private collusion that we’ve all known takes place, at an instinctual level, but is now being revealed as undeniable fact. This fact is the essential basis of Moldbug and neoreaction’s terminology about “the Cathedral,” which specifically refers to the use of directionally channeled information gathering and distribution by various “soft power” institutions such as the media and NGOs with the aim of enforcing “right doctrine” against which there should be no dissent. This is the essential purpose of the across-the-board narrative building that takes place routinely at all levels in the USA and other western nations (especially) whose purpose is often to mask reality, rather than explicating it.

I trust that most readers are familiar with the concept of a “psyop,” a psychological operation designed to sway its targets in certain desired directions. Many of the mechanics of psyops were pioneered by the CIA and other intelligence agencies during the Cold War but have now been turned against civilian populations in the USA and elsewhere in an effort by the Regime to maintain control and minimise opposition to its various agendas. However, I’d like to make the point that psyops qualitatively differ from standard, run-of-the-mill propaganda such as governments have used for millennia.

The difference is primarily that of the time preferences involved. Whether it’s designed to whip up a population against an enemy or to try to obfuscate the truth about some particular event that has occurred, propaganda tends to operate on a shorter timescale and with more limited and simple policy goals in mind. It’s not surprising that modern propaganda techniques share a lot in common with commercial advertising designed to induce an “impulse buy” response in potential customers. Propaganda generally operates the same way - create a monodirectional response to a particular stimulus.

Psyops, on the other hand, are quite a bit more complex and generally involve the building of a narrative memeplex over the course of months, years, or even decades. Psyops are, of course, also fake but theirs is a fakeness that builds upon constant, repetitious narrative-building that lays out a foundational lens through which any individual incident or act can be systematically interpreted, adding them to the overall saga being told.

With conventional propaganda, the aim is to communicate Regime diktat to the average citizen. However, it does not necessarily expect the recipients to believe the propaganda, but merely comply with the goals. The Powers That Be in such cases don’t care why Havel’s greengrocer puts the sign up in his window, but merely that he does so. The primary purpose of psyops, on the other hand, is to ensure compliance by convincing the target to self-comply, rather than it having to be done by outside force or persuasion. It’s always touch and go when you’re making someone outwardly comply but inwardly they’re dissident. When the mark can be convinced to willingly self-police, this makes the government’s job easier since they don’t have to worry about this closet dissidence. The true believer is the best believer.

In essence, propaganda aims for immediate reactive persuasion while psyops seek long-term groundlaying that gives more all-inclusive means of maintaining overarching narrative control.

Now, a lot of people out there like to think they’re immune to psyops because “hurr durr I don’t beleeb da media!!” But they’re not. Indeed, a lot of these boomercon types are just as susceptible to psyops as anyone else when the right buttons are pushed. This is because they’ve been primed for it by the systematic, society-wide preparation of the psychological battle space without their ever realising it. In many cases, the foundations for a psyop are so culturally systematic that people don’t even realise what is happening.

For example, there are a ton of people out there who would pride themselves on being independent thinkers who nevertheless believed everything that was peddled during the covid and vaccine psyops. The reason for this is because they want to think of themselves as smart, knowledgeable about science, etc. Smart People believe the Right Things, after all. That, in turn, is the result of decades of psyops that have ensconced “science” as the arbiter of morality and truth in post-Christian America. So even when the science is fake or wrong, it is still accorded a moral authority that it does not deserve.

Millions of people in this country believe the psyops surrounding Ukraine because they’ve been primed for decades to see “the Roooshians” as the mortal enemy of America. This is despite the facts that (technically) America is not even involved in the current war and that “the Roooshians” are no longer the communists that boomercons still remember from the Cold War. Indeed, Russia is a lot further to the Right than we are, which is why globohomo hates them so much. So while one can certainly question the decision by Russia to invade Ukraine, it’s not as if America’s previous involvement in the area (overthrowing an elected Ukrainian government in 2014, tacitly supporting the Ukrainians as they shelled civilians in the Donbass, etc.) has really been any better. The best thing we could do is stay out of something that is not our business - but the psyop demands that we involve ourselves because we’ve been globohomo’s world policemen for decades.

Most Americans naively believe that “democracy” is holy and sacrosanct because they’ve been taught decades worth of American post-WWII globohomo foundational mythology. This renders them unable to see that “democracy” really amounts to a small cabal conning and dunning the masses into giving the cabal what it wants. Functionally, democracy amounts to little more than a legitimising process for Regime policymaking. What the people actually want rarely, if ever, factors into the equation.

Related to the above, most people believe egalitarian platitudes that deny that there are any substantive differences between different population groups. Yet, there are very real genetic differences that exist between (mostly) discreet ethnic and racial groups - and among other things this is impacting the future of American civilisational competency. Despite the best efforts of critical race theorists to mask the real reason, it cannot honestly be denied that certain ethnic groups are more prone to crime than others. From an historical perspective, republican forms of government in the Middle Ages were only really successfully maintained by high IQ populations that could exercise low time preference and the ability to plan ahead rationally, something that also makes the continuation of popular, representative government in the USA increasingly unlikely in the long term. Yet, many people are simply unable to even consider, much less honestly accept, any of this because of decades of post-civil rights movement brainwashing.

In current news, we’ve been seeing a psyop in action with regards to the Paul Pelosi assault. This obviously scandalous and sketchy story most likely involves a gay tryst between Pelosi and nudist hippie illegal alien David Depape that somehow or another went wrong, though there are other…more esoteric…suggestions that have been made. Yet, the MSM and other lefties are (somehow) trying to spin this into a “MAGA Q-Anon assault on an important Democratic statesman!!!” in a transparent attempt to gin up an October surprise to try and rescue the Democrats’ failing prospects for the current election.

Now you might ask yourself whether they really think such an obviously stupid argument would work. The answer would be “Yes.” In fact, there will be millions of people out there who completely buy it because the Left has been laying the groundwork for the “right wingers/white nationalists/radical Republicans are committing all the stochastic terrorisms!!” psyop for years now, all the while studiously ignoring actual violent attacks and threats against Supreme Court justices, sitting Republican congressmen, and congressional baseball teams. What the lefties are doing is trying to pound the round peg of this story into the square hole of the narrative they’ve already crafted for years.

So what might cause a psyop to fail? Generally, this would involve setting two or more Regime narratives against each other (after all, no amount of information control/sanitisation is going to be perfect). An excellent recent example of this was the aborted attempt to create a biomedical scare using monkeypox similar to what was done with covid-19, presumably with the intention of using it to (re)institute and expand social and economic controls that were set in place during the covid plandemic.

First, the groundwork was laid for a couple of months in advance using ominous warnings appearing in broadcast media, acculturating viewers to the existence of this “new” disease that was being spoken of as an existential threat looming on the horizon. Then, monkeypox was psychologically associated with covid-19, linking monkeypox as potential pandemic material that would result in the same sort of worldwide catastrophe created by covid-19. After this, news and social media concern trolling was ramped up about the potential dangers of monkeypox being able to rapidly spread throughout the population in the same way that a respiratory virus like covid-19 could. All of this was fit into the preexisting framework of previous “pandemic reporting” that had already been perfected over the past three years. The framework was even being built for the introduction of a vaccine to combat monkeypox as a remediation of this impending pandemic.

But then word began to get out and around that monkeypox is a disease that basically only affects gays and other “alternative lifestyles” and hence isn’t a threat to the vast majority of the population. The media attempted to combat this as “misinformation,” but it was too late. The truth managed to circumvent the information blockade. And then word got out that some kids and few dogs had gotten monkeypox, and people started to ask some uncomfortable questions about how this had happened with a sexually transmitted gay disease. This ended up substantiating a lot of stereotypes about one of the cardinal groups in the Left’s intersectionality alliance and making them look really bad. After this, top level decision-makers in The Powers That Be apparently judged that a monkeypox-driven rerun of the covid plandemic was not worth the scrutiny being drawn to one of the Left’s core constituencies. The whole thing was scrapped and now you never hear a word about monkeypox from any official sources.

So this is basically how the sausage is made. At the point where we are, it seems like the only way to permanently detox our information culture would be for a severe collapse and subsequent…hollowing out…of our current culturo-media apparatus to take place. However, on a personal level /ourguys/ can get more adept at recognising not just individual deceptions emanating from the Left’s info-apparatus, but the overarching narrative constructs that drive the interpretation of all of these little individual happenings that, when put together, create the framework that “justifies” the Left’s behaviour. In doing so, our side would become proactive in the culture wars instead of merely reactive, and may even be able to break the cognitive hold that the Regime has on many of our friends and neighbours.

[nicollo]

America and Russia SHOULD be natural allies.

In the 1830s, Tocqueville presciently saw the two as rivals. We could very well extend that observation to allies, as well.