Dynamic Coalitions to Unmask the Emperors Above — Part 1

Tribalistic Echo Chambers Weaken Us and Our Ability to Face Autocratic Threats

David Bowie sings Heroes in a 1987 concert by the Berlin Wall to thousands of fans on either side. Chants to bring down the wall erupted on the East Berlin side. Arrests and rioting would follow, the first in an escalating series that would apply pressure on Soviet leadership to loosen its grip, until they did in 1989. Rolling Stone contends Bowie’s performance hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall, helping the people find their power.

Megan Garber warns in her recent cover story for The Atlantic that “We’ve Lost the Plot” so to speak. That is, a gaggle of modern circumstances have conspired to distract us. The conveniences of modern technology, the centrality of the almighty dollar, the weird social pressures of social media, the information silos of the internet and the obscene emptiness of post-truth politics have coincided in this strange moment in human development. Immersed in so much information, much of it cynical propaganda, many become confused and unable to discern fact from fiction, entertainment from reality, conspiracy theory from gospel.

While Garber so elegantly captures those truths, she misses half the plot herself. ‘We’ as the American public in general have indeed ‘lost the plot.’ And yes, all of us flawed humans are vulnerable to the corruptions responsible for this decline, as discussed here:

Tarot’s Emperor in Current Global Conflicts

What Garber misses is the existence of a network of neofascist predatory kleptocrats pushing and accelerating these corruptions to gain leverage over us via:

1. Deceptive machinations, which often take the form of aligning, empowering and enticing abusive personality types (dark triad, Emperor-types, like Trump or Manafort) to carry out key tasks to corrupt institutions and control opposition.

   Manafort's Collusion, Post-Soviet Machinations & Merger of Mafia

2. Psychological warfare, via the propaganda of paid trolls, chaos agents-of-influence, and multitudes of disaffected American co-opts, through the silos of the internet, with nihilistic attitudes and viral post-truth cynicism, to shift factions perspectives ever further apart, pushing tribalism, despair, distrust and domination. These attitudes would prefer abusive leadership to dominate domestic foes, pushing us towards authoritarianism.

A Theory on Post-Soviet Psychological Warfare to Help Defuse It

Threatened by relentless marching East of Western values, culture and ideology, Putin wages hybrid world war using these strategies to corrupt the West’s liberal democracy. Putin’s conventional military hand is non-dominant. Meanwhile, use of nuclear weapons would invite retaliation likely annihilating Russia in the process. So, Putin wagers that corrupting the West’s institutions and culture are his best shot to weaken liberal democracy’s influence on global affairs, to preserve his autocratic, Imperial rule.

Honest Assessment of Putin’s Hybrid World War Strategy Is Critical For Victory

Defeating this Imperial attack of our digital age is critical especially for our children. Unfortunately, the attack is already advanced and entrenched, with the Republican party largely remade by Trump in his image: infected with tribalism and post-truth cynicism, pumped full of convenient lies and now motivated more to dominate and control domestic foes than resolve conflicts to advance national interests. Meanwhile, much of Trump’s opposition is also radicalized in resistance to the threat, too willing to accept domestic violence and domination in response. Divisions are deep, and co-opts and agents of influence often have little idea they’ve been manipulated to work against the USA.

One prevailing narrative today is that Putin is content to “wait out the West” with his stalled invasion of Ukraine. This, however, misses that Russia is bleeding badly, enduring extreme loss of life and military equipment. Willing soldiers are increasingly difficult to conjure, meanwhile, Russia’s military-industrial complex has apparently lost vital functionality and capacity since the Soviet era that had prioritized heavy industry and its workers. After a year of sanctions from the Western world, Russia starves for foreign investment and is desperately courting Asian money and resources. With an economy a fraction of the size of the free world alliance that supplies Ukraine, Russia is obviously unable to continue this war indefinitely. Putin will likely soon resort to wholesale theft of foreign assets accumulating during sanctions, but that will only buy months of warring. More accurate than “wait out the West,” Putin is pushing forward with the intention of using our 2024 US Presidential campaigns to further incite domestic divisions within US politics (and to a lesser extent via free elections all over) to erode support for the war. Of course, Putin will do everything he can to harm Biden and advantage Trump. Tribalism is both strong and irrational — it will likely erode public support for US aid to Ukraine’s defense.

Another potent force working against our interest, as Sarah Kendzior writes in They Knew, normalcy bias is disarming. The thinking goes:

If a situation is truly dangerous, if massive misdeeds are being committed in plain sight, somebody would intervene and stop them. The absence of accountability and alarm lends credence to the conspirator’s claim that no serious crisis is occurring and that those claiming so are doomsayers or conspiracy theorists.

Meanwhile, speaking of dangerous, these goons tied to transnational organized crime and corruption were just recently at the center of American power and therefore global power. They attempted a coup to keep it when they lost it. Since then, Putin has escalated Russia’s terroristic invasion of (and atrocities in) Ukraine whose defense is now dependent on the resources and weapons of the free world. This is an immensely horrifying moment for all humanity — but we cannot flinch at facing it.

Kendzior has uncanny ability to buck typical defensive-minded, security-seeking thinking to face uncomfortable truths regarding society and authoritarianism, to stare into the abyss so to speak. The ability to face such difficult truths is rare, a valuable trait we don’t all share. Sadly, it’s my experience the few with such vividly clear vision — George Orwell for example — have little aspiration to wield power. These are such opposite activities: observing and reporting vs leading and politicking. Few are interested in both, let alone talented at both ends.

And this highlights a weakness within our Western liberal societal structures in this digital age. The silos of the internet combined with the psychology that underlies political choice tends to sort us into unnatural tribal groups. These digital age tribes are often composed monolithic perspectives, interests and personalities types. As such, these are prone to group-think, poor performance, cult-like behavior, riddled with blind spots, bias and incomplete capability sets. Our enemies foreign and domestic push divisions to accelerate these trends, to weaken us, to replace cooperation with conflict. When factions are confused, contentious and uncoordinated, forceful leadership becomes more functional and appealing.

Interrupting these dynamics will be essential to winning back our handle on ‘the plot.’ More fundamentally, we must identify as many in this mob of Emperor-Oligarch Imperalists as we can, to ‘unmask the Emperors above,’ so to speak. These fools, traitors and would-be tyrants in positions of power working to do the Kremlin’s warring against the USA must be publicly identified, shamed and brought to justice via the appropriate legal channels, not to humiliate their supporters, but to restore proper functioning of our system, to preserve Liberal democracy, however imperfect, and prevail over kleptocratic Imperialism.

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Up Next:

Part 2 of the 3, on development of authoritarian vs healthy psychologies and parallels between families, tribes and nations.

Dynamic Coalitions to Unmask the Emperors Above - Part 2/3

P.S. Thanks for reading! To make my too-long posts more digestible, I’m breaking them up into smaller, 3-part chunks. Please continue reading about Dynamic Coalitions next week and the following before moving onto “Michael Pollan, Timothy Leary and the Other Original American Sin.” Cheers! 💕 🍻