Student protests, dirty tricks, and forms of verbal warfare

Several weeks ago, at the height of the student protests, someone at Daily Kos wrote an essay entitled “When a Lie Obscures the Truth,” which began with this frame:

“For what it’s worth, Healing Soul Hypnosis describes mass hypnosis as where a massive part of the populace focuses on a leader(s) or series of events, with their attention focusing on a small point or issue. Followers appear to be under hypnosis, guided anywhere, regardless of data that may prove otherwise of the leader(s) or issue.”

He then went on to describe his own participation in Vietnam-era protests, saying, “I know what it is like to get caught up. . . .” Rounding out the piece, he said, “I hope that when these kids mature and temper their bravery with common sense, they rescind chants of death to America and Genocide Joe.”

So that quote at the beginning is never developed. Still, plainly, he wanted that idea to guide the reader’s understanding or contemplation of the issue — this implication that the student protesters are being manipulated, even to the point of a loss of volition.

Part of me is wistful — once upon a time, I was the lone edge-pusher of ideas like mass hypnosis among the Daily Kos readership. Still, right away, I saw the flaw in the author’s presentation (I can’t say ‘argument’, as he never develops the theme). 

Mass hypnosis, especially with regards to theories as to how Hitler in particular charmed his audience, is based on a configuration of a central figure.

This illustration of the configuration inherent in radio broadcasts is the same model of a pinnacle leader addressing a crowd: it is a top-down structure.

The leader him- or herself is the focal point of attention. Additionally, the hypnotic utterances would be emanating from one central source, the very person most interested in standardizing his or her speech so as to reliably elicit the effect sought. Centrality is key to this model.¹

That’s not in evidence here. We’re not talking about a cult of personality here. Indeed, these people don’t consider the Democrats their enemy,² so Biden doesn’t even figure as a central (hated) person in that respect.

Moreover, there’s no centrality to the “ones” purportedly creating this hypnotic situation. Who’s controlling the situation? What hypnosis is there without a hypnotist?

The entire frame falls apart.

I’m inclined to forgive the author for his speculation, as almost certainly he has not sunk any time into either the psychological or the physiological substrates of hypnosis. He’s merely seeing a phenomenon manifest before his eyes and he’s searching for an explanation. If I had to guess, I would say that the author is probably perplexed as to where this vein of protest even came from. Surely it’s been engineered; and, if so, that engineer has malign designs.

The closer analogy, I believe, would be the Uncommitted vote; especially that first run in which it materialized, in the Michigan primary back in February.

That movement had three short weeks to put together the rudiments of organization and convince people that casting such a vote would have meaning and significance. The only way to explain Uncommitted’s success is to accept that the sentiment of disaffection was already present but was being [artificially, socially] repressed.³

The results, to the established political class, seemed to come out of nowhere and thus were inexplicable.

That’s the best analogy, in my opinion. And, of course, were it not for Columbia University President Minouche Shafik’s heavy-handed, authoritarian response to a rather benign, entirely peaceful protest, odds are this student movement would never have mushroomed across the country to other campuses. But her repressive tactics tapped into a vein of discontent.

That’s a perfectly understandable impulse and a perfectly reasonable explanation. Why it hasn’t occurred to the author — why he had to reach for the explanation of mass hypnosis, which does not match the conditions on the ground — I’m not sure. I don’t have an explanation, other than he’s in an environment where people discounted the importance and the meaning of Uncommitted as a movement, so he doesn’t (or might not) even have that as a framework to reference.

Chances are, people at Daily Kos see both phenomena as inexplicable, because they can’t accept the premise of Joe Biden making such a catastrophic mistake (i.e., backing Benjamin Netanyahu to the hilt and to the bitter end).

---

What must it mean that so many Democrats, many of whom would consider themselves dyed-in-the-wool liberals, find themselves more likely to believe that leftist college students are suddenly and inexplicably anti-semitic than to believe that Netanyahu & the Israeli government are perpetuating a genocide? How do they make the one leap and fail to consider the other, far more likely scenario?

Not hypnosis but more likely narrative warfare is what the phenomenon raging all around us.

The tenets of narrative warfare, as well as psychology more generally, tell us that people latch onto information if it already aligns with other beliefs and data points they’re invested in.

That would go toward explaining that constant sense of disorientation among many of us, especially on the left — it’s cognitive dissonance arising from constant, unceasing gaslighting. Because it’s a psychic attack — an attack on one’s sense of reality — it’s difficult to identify, let alone counter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu possibly ran a narrative warfare campaign against student protests in April.

Narrative warfare is a complex topic, one which demands its own examination and expansion. It differs from information warfare⁴ or even psychological operations,⁵ terms with which many of us are familiar.

As an introduction, here are several excerpts from Braden Allenby’s “The Age of Weaponized Narrative, or, Where Have You Gone, Walter Kronkite?” where he describes how narrative is used to affect population on a mass scale.

STORY IS POWER

Weaponized narrative is the use of information and communication technologies, services, and tools to create and spread stories intended to subvert and undermine an adversary’s institutions, identity, and civilization, and it operates by sowing and exacerbating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms. It is an emerging domain of asymmetric warfare that attacks the shared beliefs and values that support an adversary’s culture and resiliency. It builds on previous practices, including disinformation, information warfare, psychological operations (psyops), fake news, social media, software bots, propaganda, and other practices and tools, and it draws on advances in fields such as evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, cognitive science, and modern marketing and media studies, as well as on technological advances in domains such as social media and artificial intelligence. [...]

[C]ommercial and nongeopolitical narratives are generally excluded, although of course the insights from such domains can be rapidly integrated into weaponized narratives. Second, narratives intended for internal audiences, either to consolidate or maintain power, are excluded. [...]

Weaponized narrative operates at both the tactical and strategic levels. At the tactical level, the goal could be to debilitate potential adversaries without resorting to conventional kinetic warfare. At the strategic level, weaponized narrative is a major means by which otherwise powerful adversaries can be weakened over time so that their ability to interfere with the attacking entity’s plans and interests is reduced or eliminated. [...]

Weaponized narrative is facilitated by a diverse kit of tools and techniques. Some of these, such as character assassination, creation of fake news outlets (“sockpuppet websites”), and planting false stories, are the traditional stuff of propaganda and disinformation campaigns, but can be much more effective given today’s information technologies; others, such as waves of social media spreading false memes at lightning speed through botnets, are new. Each confrontation or campaign is unique and will thus call forth a different mix of techniques and tools. [...]

Moreover, success doesn’t require constructing a coherent counternarrative; it’s sufficient to cast doubt on existing narratives and attack existing institutions such as the media or security agencies. [...]

[T]he increasing political and social fragmentation in many European countries and the United States only makes this easier, as it enables a sophisticated attacker to nudge groups to respond in ways that they take to be patriotic and self-evident, but that are the result of deliberate manipulation. [...]

Begin with the observation that individuals, their institutions, and their societies and cultures may be many things, but one thing they all are is information-processing mechanisms. Change the information environment dramatically, and you change how societies function. [...]

As the surrounding information environment continues to grow in complexity, the results can include social fragmentation; substitution of moral condemnation for reasoned argument; increased fundamentalism as individuals retreat from complexity into strong, familiar, identity-supporting narratives; the rise of ring-fenced communities that reject the legitimacy of any who oppose them; and golden opportunities for adversaries who wish to use weaponized narrative not to conquer but to weaken and fragment—and to legitimize their own internal narratives by contrast.⁶

You can learn more about narrative warfare by seeking out commentary by Dr. Ajit Maan, who has worked with the U.S. military in terms of setting out a model of how narrative warfare is structured.

See also this short piece on how our minds are wired to work with narrative:

“If you knew that stories literally changed your brain as you consumed them, would you pick up the same books and watch the same movies? Using MRI scans, psychologist Jeff Zacks and his team found that, when you read, your brain runs first-person simulations of what happens in the story.

“This means that, on a neural level, you’re not just learning about a situation or even simply observing it. Rather, it’s as if you are actually having the experience you’re reading about. Your brain is processing it as if you are the protagonist, making those decisions, taking those actions.”

1. Additionally, the model most often presupposes a cult of personality, where the crowd is almost (or, indeed, is) infatuated with the leader; this limerence leads to many of these entrancing effects.

2. Progressive students are most likely to be present at these protests, and progressives are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican in the upcoming election (a given, based on the dynamics of the U.S.’s two-party system). The point here is that these students are not protesting the Party as such but rather are attempting to move the current Overton window. In that sense, they have not abandoned the Democratic Party but are still attempting to work within it.

3. The primary vote, with the added benefit of the secrecy of the ballot, allowed people to express their sentiments in a way that — due to the contest being a primary — did not have indelible results, as one would see in a general election. This contributed to the “hidden” dimension and why political pundits were caught unawares.

4. “Information warfare is the manipulation of information trusted by an adversary, without the adversary’s awareness.” See “Information Warfare,” Sumit Academy, YouTube, posted August 22, 2020.

5. For an extended delineation of what psychological operations are and how they work, see this previous essay.

6. Braden Allenby, “The Age of Weaponized Narrative, or, Where Have You Gone, Walter Kronkite?” Issues in Science and Technology (2017), Vol. XXXIII, No. 4 (online issue).