Psychological Warfare in the Information Age
Evolutionary design details of the human brain bestow unique psychological abilities, but by necessity also impose limitations, including vulnerabilities to often unwitting psychological manipulation.
The communication of long held grievances has the potential to improve any relationship, so long as the parties involved commit themselves to one another, and to their future together, in good faith. This may be the case with events gripping our nation over the past several months, but it is difficult to see how protests devolving into riots and destruction end in newfound understanding and renewed commitment, rather than intensification of bitterness on all sides. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals spend their working lives attempting to understand and remedy disturbances of moods, thoughts, behaviors, and relationships among people. There may be value, therefore, in a psychiatrist’s reflections on the increasingly contentious times in which we live.
Conceptual Models of Mind
Human capacity for self-awareness drives efforts to comprehend the nature of the mind. Since the Industrial Revolution, technological models for understanding the brain and mind have prevailed. For example, Freud’s conception of the mind as comprised of fundamental drives or urges, which build in pressure until release, clearly parallels the dominant technology of his era, the steam locomotive. Over the last several decades, the dominant technological analog of the brain and mind is the computer. The human brain’s highly developed cortex distinguishes us from nonhuman primates and other mammals and underlies logic and advanced information processing. It is typically composed of six layers of cells and, if laid flat, covers about 2.0 square feet in area. Folding of the cortex allows it to fit inside the skull, but it anatomically and functionally rests upon subcortical structures that are common to all mammals, and these structures influence its activity. Except for the sense of smell, all sensory information is first sequentially processed by lower structures before ever reaching the cortex. Often, these structures are also the neural substrates for moods, emotions, and drives. Thinking of the cortex as a computer may be an accurate model for logical functions, but it fails to take into account the influence of, and dependence on, non-cortical areas of the brain that have their own nonrational mental functions, and that impact and modify cortical function. One resulting common error is to assume that human memory is, like digital memory, essentially infallible. We tend to have far more confidence in the accuracy of human memory than is justified.
Emotional Influences on Cognitive Functioning
Memory is highly malleable and manipulable by multiple factors, including distraction, suggestion from others, and context. Individuals with depression or grief frequently have disturbances not only in memory but concentration as well, and the experience of depression often powerfully colors or transforms the memory of a past or current event. Strong emotions such as anger or anxiety may disrupt not only memory but also perception, thoughts, and behavior. Sensory and emotional overstimulation can contribute to impairments in reasoning and judgment.
The great influence of fear or anxiety on behavior is demonstrated by a 30 pound dog directing the movement of an entire herd of cattle, each of which outweighs the dog fiftyfold. Although humans do not herd like cattle, we share similar subcortical structures with cattle that underlie herding behavior, and we too can be manipulated by fear into groups. One might ask: what motivates the dog to perform its task? Almost certainly because the highly social nature of canines leads them to seek affection and approval from their human owners. To the dog, no money or food is necessary; social approval is sufficiently reinforcing for the dog to expend considerable resources in order to receive it. Among humans, too, social acceptance is an extremely powerful reinforcer and rejection is often devastating.
Not only does thinking of the brain as a logical device lead us to ignore the impact of non-logical aspects of the mind on rational processes, but human sensory bandwidth is limited. Even in the case of the visual system, bandwidth is likely much lower than we subjectively experience, and our subjective sense of a rich visual world is dependent upon so-called ensemble processing, wherein a full visual world is built up from processing relatively small amounts of real-time visual data and summary statistics based on prior visual experience. To create a unitary experiential world, it appears likely that other areas of experience, besides the visual, may result from a creative synthesis of small building blocks of current experience in the context of prior experience. In the service of such a creative synthesis may be the well described phenomenon of cognitive dissonance: we tend to feel uncomfortable with, and hence ignore or discount, information that is not consonant with our pre-existing notions, beliefs, or worldview.
Potential for Manipulation of Individuals and Groups
The livelihoods of benign actors such as illusionists and mentalists depend upon their operational expertise with human mental limitations, manipulating our minds and behaviors in ways that we often find entertaining. Unfortunately, con artists and other malicious actors can leverage these same vulnerabilities to accomplish their own ends. If highly skilled, we remain unaware of the manipulation even after the fact. History is replete with examples of conquering peoples exploiting these vulnerabilities against their enemies in war. In fact, such techniques can be utilized to undermine entire nations and even civilizations, for example with a program of ideological subversion.
While an ample literature exists concerning ideological subversion, an illuminating introduction is provided by the late Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB agent who defected to the West in 1970. In a 1983 interview, he states:
The main emphasis of the KGB is not in the area of intelligence at all… … Only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process that we call either ideological subversion, or active measures, or psychological warfare. What it basically means is, to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that, despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interests of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.
Bezmenov then explains the other stages of Soviet ideological subversion, which may require decades to complete. Americans’ tendency to expect rapid or immediate results are at odds with some other societies and cultures, who tend to adopt a longer view of history. Americans may have been blinded by this cultural bias to the detonation of a Soviet ideological subversion bomb in the 1960s, and to its slow but sure propagation ever since, leading to the possible destruction of the Soviet Union’s enemy long after its own demise. On geologic time scales, this process would appear to be an explosion, but from our perspective would be so gradual as to be imperceptible. Subversive techniques undermine the critical supports of a society or civilization, often by encouraging doubt about religious beliefs, legal structures, the central importance of the family to wider society, and by sowing division between people. Inducing fear and distrust, for example pitting one racial or religious group against another, all the while demanding equal outcomes among all people, produces anxiety and uncertainty to such an extent that we cannot accurately come to sensible conclusions and see the bigger picture. As a result, we are easily herded into groups and group identity, which may lessen anxiety temporarily but only exacerbates social conflict. One recent example is provided by the push to abolish police forces, which appears to be driven by intense emotions associated with recent events, rather than by any rational consideration of the potential negative consequences of this for the very people it is intended to help.
Amplifying Effects of Social Media on Emotions
Contributing to our difficulty making sensible decisions is an unprecedented and disorienting volume of information available to us via the internet, including especially social media. When we are driving alone, we are free to scream at other drivers because there are no social consequences of doing so. This characteristic in large part applies to social media as well, producing a cacophony of angry, often anonymous voices that generate the intense heat of raw emotion, but precious little light of understanding. Furthermore, we can make sense of only a tiny fraction of the information available to us, so we tend to view only the stream of information that minimizes our anxiety and gives us social acceptance and affirmation, and minimizes cognitive dissonance. Multiple information streams, any of which may reveal certain truths, cannot always be satisfactorily reconciled. For example, a progressive cajoled to tune into Fox News concludes, after a short time and with considerable agita, that conservatives are being brainwashed and are evil, or insane, or both. A conservative tuning into MSNBC will have the exact same response and be just as certain of his or her conclusions as the progressive was sampling Fox News. In other words, at this point the information streams, and extant biases and beliefs, are so at odds that the two worldviews cannot be easily reconciled simply by exposure to different information.
Mass communications have permitted mass manipulation and, whatever our political views, I believe all of us have likely been affected to a significant degree. Neither Sean Hannity repeatedly barking the same angry words night after night, nor Rachel Maddow insisting ad infinitum that she knows for a fact that Trump colluded with Russia, are intended to inform. Rather, they serve to manipulate emotions and opinions to maintain a worldview, regardless of where the truth lies. A Google search on Fox news falsehoods produces the expected page after page of examples of alleged falsehoods promulgated by Fox. The exact same search for CNN falsehoods and MSNBC falsehoods produces an enlightening result: page after page of claims by CNN and MSNBC of falsehoods promulgated by the president or other perceived enemies. There may be some so blinded by rage that they do not understand the way in which even our information searches effectively manipulate.
The Way Forward
The sheer volume of information available on social media presents major challenges in detecting and documenting attempts at mass subversion. One big-data approach by the RAND Corporation successfully detected subversive attempts by Russia, via Twitter. This malicious program nurtured political extremism, specifically targeting the anti-Emanuel Macron, populist gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement, months before the gilets jaunes riots became headlines throughout the West. Efforts to improve media literacy have benefit in nurturing a more skeptical and discriminating media consumer.
Such large-scale approaches to detecting subversive attempts are promising, but what individual level efforts might permit healing and preservation of the ideals of Western civilization? A humble and abiding recognition that each of us is limited in what we may know; acknowledgement that some of what we believe we know is likely to have been influenced or augmented for purposes ultimately contrary to what is in the best interests of us as individuals and as a society. I recently learned of a long-married couple who had divergent political views. When asked what permitted them to remain together despite these differences, they stated that it was the acknowledgment to one another that each may be mistaken in their own views. We all must consider it possible that we are mistaken and that, however passionately we hold a belief, this has no bearing on the truthfulness of that belief. In addition, it is possible to cultivate the ability to step back from the field of the emotional battle and dispassionately ponder who is truly being served by such conflict. Maintaining a personal commitment to truth rather than to power or influence, and to treating others as we would wish to be treated, would be critical. We must open our eyes to the ways in which our strong opinions and emotions may distract us from developments we might otherwise be seeing.
While unsure of the precise remedy for our social ills, I suspect any healing solution will involve greater awareness of unique human abilities and vulnerabilities, the latter making us susceptible to unwitting psychological manipulation and consequent limitations of human freedom.
