People are angry and they’re fighting and it’s not because social media has changed them. It’s because they have been skillfully manipulated into the fight.
In yesterday’s first installment in this series, I promised to begin explaining how a group of experts in what I call “amplified goebbelsology” have skillfully crafted the anger-driven social-political environment we find ourselves in.
Actually, goebbelsology is only one of eight techniques used by the group. Goebbelsology just happens to be the one of the eight that you and I can most quickly do something about, if we’re smart about it.
Josef Goebbels’s boss – yes, you-know-who – considered this: “Pick out one special ‘enemy’ for special vilification” to be an important step in the use of propaganda. Compared to the ambitions of amplified goebbelsology, the goal was relatively simple: use a set of repeated, consistent emotion-laden lies to rally a population to hate an identifiable group in order to further a murderous agenda against the group.
Amplified goebbelsology takes a big step beyond that, by not only fabricating new groups but by getting them to vilify each other. Note that “groups” is plural. The goebbelsology gestapo didn’t just fabricate the MAGAs; we will show that effectively they fabricated the Wokes as well, by touching the right nerves of the right people with the right emotion-laden message at the right time.
Bringing it down to street level
If you’re like me, you find it astounding that a person as unfit for public office as Donald Trump is leading in the polls and is threatening to reprise his presidency.
One can dismiss the enthusiasm for Trump of cognitively impaired folks who simply lack the tools to make intelligent judgments about the necessary qualities of a leader. But you and I must face the fact that there are also intelligent people who have somehow fallen under Trump’s thrall.
How on Earth did that happen?
How do cults seduce normal, intelligent people into accepting and embracing their bizarre expectations and perceptions? In this document I will answer that question as it applies to one type of cult, and will offer a solution to the dire problem posed by this one instance of that type of cult: the one called MAGA.
The start of the answer is quite simple. While we have treated the Trump campaign as though it has something to do with party politics and government, it fact it has nothing to do with those. We are dealing with a mafia.
I use the term “mafiocracy” for its system of governance.
We’ve all seen portrayals of mafias in movies of course. We have an impression of how a mafia works, and that impression has a lot of truth in it. But because not all of the internal workings of a mafia lend themselves to dramatic movie scenes, important things we should be aware of are just not so visible in our entertainment-dominated ways of learning.
And as with all sorts of other processes, mafiocracy has become more sophisticated and powerful in recent decades, benefiting from developments in digital technology.
While it’s common for political power struggles to exhibit some mafiocratic methods, the legitimate ones take seriously things like constitutions, due process, parliamentary procedure, the rule of law, and some measure of civil behavior and integrity.
Mafias Do Not Care
Mafias care only about their own internal rules, as exemplified by La Cosa Nostra’s requirements for becoming a “made man.” For the rest of us, murder is not only illegal but way over the edge morally. For a mafia, it’s simply a procedural necessity and has nothing to do with rules from outside the organization.
Ideology is another point of distinction. Legitimate politicians tend to have sets of beliefs, particularly when it comes to economics. While the words “conservative” and “liberal” are regularly tossed around without a lot of definition, legitimate politicians tend to believe those words represent ends of a meaningful spectrum of beliefs, and they see themselves as advocates of policies based somewhere on that spectrum.
Mafias will pretend to observe ideologies in their efforts to recruit chumps, but under the surface it is pure brutal power struggle. A mafia does not care about ideology.
Hitler’s Nazi party and Stalin’s Communist party are purported to represent opposite ends of an ideological spectrum. In fact, their “ideologies” were identical. Their “set of beliefs” starts and ends with “I believe that I should have what is now in your possession.” They were mafiocracies.
Says your local crime boss: “My belief is that I should be in control of everything, capiche?” You won’t find him (never her) discussing the merits of parliamentary versus limited-term governance.
While we debate, or rather fight over, politics and ideology, the world’s richest and smartest mafioso is conquering us.
Vladimir Putin, world’s richest and smartest mafioso, has got us so distracted and dumbed down by fights between meaningless clubs built upon imaginary ideologies (left, right, conservative, liberal, progressive, woke, Tea Party, Libertarian, socialist, collectivist, etc.) that we’ve been made too stupid and busy to notice that he is taking over the world.
Mentioning details of how this works in America to an American audience would just play into the mafioso’s hand by provoking a fight. So let’s instead show how the mafioso has worked his skill in another culture, France, in this article entitled A Russian bank gave Marine Le Pen’s party a loan. Then weird things began happening.
In fighting this mafia, it’s important that we all understand mafiocracy. I have described mafiocracy’s eight components, eight sets of techniques used to aggregate power to a hierarchy headed by a single individual.
If I can contribute in some small way by promoting an understanding what’s going on under a mafia’s veneer of normality, that will help toward blunting its force.
More importantly, after I explain the eight components of mafiocracy, I will offer a strategy for dealing with the one component that you and I can most immediately do something about.
The Eight Components of Mafiocracy
Modern Mafiocracy consists of the application of the following methods in the aggregation of power:
Recruitment of Stooges
Recruitment of Kompromats
Insertion of Discreditors
Insertion of Allies
Deployment of Goebbelsology
Trolling of Social Networks
False Flag Operations
Signaling The Consequences Of Opposition
In the next post in this series we’ll start exploring those components of mafiocracy.
About the Author
In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.
Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society.
Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.
Interesting. You decry 'goebbelsology' and then practice it, all in one essay.
Perhaps your next essay should be on cognitive dissonance.