Story Wars

By Chance Lunceford – Logocentrifugal

Story Wars are underway.

There have been coordinated and patiently planned and ruthlessly executed attacks on the American way of life, and on the underpinnings of the western world in general.

By hijacking the media apparatus, and subjecting the populace to thoughtfully crafted, easily adapted and very often automated malicious narrative generating mechanisms, the enemies of this country have introduced mass confusion and broken the truth-sense of the entire nation.

Of course, we’ve been doing it to ourselves for a long time.

In fact, the crafting of a narrative designed to gather attention and imprint itself upon the psyche of the populace is what gives a nation its identity. The stories that we tell ourselves shape how we view and behave in the world.

We are pattern seeking creatures, and then we seek to weave those patterns into a sequence. A series of connected events is what constitutes a story. And the story of the pilgrims, the founding fathers, etc.. are chapters in the American story.

The story that is written in the history books that our children are required to work from has been decided upon, and shaped, to unite the children to a common cause by telling a compelling story of heroes who did heroic things to build their heroic country so that they too can become heroes.

It has always been this way, and the quality of the story has determined, in large part, the quality of the country and the people within it.

These traditional unifying narrative constructs that could be universally (or nearly so) distributed and believed are how nations were able to unify their people around common causes, and to prepare the populace for war.

The practice of manipulating facts in the ramp-up for war, and the propaganda disseminated during the effort are as old as warfare itself. People will do what they think they must once the decision to shed blood has already been made.

But, as the 1800’s became the 1900’s, all this changed with emergence of several seemingly disparate, but undeniably connected events, and the world has never been the same.

What are they?

1 – Rapid long distance communication

2 – Rapid long distance travel (trains and airplanes)

3 – Surplus of capital

4 – The introduction of communism/socialism

Where once communication between distances could take anywhere from days to months, and the expense and time required made frequent contact with large groups across distances nearly impossible, innovation had now made possible methods of increasing coherence and fidelity, which resulted in the ability to communicate increasingly complex messages by increasingly sophisticated methods to an increasingly large amount of people.

Where once a message took many days to travel, a person, and especially a group of people, took just as long if not longer. Many never travelled, and few travelled further than 100 miles from their childhood home.

With the addition of travel by train and airplane, people could now travel further in a day, and in some cases in an hour, than they had travelled in their lives.

The opening of the world’s ideas to the masses, and the ability to travel the world to the relatively wealthy, meant a massive exponential growth in potential for capital and power.

Potential for capital and power is never left unexploited for long. Massive deals were struck, and international business empires became far more ubiquitous. Nations with experience with or aspirations of empire building reinvigorated their efforts.

As the growth these new frontiers inevitably delivered began to accrue in the hands of a very tight-knit group of pioneering business oriented families, many felt disenfranchised by the disparities.

This was occurring across most of Europe, and unrest was brewing, there were clamoring masses seeking answers to the unprecedented wealth being generated and stockpiled by the titans of business, and the resentment that the opulence of the lives these businessmen and their families displayed engendered in many was on the rise.

It was in this climate that a pair of thinkers named Engels and Marx wrote a collection of ideas that would undermine the national narratives of essentially every country in the world in the coming hundred years, destabilizing nation after nation thus creating ripe opportunities for high-impact insurgencies and rapid shock-and-awe military coups.

Combined with the lessons of impactful propaganda learned in the buildup to, during and in the decades after WWII, the world’s intelligence agencies refined and reformed the systems of information warfare.

You could indeed, upon engaging the fortunately clear lens of hindsight, say that the so-called Cold War was the first iteration in what would become a never-ending cycle of weaponized information warfare.

The differences in the approaches of the western world and the eastern block, ideologically based though they are, have drawn very clear differences in the real-world approaches to winning the story-wars.

While the US and other western nations have appealed to the unifying strength of a commonly held set of foundational beliefs, Russia, having had it’s foundational story already undermined by the economic brutality of the cold war and the unified front of the media and intelligence organizations of the western coalition, has taken a very different approach.

The KGB never dissolved or left Russia, they merely changed their letters and took over the entire country. Their allegiance was to themselves and their own interests, which were essentially all the latent economic capacities of the concussed former number-two power in the world.

By quickly disposing of any likely opposition and commandeering the media outlets to engage in a unanimous approach to state-crafted narratives, they were able to confuse and distract any attempts at coordinated efforts to stymie their ascension to total dominance.

Once power was consolidated, they continued and amplified their efforts at undermining the narrative apparatuses of the west.

Through the 80’s and into the late 90’s, they were largely unsuccessful at penetrating the western media landscape in anything more than a cursory and humorous way, due largely to a hawkish element in Washington who’s coalition bridged the party divide.

Thus, the news media shared a relatively united messaging apparatus, and the Hollywood element, traditionally more permissive with Marxist ideas, maintained a strong, independent, and capable man as the hero in most the stories.

This “rugged individualist” archetype began to show deep cracks by the turn of the millennium, due to the ubiquitous spread of the internet and the vulnerability and relatively unsupervised access of the young minds who dominated the landscape, and has obviously now been called into question in an obvious and concerted manner.

Thus, by using a rapid-fire approach of tossing every conceivable narrative weapon into the milieu of the internet, combined with the mechanisms of idea distribution being refined and optimized, and the resulting echo-chamber/tribal digital opinion pockets being influenced into escalating their own rhetorical partisanship, the hidden agenda and robotic and ubiquitous tools of the foundational narrative disruption scheme have been revealed.

In the coming days, I’ll be expanding this subject, showing some of the mechanism of distribution and their evolution, as well as how to defend yourself against such tactics and to master them for your own devices.

Thanks for reading.

Chance Lunceford – Logocentrifugal