Ethical Inversion, Moral Confusion, and Sympathy for the Devil
The Subversion of Ethics in Contemporary Entertainment
Preface
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Introduction
Throughout human history most civilizations have developed rich cultural traditions of a specific type of story-telling which has as its emphasis the transmission of values, virtues, and ethical constructs. The nature of the stories themselves can vary significantly and can take the form of folktales, fables, parables, allegories, biographies of historical figures, mythologies, philosophical treatises, works of fiction, etcetera. Whatever their form, these works have as their intended purposes the upholding of ethical conduct, the promotion of virtues, and the intent to inspire audiences to embody enlightened ethics. Furthermore, these traditions developed as a way for societies to transmit key aspects of their character and in order to imbue children and adults alike with the paradigms of sociocultural excellence. While these traditions and the specific agglomeration of promoted characteristics have differed significantly, what they all share in common is the intent to instill within their audience the defining values, virtues, and ethics of their civilization.
These traditions should not be merely perceived as being a superfluous fancy but understood as being critical cultural instruments with which to optimize social dynamics and hone the necessary attributes for individual and collective flourishment. Furthermore, these traditions allow for the transmission of intergenerational wisdom as well as serve to augment intergenerational cohesion and unity. For the purposes of this discourse the only meaningful distinction within this subgenre of storytelling is the ages of the intended audience. Some of these traditions are especially aimed at children, some at general audiences, while more complex treatises and traditions have been reserved for adults. In general, the tales told to children have historically had the dual purpose of entertainment and edification. The entertainment aspect of children’s stories often attempts to stimulate the imagination of children while the content of the stories often attempts to teach children invaluable life lessons.
A few notable examples which highlight important points merit mentioning:
Aesop’s Fables are a highly influential compilation of fables credited to the historical figure of Aesop, a slave from Ancient Greece. Aesop’s Fables predominantly strive to teach children important moral lessons, imbue them with insight and wisdom, and attempts to warn children of the folly of vices. Since ancient times the fables have had incredible historical importance in Western civilizations and its influence has become international with the works influencing cultures around the world.
In Plato’s Republic, Plato champions the need to promote paradigms that strongly encourage the proper moral development of the youth and instill an unshakable ethical rectitude. To this end he proposes the censorship of all works whose content promotes moral corruption and ethical deformity. Plato’s conviction of the need to censor corrupting influences goes as far as his expounding the need to strategically edit and partially censor the stories of the Greek gods due to their profound immoral character. Though at that time the stories of Greek mythology were held by the ancient Greeks as being true, Plato felt that the tales of the gods and heroes which involved wanton violence, rape, avarice, jealousy, power-lust, patricide, sadism, capricious cruelty, and hubris would promote moral corruption, the apologetics of vices, and dysfunctional social dynamics. Even if these tales of the gods were true, in their unabridged form these tales would serve to morally corrupt the youth and weaken the strength of their civilization. Plato’s opinion also extended to travelling poets, narrators of stories, and mummers who would not be allowed to pollute the ethics of the youth by their enticing stories of ethical debasement and unbecoming conduct.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, also known as Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, explored the biographies of historical and mythic figures with an emphasis on their moral and ethical character. This exploration was meant to elucidate how excellence of ethics and character was conducive to greatness. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives has been highly influential in Western civilization and continues to be an inspiration for contemporary audiences for their moral development and mastery of character.
While a comprehensive exploration of these historical traditions is beyond the scope of this article, several important aspects of ethics, moral story-telling traditions, and history ought to be noted:
The moral and ethical development of children has been of great historical importance in nearly all civilizations throughout time. This imprinting of ethics has long been known to be both beneficial to individual development and having an immunizing effect against vices and criminal or dysfunctional behavior in adulthood.
As it concerns children, the moral stories usually told to children involve individuals of extreme virtue and greatness of character. The use of these paragons is intended to inspire children to become like their childhood heroes and emulate their key characteristics which will greatly benefit them in adulthood.
The moral stories told to children which use paragons are generally straightforward and uncomplicated examples of virtue and heroism. Doing so avoids undiscerning impressionable children attempting to fully emulate their childhood heroes’ vices, negative attributes, and foibles.
In moral stories involving villainy or anti-paragons, the villains and antagonists are portrayed in an uncomplicated manner that attempts to highlight their counterproductive, destructive, dysfunctional, and/or sociopathic behavior and attempts to demonstrate how these detrimental attributes contributes to their folly and self-ruination.
Moral stories usually attempt to highlight and promote the beneficial and discourage the detrimental. Stories which involve evil triumphing over good or which show the personal successes of corrupt individuals is usually avoided for child audiences.
Nuanced portrayals of human behavior are usually reserved for adolescents and adult audiences.
The ethical integrity of a civilization has long been understood as being quintessential for civilizational stability and integrity. Ethical decay has historically been known to be directly related to numerous social ills and a contributing factor in civilizational collapse.
The subversion of ethics and the engineering of ethical decay is a tool of sociocultural warfare. Ethical subversion serves to promote vices, encourage counter-productive characteristics, and promote dysfunctional social dynamics which destabilize civilizational integrity. The means of achieving these ends has varied greatly throughout human history but it has nonetheless been an important strategy in imperial predation and is currently standard practice in psychological warfare and malicious social engineering.
This discourse will explore a recent trend in propaganda and sociocultural warfare which is an inversion of the ethical storytelling traditions normally found in cultures and which attempts to corrupt the ethical development of the youth for the purposes of engineering pathological ethical malleability. It should be noted that the social engineering from the 1960s and beyond initially targeted the youth (particularly adolescents) while leaving the older generations (which had greater ethical fortitude) alone. These generations that were raised in the United States and Western Europe post-1960 have experienced systematic ethical decay as a consequence of the social engineering and psychological warfare campaigns that have been conducted on them during the subsequent decades. This has caused a gradual erosion in the integrity of the ethics of civilizations which is readily evident between the successive batches of generations.
Currently, due to the induced pathological malleability instilled in the youth of the past generations, social engineering is not merely applied to the extremely young but to all generations simultaneously. This has caused seismic shifts in the core ethics of the citizenry on an international scale and allows for the more aggressive engineering of changes to a citizenry whose ethical framework is increasingly elastic and pliable. Even for adult audiences, aggressive ethical subversion and inculcation into patterns of psychopathology is the norm.
The trends in propaganda and sociocultural warfare that will be explored in this discourse are the strategies of ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the “Sympathy for the Devil” technique. While the strategy of fulminant ethical decay has been ongoing for some time as it concerns adolescent and adult audiences, the current trends have been noticeably and conspicuously targeting extremely young audiences with aggressive ethical subversion. While child audiences have historically been targeted for propaganda, indoctrination, and social engineering, the performance of such campaigns post-1960 tended to be subtle, surreptitious, and extremely clever. The use of these far more aggressive and overt strategies specifically aimed at impressionable child audiences betrays an intent of rapid ethical subversion and portends the rapid engineered malignant transformation of civilizations.
Definitions
For the purposes of this discourse, several terms must be defined which are specific to the scope of this discourse.
Ethics: for the purposes of this discourse ethics is understood to mean the psychological superstructure involved in moral decision-making and moral assessment. At its center, ethics has core tenets (basic principles and paradigms which themselves can be arranged by an individual in a hierarchy of importance) and values (that which the individual values and is almost always arranged in a hierarchy). Based on core tenets and values, an individual engages in cognitive processes, social interactions, and social analysis that is normally a function of the individual’s ethical framework. Depending on the stability and integrity of the ethical framework, thought and behavior are usually within the limits of the individual’s ethics and highly predictable. Many factors shape the development and evolution of the ethical superstructure as well as its functioning.
Moral Reasoning: the process of analyzing, reasoning, and assessing people, things, acts, situations, possible courses of actions, etcetera, based on one’s ethics. Moral reasoning is influenced by general factors and by individual factors. General factors include:
Relevant contextual information specific to each instance of moral reasoning.
The general desire to maximize the beneficial/constructive and minimize the detrimental/ destructive.
General human concerns such as justice, dignity, liberty, equity, utility, the maintenance of ideal social dynamics, the avoidance of suffering, the promotion of well-being, etcetera.
Sociocultural norms, spiritual and philosophical traditions, historical trends, the contemporary zeitgeist, etcetera.
Individual factors may include:
The firmness, flexibility, haziness, or absence of core tenets and values.
Individual character traits and virtues such as discipline and exhibiting resolute will.
Individual character deficits, flaws, vices, follies, etcetera.
Individual mastery of ego and emotions as well as an individual’s general maturity.
The individual’s general ability to reason and engage in logical analysis especially in a manner that is detached from oneself and free of emotion.
Individual hierarchies of tenets and values.
Social pressures and corrupting influences.
Life experiences and the internalization of the life experiences and wisdom of others.
State of mental health and any psychopathologies or psychopathological traits an individual may possess.
The consideration of the consequences and impacts of any course of action often with a special emphasis on the effects on the individual as well as on those the individual cares about.
It should be noted that propaganda, psychological warfare, and sociocultural warfare often intentionally attempt to subvert the integrity of moral reasoning for the purposes of furthering pernicious sociopolitical agendas. Failure to subvert moral reasoning can lead to audiences making appropriate assessments which deduce the true nature of the malicious agendas, the propagandists’ intent to deceive, the intent to cause harm, and deduce exactly how the agendas are deleterious to their personal and collective interests. Correct moral reasoning in turn is liable to crystallize public opinion in opposition to the agendas being foisted upon audiences via deceptive and disreputable means.
Eusocial Dynamics: a state of social dynamics in which the ideal paradigms have been attained resulting in profound individual and collective wellbeing. This idyllic state of functioning is usually achieved through collective conscious efforts and refined over time. Eusocial dynamics provide a great many benefits which can include:
Uncomplicated social dynamics with a tendency of being synergistic in their beneficial output.
High levels of individual and collective happiness, fulfillment, and quality of life.
Fast pace of social progress, civilizational flourishment, and enlightened social evolution.
High social unity and social cooperation.
High individual and collective resilience.
Tendency towards the safeguarding and protection of the interests of others in one’s community.
Tendency towards rapid, uncomplicated, and efficient cooperation in the face of adversity.
Tendency towards a productive arc of human existence with individuals often able to achieve their ambitions and attain great fulfilment and enjoyment from each of the phases of human life.
Tendency towards proactive organization for the furtherment of collective interests and ambitions.
There are many other benefits associated with eusocial dynamics that are beyond the scope of this discourse. While the natural tendency of humans as a species is to strive for eusocial paradigms, there are a great many factors which inhibit or block the attainment of this state. The intentional blocking of these dynamics often by powerful interests often causes this state to remain elusive for certain civilizations. In the contemporary setting, psychological warfare has especially targeted eusocial dynamics in an effort to undermine ideal paradigms of functioning and normalize dysfunction and corruption. For the purposes of this discourse the term “eusocial” is distinct from its use in biology although like its use in biology it is the conjugation of the Greek prefix “eu-” (meaning “good” or “ideal”) and social. Unlike its traditional use, the ideal social functioning solely refers to ideal human functioning within the normal range of human nature.
Paradigm Imprinting: the process by which paradigms and principles are integrated into the schematic understanding of an individual and/or integrated into their personal ethics. This process can occur consciously or subconsciously as well as actively or passively. The great majority of paradigm imprinting normally occurs in a passive manner in which individuals via observation absorb the paradigms present in the milieu of their environment and exhibited by individuals close to them (especially during their early development).
Proportional Perspective: the ability to perceive, reason, and form opinions based on objective proportionality and the juxtaposition of elements with relevant counterparts. Specifically, proportional perspective attempts to juxtapose similar elements both within their individual context and abstractly in order to form a schematic spectrum of such elements and formulate an assessment based on neutral dispassionate objectivity and which displays a deeper understanding of the elements involved. While proportional perspective is an innate trait of social species, techniques used in propaganda and psychological warfare specifically attempt to downplay the heinous acts of certain parties or individuals while grossly exaggerating the acts of the targets of propaganda or outright vicious slandering targets with false claims intended to demonize, disgrace, and defile the reputation of the target. The standard application of techniques aimed to skew and distort perception while simultaneously engaging in crass omissions of relevant information requires refined proportional perspective processes. These processes involve the careful analysis of objective evidence, claims made by different parties, the history of the parties involved, the established modus operandi of the parties, etcetera, in order to properly gauge the true essence of a context mired in hyperbole and emotional manipulation. Doing so allows for the formation of meritorious opinions which have genuine value and legitimacy in their objectivity.
Moral Confusion: serious deficits and/or dysfunctional ambiguities in moral assessments arising from critical failures in moral reasoning and/or ethics. Historically, moral confusion most often occurred in individuals due to serious deficits in the upbringing and/or enculturation but is increasingly reaching epidemic proportions as a direct intended effect of propaganda, psychological warfare, and sociocultural warfare. Moral confusion can be weaponized in order to engineer support for pernicious agendas, in order to imbue a civilization with unnatural and detrimental ethical “flexibility” which facilitates corrupt practices, in order to cultivate doublethink in audiences, and in order to engineer dysfunctional dynamics which destabilize civilizations.
Lingo of Legitimacy: a vocabulary or jargon usually rooted within a specific ideological construct used to confer pseudo-legitimacy, unmerited respectability, or the acceptance of authority often by the mere propagandistic use of the terminology or by appeals to the themes of the ideological construct. Lingos of legitimacy are often intentionally propagandistic and an exercise in psycholinguistic psychological warfare. The use of these lingos is intended to inappropriately confer instant false legitimacy and inappropriate respectability to a previously propagandized audience who has already accepted the ideological construct or the weaponized terminology. Oftentimes tactics involving lingos of legitimacy will use propagandistic repetition to emphasize to the audience the artificial legitimacy or force an acceptance of the claims or assertions that are being made. The lingo of legitimacy is understood as being an exercise in deception and psychological manipulation and does not objectively confer legitimacy. The ideological constructs which utilize lingos of legitimacy are often themselves disreputable and do not have authentic and objective legitimacy. Lingos of legitimacy are not usually effective when used on audiences who have not been inculcated into the ideological construct involved in the lingo and such audiences may find the use of such language strange and bizarre as they are not necessarily logical or functionally practical.
Ethical Decay: the deterioration, corruption, and/or debasement of ethics especially in situations in which it produces serious individual or social dysfunction. Ethical decay most involves the erosion or loss of key paradigms or the devaluation of important values that had previously been very highly regarded. Ethical decay is generally more pronounced in persons or civilizations with insufficiently hardened ethical frameworks which do not possess the integrity and fortitude necessary when confronted by serious challenges, significant stressors, or intentional attempts at subversion. Ethical decay can occur at the level of an individual or at the level of a society when epidemic levels of ethical decay affect the whole of a civilization. Under normal circumstances ethical decay is prevented from occurring at the level of society due to watchdog institutions and counteracting social forces. However, when such counteracting forces are themselves neutralized or captured, ethical decay can occur rapidly with profoundly detrimental consequences for civilizations. Ethical decay, especially in the contemporary setting, is often itself an intended end of propaganda, psychological warfare, and sociocultural warfare.
Social Cannibalism: patterns of behavior and social dynamics in which members of a society unjustly prey upon other members of their own society who have not wronged them and who are often in a vulnerable or disadvantageous position. The member of the society metaphorically “cannibalizes” other members of their own community by engaging in social predation, parasitic dynamics, wanton abusive behavior, unwarranted antagonism, violating the rights of others, sabotaging or undermining others, engaging in cynical abusive gossip or slander, defiling or desecrating things of importance within the sphere of others, or taking inappropriate and sacrilegious liberties at the cost of others. Social cannibalism can occur at the level of an individual or as dysfunctional norm within a corrupted society.
By definition, social cannibalism is a dysfunctional and pathological trait which erodes the natural advantageous dynamics of social species. At the level of an individual, the individual may initially benefit from being a social cannibal but in a normal functional society once that individual is outed for their pathological behavior they are liable to incur serious social consequences not readily mitigated as a result of their psychopathic and sociopathic behavior. If such dynamics reach epidemic levels within a society, that civilization will experience serious detrimental consequences, social destabilization, and have a seriously compromised cohesiveness and overall civilizational integrity. Epidemic social cannibalism can occur either naturally due to multiple generations who have experienced ethical decay or as the intentional result of campaigns of psychological and sociocultural warfare. Societies who have succumbed to epidemic social cannibalism fall into states of intractable stagnation, have their civilizational power and cultural advantageous attributes undermined and neutralized, and are extremely vulnerable to external predation and exploitation.
Systematic Limit Subversion: a tactic associated with propaganda, psychological warfare, sociocultural warfare, and social engineering involving the methodical subversion and elimination of psychological limits, boundaries, inhibitions, or restraints usually in an effort to subvert ethics, promote detrimental dynamics, and normalize disadvantageous endpoints. Limit subversion is usually performed by incrementally breaking down of limits, gradually shifting the standard of dynamics, and normalizing pathological traits and dynamics. Systematic Limit Subversion is understood as being unnatural and artificial and distinct from natural social flux or autonomous self-directed changes that occur in people and societies.
Ethical Inversion: the inversion of ethics into their opposite usually for the purposes of inducing profound dysfunction and promoting corruption. Ethical inversion is often performed by the manipulation of perception in order to trick audiences into perceiving that which they previously understood as being beneficial, positive, or “good” as negative and undesirable, and vice versa (that which they previously understood as being detrimental, dysfunctional, malignant, negative, and/or “bad” as being positive and desirable). Ethical inversion is associated with profound individual and societal harm though the perception of the disadvantageous consequences and deleterious effects of the inversion may be intentionally masked in order to continue the agenda of ethical inversion. The ultimate endpoint of ethical inversion is a dys-social paradigm which is a perfect inversion of the eusocial state. Such a dys-social state produces significant and widespread social ills, suffering, and dysfunction.
Exemplar of Evil: a person or thing associated with profound irredeemable evil who serves as an anti-paragon and as an example of the possible depths of sadism, inhumanity, cruelty, and villainy. And exemplar of evil is not normally humanized nor portrayed in a favorable manner with such portrayals being traditionally considered taboo and/or in poor taste. Whatever positive traits an exemplar of evil may possess, they are decidedly outweighed by the sheer depths of dysfunction, destruction, and suffering they have wrought in the lives of others.
Sympathy for the Devil technique: the phrase “Sympathy for the Devil” is originally the title of the 1968 song by The Rolling Stones. For the purposes of this discourse the phrase is intended to mean the propaganda technique of humanizing, engineering sympathy for, rehabilitating the image of, or glorifying an exemplar of evil usually for the purposes of normalizing pathological traits or normalizing the agendas associated with that exemplar. The tactic is distinct from the normal course of artistic expression in that it attempts to engineer inappropriate sentiments toward deleterious things, provoke moral confusion, and promote destructive, dysfunctional, and/or pathological traits, dynamics, and behaviors. Those who have had their perception manipulated by this tactic and internalize the inverted paradigms are liable to experience ethical decay and can potentially experience serious detrimental consequences as a result of the corruption of their psychology and their inculcation into dysfunctional behavior.
Emotional Pseudo-reasoning: integrally flawed and generally dysfunctional pseudo-reasoning driven by emotions especially in an egocentric manner. Emotional pseudo-reasoning can be normally present at variable levels in early childhood and is normally addressed and rectified during the normal course of upbringing and formal instruction. Failure to correct emotional pseudo-reasoning tends to cause progressive problems as an individual matures and can predispose to psychopathologies, pathological selfishness, egocentrism, self-righteous abusive behavior, and severe interpersonal dysfunction.
For the purposes of this discourse, emotional pseudo-reasoning is also understood as a desired endpoint of contemporary social engineering and psychological warfare. The weaponized variant of emotional pseudo-reasoning is targeted at all generations and is intended to corrupt logic and inculcate audiences into patterns of egocentric selfishness with pronounced psychopathic features. The engineering of this psychopathology is intended to make audiences far easier to manipulate as they would display a heightened susceptibility to the emotionally manipulative tactics of psychological warfare. This would allow for far more aggressive and ambitious campaigns of psychological warfare and social engineering. Such psychopathology is also understood as adversely immunizing audiences to logic and making them insensitive to ethical civil discourse that attempts dialogue using sound logical argumentation. Furthermore, audiences inculcated into emotional pseudo-reasoning are liable to be highly dysfunctional and self-defeating at the individual level and dysfunctional in group settings, disunited, and inherently unable to effectively cooperate when faced with assaults on their collective interests.
The Nature of the Strategy
The current strategy that is being conducted on general audiences is one of wholesale ethical inversion, the engineered of moral confusion, the beautification of psychopathology, the engineering of fulminant ethical decay, and the rehabilitation of the image of exemplars of evil for the purposes of subverting ethical restraints. The rehabilitation of exemplars of evil will predictably affect core paradigms in the psychology of audiences which in turn is expected to soften perception towards similar instances of criminal, sociopathic, and/or dysfunctional behavior in real life. What is especially noteworthy in the implementation of this strategy is the targeting of increasingly younger audiences for ethical inversion and the aggressive designs on the ethics of future generations.
This strategy is being conducted in a background of ambitious daily psychological warfare, social engineering, and sociocultural warfare which is currently standard practice on an international scale. Furthermore, strategic assaults on ethics for the purposes of engineering ethical decay has an extensive history with many notable astounding successes in various psychological warfare campaigns of the 20th and the 21st century. Past campaigns tended to be far more strategic in their targeting of audiences’ ethical superstructure. The current campaigns distinguish themselves from past campaigns in the scale of destruction they seek to wreck on the ethics of audiences and the degree of widespread individual and social dysfunction that is expected to be engineered as a consequence of the campaigns.
The intended goals of the strategy include:
Targeted destruction of key aspects of audiences’ ethics and the engineering of fulminant general ethical decay.
Engineering psychopathological traits in audiences.
Engineering malleability in the moral perception and the moral reasoning of audiences.
Engineering moral relativism and moral confusion.
Engineering emotional pseudo-reasoning in audiences conducive to the engineering of consent and the manipulation of perception.
Engineer a predisposition for the positive reassessment of criminal actors that may require image rehabilitation.
Engineer an increasing tolerance for corrupt and criminal leadership.
Subverting the proportional perception of audiences.
The ethics of audiences has been strategically under assault for many decades, however the accelerated pace of malignant sociopolitical transformation due to Paradigm Shifting Operations (PSOs) and the ambitious goals of social engineering campaigns necessitates a faster rate of ethical decay and a more aggressive subversion of ethics. Such aggressive destabilization of ethical frameworks is expected to greatly facilitate malignant transformation of civilizations and increase the ease with which audiences will adapt to increasingly inhumane and adversarial paradigms of individual and social functioning. Furthermore, the devastation of ethical frameworks is expected to greatly diminish popular resistance to novel malignant paradigms.
The glorification of ethical inversion especially via aesthetic means is intended to popularize psychopathologies and psychopathological traits in audiences via paradigm imprinting. This is especially so for younger audiences who are far more impressionable and have not yet developed the cognitive filters necessary to consciously and subconsciously reject embedded propaganda. In the contemporary setting most adults themselves do not possess the proficiency with logic, the critical thinking skills, the understanding of embedded propaganda, or possess the mental faculties necessary to resist social engineering. However, adult audiences are generally affected at a much slower pace and the core of their psychology is not as readily programmed when compared to child audiences. The continued illiteracy of general audiences in the critical subjects of logic, propaganda, and psychology predisposes to a pattern of downplaying and/or excusing propaganda inserts in entertainment products and mass communications. This continued oblivious consumption of propaganda inserts greatly facilitates the continued imprinting and systematic programming of audiences.
Under normal conditions the shared ethics of a civilization possesses structural integrity, general internal consistency, and temporal stability. The plurality of thought and opinion tends to be confined to the fringes of the ethical framework while there tends to be a generally accepted and stable ethical core. While The fringes of the ethical framework may experience rapid fluctuations, any changes to the ethical core tend to occur at a glacial pace. It is upon this ethical core that social dynamics are built and refined over time. Attempts to introduce pernicious agendas, malignant transformations, and/or novel corruptions have a tendency of inflaming public sentiment and arousing great animosity in response to ethical assaults.
The agendas which are being foisted upon civilizations internationally are expected to generate intransigent public resistance directly related to the heretical nature of these agendas to time-honored ethical frameworks. The engineering of ethical relativism, dysfunctional ethical malleability, malleability of moral reasoning, and moral confusion are expected to greatly facilitate the implementation of these agendas. Furthermore, the engineered susceptibility of audiences to Public Relations (PR) campaigns allows for an ethics du jour in which moral reasoning can be fully manipulated and audiences can be led into reaching drastically different opinions in a relatively short period of time.
While the wholesale inversion of perception as it concerns covert actions has been standard practice in Western intelligence campaigns, there has been an increasing necessity to rehabilitate the image of individuals outed as being excessively deranged, psychopathic, and/or criminal. Furthermore, there is an increasing trend towards overt technocratic rule over societies which has been combined with efforts to liberate such technocrats from the ethical constraints normally associated with individuals holding public office. As such, the Sympathy for the Devil technique is especially useful in inculcating audiences into patterns of perceptual reassessments and the engineering of inappropriate positive sentiments towards despicable individuals or organizations which do not merit such emotions or assessments.
The methods of these strategies include:
The Sympathy for the Devil technique: the writing stories that portray exemplars of evil in a positive manner which excuses their villainy and psychopathic behavior. Often combined with the vilification of traditionally heroic and/or virtuous figures.
The Glorification and Beautification of Psychopathology: the general promotion and aesthetic beautification of psychopathological traits and maladaptive behaviors which includes psychopathy (antisocial personality disorder), emotional pseudo-reasoning, egocentric socially destructive behavior, and a number of miscellaneous pathological traits.
Systematic Limit Subversion (SLS): standard practice as it concerns social engineering, sociocultural warfare, and psychological warfare. SLS is used to subvert ethical limits and breakdown psychological resistance to morally reprehensible paradigms.
Perceptual Manipulation: grossly distorting perception in an intentionally deceptive manner which seeks to subvert moral reasoning and engineer highly inappropriate sentiments based on the perceptual manipulations. The repeated subversions of moral reasoning and the inculcation into paradigms of deception function to engineer highly erroneous and dysfunctional opinions as well as a maladaptive worldview.
Emotional Manipulation: emotional manipulation which seeks to influence psychology and behavior, subvert productive reasoning, engineer inappropriate sympathy or antipathy, and emotively fixate maladaptive sentiments or pernicious ideological constructs into the psychological framework of audiences.
Strategic Irrationality: Destabilizing the reasoning of audiences by obvious and overt irrationality which is intended to be consciously perceived. Used repeatedly this is intended to subvert the ability to properly reason, inure audiences to irrationality, and engineer the subconscious acceptance of non sequitur pseudo-logic.
Cognitive Dissonance: engineering conscious and subconscious dissonance via various techniques including strategic irrationality, bizarre perceptual distortions, inconsistent or incongruous emotional manipulation, and the inappropriately linking of emotions/sentiments with conclusions, opinions, and reasoning.
Dysfunctional Psychological Intertwining: pathologically intertwining concepts and emotions that would not normally be associated with one another especially in a manner that is intended subvert the psychological integrity of audiences.
Normalizing Ethical Inversion & Anti-Paragons: promoting inverted ethical paradigms and engineering the inappropriate acceptance of unpalatable and disreputable pseudo-moral figures.
Of special note in the methodology of this strategy is the Sympathy for the Devil technique which has followed a predictable formula. The following are general motifs in the contemporary application of this technique:
Choosing a tale with the most extreme example of an exemplar of evil. The chosen story for this technique often has cultural and historical significance. The tale is then rewritten to make the exemplar of evil into the hero often combined with the vilification of the previously heroic figures of the original story.
The rewritten story downplays the psychopathic acts of the exemplar of evil often eliminating the most reprehensible of the acts. The less reprehensible acts are excused or justified due to plot contrivances and a self-serving incongruous narrative. The exemplar of evil does not incur censure or punishment for their unethical or criminal behavior, does not request forgiveness for their actions, is insensitive to the harm they have wrought, and normally does not undergo an arc of redemption. Rather they are “justified” in their behavior due to being a “victim” and due to their egocentric feelings.
The general narrative of the story does not promote virtues and subverts the moral lessons of the original story. Rather the rewritten story subtly champions vices and egocentric psychopathic behavior.
In the rewritten story, the exemplar of evil is shown to be secretly a friend to the protagonists of the original story.
In cases in which the Sympathy for the Devil technique is employed with an original story, the modified pattern includes:
Having an exemplar of evil as a hero/anti-hero in the narrative, a primary character, or a sympathetic justified villain. The plot is written in such a manner as to humanize the exemplar and minimize or excuse their extremely unethical or criminal acts.
Having the exemplar of evil commit serious criminal acts, engage in psychopathic behavior, and/or engage in serious breaches of ethical behavior. The full consequences of the psychopathic acts and the full range of emotional impacts on the victims is minimized or omitted from the story.
Justifying or downplaying the criminal behavior of the exemplar of evil due to their victimhood, their identity, a few positive actions, and/or the purported validity of their agendas.
The intentional failure to explore the ethical implications of the plot and intentionally overlook the ethical inversions and gross breaches of ethical conduct.
Glorification or beautification of psychopathic traits, pernicious agendas, destructive behavior, and/or unethical behavior.
The narrative attempts to maximize cognitive dissonance and moral confusion ultimately leaving audiences with a problematic positive or ambiguous assessment of the exemplar. The exemplar of evil is not allowed to be emotionally perceived by audiences as being evil (although any objective analysis would render such an opinion) and inappropriate sympathy is engineered towards the exemplar.
The technique is especially aimed at younger audiences serving as a tool of ethical subversion which compromises the normal paradigms of ethics and warps their developing ethical framework. Furthermore, while the technique is employed in fictional works in a fantastical manner in which the exemplars of evil can act with impunity, children who emulate such fictional exemplars in real-life are liable to incur serious personal and social problems. Though self-destructive, foolish, and/or dysfunctional behaviors can be perniciously glorified in fictional works in a manner which irrationally decouples cause and consequence, those who attempt to emulate such behaviors in real-life will experience deleterious consequences which can be potentially catastrophic and life-altering.
Due to the impressionable nature of children, stories with moral themes are usually clear, unambiguous, easy to understand, and marked in their depiction of ethical behavior. Conversely, if there are unethical behaviors in the moral stories, the stories are marked and unambiguous in their condemnation of unethical behavior often demonstrating the direct consequences of such behavior. Due to the normal course of human psychological development (especially as it concerns the development of abstract thinking) this historical strategy is ideal.
The use of these techniques is a perfect inversion of the historical storytelling modes of moral edification in that these weaponized stories are marked and unambiguous in their portrayal of unethical behavior which is excused rather than condemned. Furthermore, the unethical conduct is shown to produce beneficial outcomes for the exemplar of evil in a clear and easy to understand manner. As such, these stories are unambiguous anti-moral stories inculcating inverted paradigms into the ethical superstructure of developing children. The manner in which these stories are written betrays a profound understanding of human psychology and an intent to harm via the instilling of psychopathology.
Selected Examples
The list of examples that will be explored is not intended to be comprehensive or exhaustive. The few examples that will be discussed have been included either due to being extremely high-profile products widely consumed internationally, being especially extreme in their use of the psychological warfare techniques, or due to the extremely overt and intentional parallels between the use of the techniques and their intended real-world application.
Maleficent (film)
The original folktale of “Sleeping Beauty” has had a few major versions and numerous iterations throughout history. The 1959 Disney film Sleeping Beauty roughly follows the first half of Perrault’s version of the tale with significant artistic departures from the source material. Furthermore, the film includes music from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty ballet and borrows heavily from Tchaikovsky’s adaptation of the story.
The Perrault version of the tale includes 7 fairy godmothers who gift the princess at her christening with positive attributes and virtues save for the 7th fairy who must use her gift to mitigate the curse of a malignant old fairy. This bestowing of attributes and virtues turns the princess into a paragon of virtue while the old jilted fairy is an exemplar of evil and the primary antagonist of the first half of the story.
The artistic license taken in the 1959 Disney animated film includes some significant departures from Perrault’s narrative and the traditional iterations of the tale. In the Disney adaptation the old malevolent fairy is instead an evil witch named Maleficent (a name unique to the Disney adaptation of the tale). The word “maleficent” itself means causing or conducive to malicious harm, destruction, or evil. The Maleficent character is physically represented using demonic and hellish imagery (horns, ominous black garb, hellfire). It should be noted that while technically Maleficent is a “witch,” her appearance and her attributes make her functionally more akin to a demon or a devil from traditional religions and mythologies. Furthermore, the Disney adaptation includes a novel subplot in which Maleficent abducts Prince Philip, the suitor of the princess. This subplot involves Prince Philip escaping Maleficent’s castle, her transforming into an evil dragon, and Maleficent being slain by the virtuous prince who throws the “Sword of Truth” into Maleficent’s heart. The theme of the weapon of “Truth” slaying the demonic witch who embodies evil itself is overt and intentional. These choices of thematic and aesthetic representations are interesting given the strong use of demonic imagery in an era of greater social and spiritual conservatism which might have greatly upset audiences due to the “satanic” overtones of the film.
The 2014 Disney film Maleficent takes the general premise of the 1959 film but thoroughly rewrites and inverts the story eliminating all of the moral content of the original and twisting the narrative in a manner which functionally makes the film an “apologetics of evil.” The film inverts the moral elements of the tale so that characters who were previously honorable and noble are now portrayed as “evil” or corrupt (save for the princess and the prince), and Maleficent, the “exemplar of evil” of the original Disney adaptation, has her image rehabilitated and her malicious actions condoned. The overall plot is flimsy in its structure merely attempting to hit the major narrative points of the 1959 film while fully inverting the content of the story in order to portray the exemplar of evil as the “victim” who is “justified” in her actions.
Major thematic and plot points of note include:
“Evil” is actually secretly “good.” The “Maleficent” character is now downgraded from demonic witch back to a fairy though she still retains the previous demonic imagery and dark powers. Maleficent is shown as a sympathetic character who is secretly helpful to the princess Aurora thus “justifying” her actions against the princess and her family.
The actions of Maleficent are downplayed throughout the film in order to make her appear sympathetic to audiences with the use of plot contrivances to “justify” her actions as an exemplar of evil. A new subplot involving Aurora’s father “Stefan” cutting off Maleficent’s wings is included in order to portray the previously honorable and caring father as corrupt and incorrigibly evil thus justifying Maleficent’s future actions.
The paragons of virtue and righteousness in the previous tale (the fairy godmothers) are downgraded in this adaptation to feckless pixies. This symbolically defiles what the characters had represented in the previous adaptation (the godmother’s gifting of virtues to the newborn Aurora, providing Prince Phillip with the “Sword of Truth” and the “Shield of Virtue”) and subverts the moral themes of the story.
An inverted moral story is established throughout the film with an anti-moral message consisting of: “extreme unethical behavior is justified if one’s feelings are hurt or if one is wronged.” Egocentric emotional pseudo-reasoning is encouraged and explorations of the ethical implications of actions are avoided.
“Evil” supplants the bonds of the loving mother and father in the original tale with the exemplar of evil becoming the surrogate mother to the princess. This supplantation occurs regardless of the fact that Maleficent actions lead directly to the downfall of the Aurora’s entire family and the death of her father.
Blood ties and familial relations are thematically irrelevant or symbolically defiled.
In the new narrative Maleficent is wronged by Stefan who deceives Maleficent, drugs her, cuts her wings off, steals them, and absconds back to the human kingdom. The reason for this mutilation is that Stefan was from a poor humble background and the king of Stefan’s realm had promised his daughter’s hand in marriage and the kingship to any man who could slay Maleficent. Stefan and Maleficent were previously love interests and Stefan abused her trust in him to get close to her. Rather than murdering Maleficent in cold blood, Stefan decides to cut Maleficent’s wings off as “proof” that hey slew her and thus claim the kingship and his royal bride. These actions are portrayed as a personal betrayal to the jilted Maleficent.
Maleficent does not seek justice on Stefan directly as would be logical and expected. This is in order to follow the main points of the original Disney version while radically reinterpreting the nature of the events. Rather she bids her time and doesn't confront Stefan until she arrives uninvited to the christening of Stefan's newborn daughter with the intent of killing the babe. Plot contrivances abound in order to stay within the confines of the major plot points yet simultaneously “excuse” Maleficent’s behavior. Maleficent could have shamed and delegitimized the king in front of his subjects, could have outed his criminal acts against her in front of nobility and commoners, could have outright executed him publicly, could have requested her wings back, and she could have easily reclaimed the wings by force if necessary given her godlike power. The return of her wings would have made her physically whole and would have granted her most of the justice owed to her thus eliminating any flimsy justification for cursing a helpless newborn. Rather Maleficent emotionally traumatizes Stefan by cursing his daughter to an early death. Stefan is forced to beg Maleficent to spare his child and only after humiliating himself in front of his subjects does Maleficent make a caveat that could undo the curse. The nature of the curse is downplayed in the new narrative from actual death to eternal sleep but still constitutes a form of living death with concerning implications. That it was Stefan's actions which ultimately spared the little princess Aurora and that Maleficent intended to kill the child is ignored throughout the rest of the plot.
Emotional manipulation and emotional pseudo-reasoning are amply used in the apologetics of Maleficent’s behavior. However, for an objective analysis some real-life juxtapositions merit mentioning. There are crime syndicates throughout human history that have had rules against their membership harming the civilian family of fellow criminals or the families of victims of their racketeering schemes. Not all crime syndicates have had such ethical restraints, but that such ethical concerns have existed amongst hardened criminals is noteworthy. When juxtaposed with real-life criminal counterparts the anti-morality themes of the Maleficent film possesses no such ethical restraints. Abstractly, the plot of Maleficent can be metaphorically likened to a mobster getting a limb cut off by another criminal and then slaying the 3-year-old daughter of his enemy in retaliation. Such an act would be universally perceived as vile and heinous. In truth, acts of retribution that are directed at newborns or children are always considered heinous and disreputable. The film, which is mostly directed at child audiences, attempts to justify such behavior.
Furthermore, Maleficent follows-up her curse of a living death on an innocent newborn by: 1) disregarding her parent’s wishes that she stay away from their child 2) developing an unhealthy obsession with the princess despite Stefan having previously been the object of her affections and 3) violating Aurora’s privacy and stalking the princess for years. Again these acts are made to appear justified or innocuous though young children are apt to learn later in life the serious social and legal consequences of unwanted attention, criminal invasion of privacy, and stalking. These acts which would normally be viewed by audiences as creepy and disturbing are portrayed as “cutesy” and sentimental.
The personal and emotional impacts of Maleficent’s actions on Stefan, on Aurora’s mother “Princess Leila” (who is innocent and had not wronged Maleficent in any way), on any possible extended family, on the peoples of the kingdom, or on the sociopolitical stability of the kingdom, is simply irrelevant in the film. Maleficent’s feelings are more important than any of the repercussions of her actions regardless of how outrageous, criminal or unethical they may have been. At the finality of the film, Maleficent is fully restored, Stefan is psychologically broken and ultimately dies, Aurora is orphaned, and Maleficent becomes Aurora’s adopted mother despite her adversarial actions against the royal family.
As a final comparison the film merits juxtaposition with the Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette. In Balzac’s novel, the beastly Cousin Bette is underappreciated and overlooked by her wealthy aristocratic extended family. Bette harbors poisonous resentment towards her family though she does not act upon these sentiments initially. When her cousin poaches Bette’s love interest (whom Bette had been cultivating personally and professionally), Bette’s years of resentment boil over and she vows unholy vengeance on all of her aristocratic family (not merely the cousin who had wronged her). Bette begins scheming and plotting to undo the entirety of her aristocratic extended family using their weaknesses and foibles against them and setting elaborate traps in order to ensure their downfall. At the end of the novel her aristocratic family (even the innocent ones) are financially bankrupted and socially disgraced with a few members perishing as a result of their scandalous ruination. Bette funneled to herself great wealth obtain from her schemes against her family and ends up becoming the adopted mother to the infant child of her cousin and former love interest.
Both fictional works deal with a jilted woman seeking revenge and both works have the jilted woman being made “whole” in the end and becoming the adoptive mother of the child of their former love interest. The major differences in how these works deal with the general premise is that Balzac does not attempt to make Cousin Bette into a purely sympathetic character when she engages in sociopathic behavior despite Bette having been legitimately jilted and wronged. The consequences of Cousin Bette’s revenge are honestly portrayed and the emotional impacts on her victims are not hidden from audiences or excused by silly plot contrivances. Readers of the novel may feel genuinely horrified by the extent and cruelty of Cousin Bette’s wrath. The Maleficent film by contrast takes great pains to manipulate the sympathies of audiences and excuse Maleficent’s behavior via providing aesthetically pleasing apologetics for psychopathic behavior.
Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil and Vile (film)
By far one of the most famous real-life exemplars of evil of the 20th century is the American serial killer and necrophiliac Theodore R. Bundy, commonly known as Ted Bundy. While there have been a number of prolific serial killers throughout the history of the United States, Bundy is by far one of the better known due to the nature of his sensational crimes and the fact that his 1979 Florida trial was the first to be nationally televised. Bundy is among a select group of serial killers and mentally disturbed murderers etched into the American public consciousness along with the likes of Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy.
Bundy’s modus operandi was to bludgeon young attractive females and kill them either immediately via bludgeoning or later by strangulation at the murder site. Bundy would acquire his victims through several methods though the one he is best known for is luring women into his vehicle by pretending to be injured (having one arm in a sling, having a fake arm cast, using crutches with one leg in a fake cast) and requesting help putting things in his car. Bundy preferred to minimize the time the victims were alive and primarily sated his psychopathic needs on the bodies of women who were dead or appeared to be dead (due to being unconscious and unresponsive following violent head trauma). Bundy would then proceed to prolifically rape the bodies of the victims, defile their bodies sexually, and (depending on his mood) mutilate the bodies of the victims. During the main part of his criminal history Bundy would dump the bodies of his victims in the wilderness and often return to the site where the bodies were located. He would commit further acts of necrophilia on corpses in variable states of decay and engage in play behavior with the corpses. He decapitated a subset of the victims and kept their heads in his home for variable lengths of time.
The 2019 film Extremely Wicked, Shocking Evil and Vile is fictionalized re-telling of the Bundy story told predominantly through the viewpoint of Elizabeth Kloepfer (renamed Elizabeth “Liz” Kendall in the film) a longtime girlfriend of Ted Bundy. The film also follows highly selective aspects of Bundy’s life as well as his relationship with other women and female fans. Had this film been produced prior to the widespread application of the Sympathy for the Devil technique it is likely an alternate version of such a film would have been a cautionary tale of the deceptive charisma of psychopaths and the maladjusted psychology of those in the thrall of the psychopath. Such a hypothetical film would have been especially intriguing given the nature of the Bundy’s case and the problematic issues which arose from the misuse of mass media which gave celebrity status to a violent necrophiliac. The actual Extremely Wicked film is in the style of Sympathy for the Devil technique with all the narrative tricks and emotional manipulation associated with the technique. The film is designed in such a manner as to appear superficially critical of Bundy and be defensible by its creators while still unabashedly glorifying and beautifying Bundy, downplaying his crimes, and inappropriately humanizing him to audiences.
The Sympathy for the Devil technique as it concerns Extremely Wicked is as follows:
Places emphasis on Bundy’s attractiveness, portraying him as an “ideal” man, and emphasizing his romantic dynamics with Kloepfer. Exemplified by emphasizing Kloepfer’s initial impressions of Bundy, Bundy being an “ideal” surrogate father to Kloepfer’s child, Kloepfer’s fawning and romantic feelings for Bundy, and Kloepfer’s unwillingness to correct her assessment of Bundy once he has been outed as being a sexual predator and serial killer.
Emphasis on Bundy’s appeal to a subsect of maladjusted women. Exemplified by placing excessive emphasis on Bundy being “attractive” to Kloepfer and Carole Ann Boone, the Kloepfer character (Kendall) competing with Boone for Bundy’s affections, Bundy receiving unsought female attention due to the publicity of his case, the inappropriate focus on his female fandom after the media storm turned him into a criminal celebrity, as well as erroneously portraying Bundy as being nearly universally appealing to highly attractive women.
Themes of aesthetic considerations and superficiality being more important than critical analysis and the careful consideration of the substance of a person. Exemplified by emphasizing how Bundy’s female fans thought he was innocent because of how “handsome” and charismatic he was and the continued undeserved “doubt” of his heinous crimes by the women in his life.
Portraying Bundy as being a “victim” and emotionally manipulating audiences into feeling inappropriate sympathy for the homicidal necrophiliac. Exemplified by emphasizing Bundy’s “discrimination” by getting kicked out of library, his being followed by undercover police after his initial arrest, Bundy being “harassed” and “bullied” by inmates while in prison, Bundy being “abandoned” by his legal counsel, Bundy being manhandled by the police while his teeth were being photographed, and generating sympathy for Bundy when he publicizes the corruption of the police.
Inappropriately emphasizing the “feelings” of the women in his life. Exemplified by the inappropriate emphasis of Kloepfer’s emotions following Bundy’s trials and conviction, Kloepfer’s alcoholism due to her conflicted feelings, the “emotional devastation” of Bundy’s fans after his conviction, and the emotional devastation of Boone, Bundy’s mother, and the Kendall character following Bundy’s final conviction.
Intentionally omitting the true nature of Bundy’s crimes, their disturbing details, and the horrific impact his murders and assaults had on the lives of the families of his victims and on his surviving victims. Exemplified by news reports of the murders which do not fully convey the magnitude of the crimes and intentionally omitting the full extent of Bundy’s modus operandi.
Using inappropriately attractive actors and actresses to portray their real-life counterparts which generates aesthetic appeal and is psychologically manipulative. Bundy was considered attractive by some but he is portrayed by an actor far more handsome than Bundy was in real-life. This inappropriately beautifies and increases the necrophiliac’s aesthetic appeal. Kloepfer was of average appearance and Boone was decidedly unattractive. Having both these women be portrayed by highly attractive actresses gives the impression that the non-victim women in Bundy’s life were great beauties and that he was sought after by beautiful women.
Perhaps the best manner of conveying the extreme cognitive dissonance between Extremely Wicked and real-life is a brief juxtaposition:
In Extremely Wicked Bundy is played by Zac Efron, considered by many women as one of the most attractive male actors in contemporary Hollywood. Bundy is portrayed as a veritable Adonis with impeccable charm and charisma and as being an ideal man and an ideal father figure. Kloepfer is portrayed by the extremely attractive actress Lily Collins. Her character’s “difficulty” in getting a man to be her husband and a stepfather to her child given the actresses extreme beauty beggars belief. Bundy is shown as “rescuing” Kloepfer and being her personal “dream come true.” Efron’s “Bundy” and Collins’ “Kloepfer” make a “picture perfect” couple together. The frumpy women in Bundy’s life are played exclusively by extremely attractive actresses. The emotions of the real-life frumpy women are excessively highlighted throughout the film as is the female attention he received after his criminal celebrity. This gives audiences an impression that Bundy had a fan following akin to Elvis Presley and had the sex appeal of James Bond. Bundy is portrayed repeatedly as being a “victim” and being “mistreated” in an effort to generate inappropriate sympathy for the character and humanize him to audiences.
The film portrays an ambiguity to Bundy’s culpability for his crimes until the latter part of the film. The corruption and incompetence of the police is portrayed in a manner that makes Bundy appear sympathetic and that fails to highlight its serious implications. The actual crimes of Bundy are minimized, glossed over, and the most critical aspects are almost entirely omitted. The word “necrophilia” is conspicuously avoided in the film. The emotional impact his crimes had on the victims’ families and the physical and psychological trauma of his few surviving victims is omitted. The final impression the audience has is that Bundy was an “amazing guy” who would have been the “perfect man” for Kloepfer had he not had an unfortunate appetite for killing young women.
In real life Bundy was an average-looking man. He was intelligent and cunning but aimless, variably disciplined, and generally unambitious. He did not finish law school and achieved nothing of note in his life except criminal celebrity. He used the typical tool of psychopaths of the “mask of sanity” technique whereby he cultivated an amiable, benign, and charming persona which successfully hid his true essence from the people around him. He was not unique in this regard. He was narcissistic, vindictive, and had serious self-image problems. The women in his romantic life were for the most part average-looking, frumpy, or decidedly unattractive. He was emotionally abusive to Kloepfer, had threatened to kill her, and apparently had attempted to kill her on at least one occasion.
In his twisted psychology he had inverted the instinct of life (sex and reproduction) into an instinct of death, defilement, and destruction (violent homicide, necrophilia, and mutilation). He metaphorically “cannibalized” great beauty by seeking out truly beautiful victims and then bludgeoning and killing them. He would perform necrophilia on his dead victims or rape the unconscious bodies of his victims. He would continue to defile the bodies of his victims even when in variable states of decomposition. He decapitated some of the victims, at one point had a collection of human heads, and would engage in disturbing “play behavior” with the bodies of his victims. He killed at least 30 women and estimates range from to 2 – 3 times that number. He left great suffering and devastation in his wake with a great many lives cut short and a great many more ruined.
The misuse of the mass media in his case was unethical as it gave the narcissistic necrophiliac a chance to turn the courtroom into a circus and allowed him to promote himself to a national audience. His female fans were mostly average-looking psychologically-troubled women on whom Bundy would prey on via correspondence from prison. The mishandling of his case by law enforcement and their corruption throughout his case was unforgivable and a permanent stain on American policing. The suspicious mishandling of the Bundy case led to numerous preventable deaths of young women and the corruption associated with his case should be eternally infamous and not readily forgotten by future generations.
Extremely Wicked is in essence the kind of movie that you would expect to be commissioned by or directed by Ted Bundy himself. It is the deceptive beautification and glorification of his person in a manner that would continue to feed his egocentric narcissism and would continue to further the myth of his person to contemporary audiences on an international scale.
As it concerns the Sympathy for the Devil technique it is especially noteworthy that this was applied on one of the best-known real-life villains of the 20th century. There are a great many villains of the 20th century that for political reasons have had their crimes hidden from public consciousness or have had their image sanitized or rehabilitated. However, there are a select few villains that have been universally etched into the public consciousness as the most extreme representations of exemplars of evil. These includes the likes of Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jim Jones, Ted Bundy, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, and Dr. Josef Mengele. The choice of rehabilitating the image of Bundy, a well-known universally-reviled necrophiliac, is intentionally applying the “Sympathy” propaganda technique to one of the worst real-life exemplars of evil. This is in extremely poor taste and should unequivocally be understood as being aggressively subversive.
Extremely Wicked can be likened to a film on the life of Adolf Hitler which portrays him as a misunderstood artist, a wounded war hero, an ardent German patriot, and a loving and thoughtful partner to Eva Braun while simultaneously conspicuously omitting the industrial bloodbath that was WW2, his homicidal eugenics policies, his genocide of European Jewry, and his plans to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe. Similar to Extremely Wicked, one could attempt a flimsy justification of such a portrayal (subversive propaganda) by the “artistic choice” of focusing on his life primarily through the point of view of Eva Braun in order to cast Hitler in a positive light and emphasize the female adoration Hitler received from German women.
Furthermore, like Extremely Wicked one could emotionally manipulate audiences by depicting every instance in which Hitler was “victimized” and “abused” during his lifetime whilst simultaneously omitting every time he was the victimizer and the physical and emotional trauma suffered by his immeasurable victims. Many in the international Jewish community would find such an “artistic work” to be unforgivably unethical, morally subversive, offensive to the memory of those who perished in his death camps, and in extremely poor taste. The outcry against such a film would be much deserved and the creators of such a film should incur lasting ignominy. Extremely Wicked should be viewed in just such a manner: as offensive, subversive, crass, and disrespectful to the memory of the many victims of Bundy’s horrific crimes.
The Last of Us Part II (video game)
In 2013 Naughty Dog Studios released the critically acclaimed and financially successful video game The Last of Us. Despite the substandard gameplay the game was considered by many players as being a masterpiece largely due to the characters, the narrative, and the storytelling. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting in which a zombie-like parasitic fungal outbreak has collapsed nations and the former United States is split between city centers controlled by a successor organization to the US Federal Government and lawless zones inhabited by tribal groups and hordes of the infected. The premise of the story is hackneyed and cliché however the dynamic between the two central characters keeps the story fresh and engaging. The main characters of the game are Joel, a father whose daughter was killed at the start of the outbreak and Ellie a young girl who has immunity to the parasitic infection. The emotional impact of the story is rooted in Joel being a cynical detached survivor following the violent death of his daughter and his transition over the course of the game into surrogate father to Ellie and regaining his humanity, his capacity to love, and his sense of purpose.
In The Last of Us Joel is portrayed as a caring father who had tried to protect his daughter at the start of the outbreak and her death had left him devastated. His life in the post-apocalyptic world following his daughter’s death consisted of impersonal survival. His being contracted to ferry Ellie across the post-apocalyptic America was initially a matter of business. However, during the course of the extended journey his time with Ellie led to his forming a father-daughter bond that filled the void left behind by the death of his daughter. Joel is shown throughout the game as being a ruthless survivor but not sadistic or wantonly destructive. At the end of the game Joel discovers that the group he was contracted to deliver Ellie to plan to vivisection her alive in order to harvest the fungus in her brain in the hopes that the seemingly attenuated form of the pathogen can be used to develop a vaccine. When Joel is upset by this revelation and objects to the extreme course of action, the leader of the group orders him to be executed. Joel escapes, rescues the sedated Ellie, kills everyone who stands in his way, and flees the compound.
The “science” and “medicine” involved in this final subplot are especially fantastical with the extremely flexible use of “science” used as a means to create a contrived ethical dilemma of: “sacrifice one to save the world.” By having spent the great majority of the game with Ellie and bonding with her character over many hours of gameplay it is hoped that this dilemma is far more personal for the players than it otherwise would have been. Regardless, the player is not actually given a choice and to proceed with the story one must save Ellie and continue to the only ending of the story. The Last of Us ends with Joel lying to Ellie about what had transpired in order to spare her psychological trauma and anguish.
In 2014 Naughty Dog Studios released Downloadable Content (DLC) for the original game titled The Last of Us: Left Behind which featured the theme of underage interracial lesbianism and whose only apparent purpose was to establish the character of Ellie as a young lesbian. Propaganda coverage of the DLC was obsequious and sycophantic and no serious concerns were raised about the ethics of depicting underage lesbianism or appropriating the representation of the ethnic minorities for such a purpose.
The Last of Us Part II (to be referred to as TLOU2) was released in 2020 and features prominently ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique. While the original game had been free of propaganda the sequel can be understood exclusively as an aggressive exercise in propaganda. The careful and considered world-building of the first game is discarded in TLOU2 in favor of an incoherent plot which symbolically defiles the themes of the original game. A great many propaganda techniques are used simultaneously although they are performed with an almost child-like clumsiness and directness that betrays a lack of appreciation for nuance and subtlety. The plot is twisted and contorted in all manner of directions in order to fit as many agendas as possible into the narrative. This combines to produce a surreal stupidity and irrationality to the overall narrative and gaming experience. Furthermore, TLOU2 is also prominently features the propaganda strategies of Symbolic Defilement, Weaponized Representation, and Weaponized Pseudo-advocacy to be discussed in later discourses.
The world of TLOU2 is a bleak dystopia defined by dys-social dynamics, ethical inversion, epidemic levels of psychopathology, fulminant ethical decay, social cannibalism, emotional pseudo-reasoning, and is anachronistically saturated with the agendas of oligarchic pseudo-liberalism. This world can be viewed as a perfect inversion of the paradigms of the American past in which every aspect of importance has been corrupted and an inverted paradigm has supplanted the original counterpart. In an effort to shield this ethically inverted world and its central characters from scrutiny, identity politics and the contemporary lingo of legitimacy associated with oligarchic pseudo-liberalism are positioned at the forefront of the story. Furthermore, the strategic use of identity politics and sexual minority politics are especially used in order to make this propaganda entertainment “defensible” by allowing for ad hominem counter-attacks on any critics of the game by false accusations of bigotry and intolerance.
The world of TLOU2 merits juxtaposition with the American past as well as with the preceding game. The historical paradigm orientation of American society included the promotion or idealization of: eusocial dynamics, family bonds, social unity, peace, justice, prosperity, harmony, productivity, work ethic, logic and reason, stoicism, education and intelligence, spirituality, social and technological evolution, etcetera.
In TLOU2 these concepts are inverted and symbolically defiled. The paradigm orientation of the world of TLOU2 includes the normalization, promotion, or idealization of: dys-social dynamics, fractured dysfunctional composite families, social disunity, strife and chaos, injustice and capricious cruelty, hardship and immiseration, antipathy and social cannibalism, sloth and inertia, irrationality and emotional pseudo-reasoning, emotional incontinence and pathological egocentrism, stupidity and brutishness, religious fanaticism or spiritual decay, accelerated social and technological collapse, etcetera. As such the world of TLOU2 can be understood as being a nightmarish dystopic inversion of everything the American civilization has represented from its inception up-to the 20th century.
Furthermore, TLOU2 ethically inverts the major themes explored in the original game. The themes of the original game included: hope, regaining one’s humanity, finding purpose in a world in upheaval, the power of fatherhood, familial loyalty, emotionless moral reasoning, and practical ethics during dangerous times. These themes which had made the original game so popular amongst its fan-base were ethically inverted into their opposite. The inverted themes of TLOU2 include: hopeless resignation to cruel realities, losing one’s humanity and civility and succumbing to epidemic savagery, purposelessness and succumbing to ethical inversion, the fecklessness of a debased father figure and his public humiliation and excoriation, familial disloyalty and betrayal, emotional pseudo-reasoning, and dangerous anti-ethics (ethical inversions) which predispose to self-sabotage and accelerated societal collapse.
In accordance with total ethical inversion, everything that had been considered positive in the original game is now “negative” in the sequel and everything that had previously been considered negative is inverted into being “positive.” Special attention is given to the debasement and humiliation of the character of Joel who had embodied many of the central themes of The Last of Us.
Some of the major ethical inversions are as follows:
Hope: the themes of hope which were prevalent in the first game have been replaced by a resignation to the “new normals” of a broken world filled with psychopathic people. The world of TLOU2 is bleak and hopeless with the actions of the central characters adding to their individual and shared suffering and hopelessness.
Purpose: Ellie’s purpose was rooted in her desire to use her unique condition as a way to find a cure and help others while Joel had found purpose in being the surrogate father and guardian of Ellie. Joel is stripped of his purpose by being estranged from Ellie (for having the temerity of saving Ellie’s life) and the optimistic Ellie is now a surly self-conscious young woman more concerned about her public acceptance as a lesbian than on finding a cure or helping the world.
Fatherhood: Rather than his previous representation as intelligent able survivor and loyal surrogate father, Joel is portrayed as a foolish feckless old man rejected by his surrogate daughter and clumsy in his attempts to rekindle their relationship. Joel is used to metaphorically represent traditional fatherhood, manhood, and patriarchal dynamics and is then symbolically defiled and destroyed. He is unfairly judged for his past actions, belittled, and ultimately violently tortured and killed at the hands of a “gender-nonconforming” woman. Ellie does not honor Joel’s sacrifices and refuses to avenge his death when presented with the opportunity.
Practical ethics: the practical ethics of survival and the basic practicalities of living in an uncertain world are discarded in favor of inverted ethical paradigms and highly erratic emotional pseudo-reasoning. The principal characters display an egocentric anti-ethics which ends up killing most of the people in their lives. Their egotistical psychological needs and incontinent emotions are always more important than pressing physical concerns such as food, shelter, and safety.
The extreme nature of the ethical inversion in TLOU2 is also noteworthy in that the configuration can only be maintained in the artifice of fictional propaganda. A civilization on the verge of collapse due to crisis and incompetent leadership that begins to cannibalize itself guarantees their shared destruction. Moments of genuine crisis in the setting of dysfunctional dynamics which cannot be overcome portends the permanent ruination of a civilization. This has been seen repeatedly throughout the course of human history. Under normal circumstances crisis situations inspire natural ingrained prosocial and cooperative dynamics between the people as these dynamics are the ones most conducive to individual and collective survival. In cases in which sociocultural warfare and social engineering have corrupted natural dynamics or in the setting of natural ethical decay the stressed civilization would rapidly decline and implode unless the dys-social dynamics are quickly corrected.
These ethically inverted paradigms are promoted throughout TLOU2 via characters clad in the armor of identity politics and the contemporary lingo of legitimacy. These characters are portrayed in such a manner as to be understood as having sacrosanct status and the audience is goaded into blindly accepting the characters and everything they exemplify regardless of their criminal conduct, unethical behavior, or obvious demerits. The ethical inversions involved in these weaponized representations permeate most of the characters, however a few of the primary examples merit mentioning:
Ellie: previously an innocent-looking upbeat child now a self-conscious, surly, and dour teenage lesbian. Physically depicted in a manner reminiscent of placing the slightly innocent looking visage of a teenage American girl on the body of a lean tattooed male convict. Exemplifies: antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, sociopathic behavior, egocentrism, surly morose attitudes, cynicism, immaturity, intolerance, wrath, violence, stupidity, brutishness, injustice, short-sightedness, hypocritical judgmental attitudes, and familial disloyalty.
Abby: a new character introduced in TLOU2 physically depicted as an amalgam of the face of a Caucasian female of homely androgynous visage and a body reminiscent of a male body-builder or professional athlete who has been using anabolic hormones for an extended period of time. Abby is depicted in such a manner as to embody a “gender-nonconforming” paradigm and for all intents and purposes could be visually mistaken for a homosexual male athlete attempting to “transition” into a female. Exemplifies: antisocial personality disorder, violent sadism, extreme cruelty, violent psychopathy, extreme sociopathic behavior, injustice, wrath, egocentrism, obstinance, foolishness, stupidity and obtuseness, lack of concern for the feelings or suffering of others, absence of guilt or remorse, and a callous disregard for the safety and well-being of others.
Lev: a new character introduced in TLOU2 depicted as an androgynous child of unspecified Asian ethnicity. Lev is a 13-year-old biological female who insists on being socially perceived and treated as a male. The post-apocalyptic setting of TLOU2 means Lev’s identity politics are a luxury when death is often imminent and merely surviving is extremely challenging. Exemplifies: emotional pseudo-reasoning, dysfunctional hierarchy of needs, dysfunctional hierarchy of values, immaturity, short-sightedness, egocentrism, confrontational antagonism towards societal norms, imposition of values on others, disregard for the social well-being, matricide, and a callous disregard for the safety and well-being of others.
Ironically the identity politics and “victimhood” of the central characters Ellie and Abby are the least important aspect of their person given the extreme nature of their crimes. Stripped of the armor of identity politics the two primary characters are unambiguous villains. Their extreme behavior is expected to be overlooked due to ineffective attempts to humanize both characters and the cartoonish use of identity politics to shield them from scrutiny and ethical considerations. The ineptitude with which these propaganda techniques are used makes the irrationality of the strategy acutely felt and consciously understood. To attempt to confer impunity to a person due to their identity politics can be likened to attempting to grant Jeffrey Dahmer immunity from prosecution due to his homosexuality. Dahmer’s sexuality, his interracial sexual preferences, and his childhood issues are irrelevant when compared to the far more germane issues of serial killing, necrophilia, and cannibalism. The characters of Abby and Ellie in TLOU2 are both violent torturers and mass murderers and these conspicuous aspects are far more germane than the trivial concerns of sexuality, identity politics, and false victimhood.
The Sympathy for the Devil technique is applied to both of the primary characters albeit in modified forms. Unlike the typical application of the technique, TLOU2 discards subtlety and sensible narrative choices in lieu of aggressive and jarring perceptual inversion pivots. Unsurprisingly this causes the technique to be ineffective at manipulating the perception of audiences. The modified use of the technique includes:
Ellie: The strong positive feelings towards the characters held by fans of the original game are expected to have been carried over to the beginning of the story of TLOU2 however this iteration of Ellie has little to do with the character as established in the original game. Ellie is devoid of all her previous charm and virtues with her new pseudo-redeeming features being her lesbianism, her perceived “victimhood,” and her new lesbian relationship with a bisexual woman. The daughter relationship Ellie had with Joel which had been the foundation of how she was viewed by audiences is symbolically defiled. Ellie is shown to be cynical, critical, unappreciative, and unfairly judgmental of Joel. As a way to rekindle the audiences’ waning sympathy for this new psychopathic iteration of the character (that is shown repeatedly engaging in disturbing violent behavior) in the latter half of the game a “flashback” sequence is shown which reminds audiences of the unblemished father-daughter relationship Ellie had had with Joel. From that point on Ellie continues her unabated psychopathic behavior until the conclusion of the game.
Abby: Is first shown attempting to hunt-down Joel for the purposes of avenging her father who was killed by Joel in the first game. Abby is almost killed by a horde of fungus-zombies but is saved by Joel. Abby proceeds to violently torture and murder Joel despite him having risked his life to save her. The scene of his death is pornographic in its use of sadism and is intentionally disturbing. This is intended to infuriate fans of the first game and provoke antipathy towards Abby. Having established Abby as a disturbed psychopathic murderer, the player is then forced to play as Abby. Plot contrivances are amply used in an attempt to fully reverse the audiences’ perception of Abby. The tricks used to humanize her are cheap, poorly executed, and ineffective. The poor writing fails to rehabilitate Abby’s image which remains bland and uninspiring. Abby is never affected or conflicted by her violent actions and Abby does not seek redemption or forgiveness for her heinous crimes. Rather Abby is expected to be viewed as “justified” because of her “victimhood,” her selfish feelings, and her “gender-nonconforming” identity.
The inept application of the technique on the character of Abby is particularly noteworthy and the full context and ethical considerations of her case merit exploration:
Abby’s father was physician who was about to murder Ellie (then an underaged child) in order to harvest a parasite from her brain. Subterfuge had been used to get Joel and Ellie to cooperate with the unethical human experimentation. Ellie did not give informed consent and Joel (the closest thing to Ellie’s legal guardian) objected to the procedure. Plot contrivances and fantastical story-telling aside, the “science” was flawed and he would have realistically killed Ellie and eliminated any chance of using her to develop a vaccine. Disregarding emotional manipulation, Abby’s father had the medical ethics and scientific competence of Dr. Josef Mengele.
The leader of the group ordered Joel to be executed when he was unwilling to go along with the plan. Joel fought back and killed only those that got in the way of saving Ellie. He did not relish killing nor did he prolong the deaths of those he killed.
Abby is driven by her selfish emotional needs and endangers her own life and that of her friends on quest to kill Joel. She does not consider Joel’s position nor the ethics of her group. Abby’s stupidity almost gets her killed and she is saved by Joel himself. This selfless act by Joel does not cause Abby to reevaluate Joel nor reconsider her plans to murder him.
Abby proceeds to brutally and sadistically torture Joel, prolongs his death, and bludgeons him to death. His act of mercy towards her is disregarded and he is not given the same courtesy he gave to those he personally killed out of necessity.
The standard application of the technique attempts to downplay or mask the psychopathy and criminality of the character on whom the technique is being applied. Normally audiences are only partially aware or fully unaware of the essence of the character. By omitting the most reprehensible aspects of the character or fully rewriting the story, the audiences’ perception can be more easily manipulated and guided towards the desired endpoints. Fast pivots within the context of unmitigated psychopathy are usually avoided as they are jarring and draw conscious attention to the attempts at perceptual manipulation. In the case of Abby, the character is allowed to shine in her full “psychopathic glory” and is fully established as a brutish exemplar of evil. This is then followed-up by a fast-pivot which attempts to suddenly rehabilitate her image. Given the context of how this was performed only the most fickle amongst audiences will be swayed into reversing their evaluation of the character. In general, the execution of the technique is especially sloppy with the game forcing the audience to witness and participate in visceral acts of murder repeatedly which greatly affects how the exemplars of evil are perceived.
Moral confusion is also prominently featured throughout the TLOU2 and is likewise performed in a clumsy inelegant manner which draws attention to the use of the strategy. The strategy of moral confusion ultimately attempts to induce within an audience an ethical haze and uncertainty in which the audience is unable to engage in grounded moral reasoning and is perceptually and emotionally disoriented. Repetition of the technique is intended to induce total ethical relativism and induce an amorphous ill-defined ethical superstructure. Typically, the strategy is accomplished by having audiences identify with and develop sympathy for a villainous character with the villainy of the character provoking cognitive dissonance as the psychopathic behavior of the villain contrast with self-identity of the audience who generally perceive themselves as being “good.”
The strategy most often requires nuance as the villainous character must be shown to be “semi-villainous”/”semi-virtuous” and possessing humanizing qualities specific to the audience the propaganda piece is intended for. The villainous character can then pivot back and forth between ethical and unethical conduct with audiences becoming inured to the unethical conduct as the story progresses and internalizing the anti-ethics being promoted in the propaganda product. This begins to bend and ultimately break the integrity of paradigms in an audiences’ ethical superstructure. Failure to humanize the villain or insufficiently establishing the “semi-virtuousness” of the villain usually leads to the failure of the strategy.
The writing in the TLOU2 is especially incompetent with the central characters being unlikable and unrelatable. The majority of the audience will remain emotionally detached from the characters and will ultimately despise both central characters for the appropriate reasons: their stupidity and their psychopathy. The failure to appropriately induce self-identification with the villains, humanize them, mitigate their psychopathy, and generate inappropriate sympathy leaves nothing of their portrayal other than bizarre idiocy and extreme violence. In this case, the application of the strategy evokes either a strong conscious rejection of the attempt to compromise the ethical superstructure and/or a sense of cynical nihilism.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (television miniseries)
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (to be referred to as F&WS) is a television miniseries released in 2021 produced by Marvel Studios a subsidiary of the Disney company. The miniseries is set within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and is a continuation of the story of the eponymous superheroes. The Disney conglomerate has increasingly been incorporating propaganda elements into its entertainment products both through the main company and throughout all of its subsidiaries. As it concerns Marvel Studios, propaganda inserts began to be prominently incorporated from approximately its 2016 releases onwards.
Initially the propaganda inserts in MCU products were subtle and skillfully incorporated but increasingly they have been incorporated in an aggressive manner which has discarded subtlety in favor of a crass ham-handed approach. F&WS can be considered the first product within the MCU that is a dedicated propaganda product rather than an entertainment product sprinkled with propaganda inserts. The use of entertainment in F&WS is primarily used to incentivize viewership rather than entertainment being the primary goal of the work. Many disparate propaganda strategies and sociopolitical agendas are incorporated into the miniseries although only the elements within the scope of the discourse will be addressed. The miniseries warrants special mention for two primary reasons: 1) the use of the Sympathy for the Devil technique on fictional terrorists 2) the intentional and overt parallels between F&WS and real-life applications of these strategies.
The modified Sympathy for the Devil technique is applied prominently in F&WS to a fictional terrorist leader by the name of Karli Morgenthau and her terrorist group the “Flag Smashers.” The character of Karli Morgenthau is a race- and gender-swapped version of the original comic-book villain “Karl Morgenthau” who is likewise a terrorist and the head of a fictional terrorist organization. In his original depictions Karl Morgenthau engages in terrorist attacks, hostage-taking, and attempted assassination. Furthermore, the comic-book Morgenthau promotes globalism through violence and terrorism in a manner which forgoes popular mobilization and democratic principles.
In F&WS the female Karli Morgenthau is a soft-sell on terrorism and real-life globalist agendas. Unlike other examples explored in this discourse, the parallels between fiction and reality are intentionally blurred in this propaganda product in order to make intentional allusions to real-life agendas and controlled-opposition groups. Karli is portrayed as a sympathetic character despite unabashedly engaging in terrorism and being wholly unrepentant for her terrorist acts. Some of Karli’s most noteworthy criminal acts depicted in F&WS include: bank robbery, larceny, terrorist car-bombing, arson, murder by arson, intimidation, death threats, violent homicide, criminal conspiracy, arms trafficking, chemical gas attack, hostage-taking, assault on a police officer, carjacking, and attempted political assassination. Despite audiences having repeatedly witnessed obvious and overt terrorist activity they are explicitly commanded at the end of the miniseries not to perceive Karli as a terrorist.
In regards to the Karli character, the modified Sympathy for the Devil technique is applied in a manner that is intended to augment moral confusion. The portrayal of the character is designed to work on multiple levels affecting both conscious and subconscious processes. While the typical application of the technique usually aims to rehabilitate the image of an exemplar of evil or inappropriately engineer positive perception of a novel villainous character, Karli is designed to both be perceived positively and be disliked simultaneously. The character vacillates between disquieting psychopathy and humanitarian behavior which is designed to cause cognitive dissonance and emotional confusion due to the incongruous nature of her depiction and the diametrically opposed directions of the emotional manipulation. The ultimate intent is to produce a state of mixed perception and conflicted emotions. By intention the perception of the character by audiences will be heavily influenced by their preexisting political positions and is designed to inflame political divisions. Furthermore, the character especially exemplifies the agenda of emotional pseudo-reasoning as it is being used in real-world social engineering and contemporary psychological warfare campaigns.
A few important aspects of the Karli character also merit mention, the character:
Preferred violence and forceful imposition to dialogue and democratic practices: Realistically there wasn’t anything Karli would not have been able to accomplish through effective popular mobilization and peaceful demonstrations. Karli repeatedly chose increasingly violent means to accomplish her ends and refused to take any personal responsibility for the casualties that resulted from her choices. This included murdering people after her objective had already been accomplished making the wanton bloodshed and destruction unnecessary, sadistic, and unjustifiable.
Possessed no ethical restraints and had no limits as to what she was willing to do: Karli was first portrayed to audiences as committing crimes that were borderline justifiable based on the humanitarian concerns she was attempting to address. However, she rapidly escalated her terrorist activity in a manner which was extreme, excessive, and disproportional to what was necessary in order to achieve her objectives. When confronted with the realities of her actions she displayed a total disregard for the collateral damage that had resulted from her terrorist activities. Such a pattern of criminal activity would be expected to exponentially escalate due to a criminal’s wholesale refusal to empathize with their victims and unwillingness to accept responsibility for their actions. Realistically such an individual would be expected to rapidly escalate their criminal activities and expand them to include acts of torture, mass murder, genocide, etcetera.
Embodied a smorgasbord of psychopathology and dysfunctional traits: Karli prominently displayed antisocial personality disorder and emotional pseudo-reasoning which were the defining aspects of her person. Throughout F&WS she displayed various pathological defense mechanisms and a total unwillingness to shoulder responsibility for her actions. Furthermore, she was self-righteous, smug, erratic, illogical, misguided, obstinate, narcissistic, supercilious, derisively insolent, disrespectful, manipulative, capricious, impulsive, and indiscriminately violent. Despite being indisputably an exemplar of evil and a disturbed individual, Karli is repeatedly glorified and her criminal behavior justified to audiences.
Had broad motives, vague ill-defined goals, and championed potentially catastrophic “solutions”: Karli’s motivations are based on general grievances and the “victimhood” of her and her group. She idealizes a past society which was previously shown as being in a deep economic depression and psychologically traumatized following the genocide of half the population. She does not care about the rights or well-being of those who had been resurrected. Her initial goals involve assisting refugees but erratically shifts into terrorism and violent political duress. She champions poorly thought-out simplistic “solutions” which will be catastrophic for billions of people and she has no long-term plan of action or agreeable resolution to the conflict.
Despite the character’s obvious demerits, the plot extensively employs contrivances, self-serving dialogue, emotional manipulation, and emotional pseudo-reasoning to give the character a false sense of legitimacy and righteousness. The ending of F&WS includes a scene in which The Falcon character carries the body of the dead Karli in a manner which is visually akin to an angel carrying the broken body of Christ and is aesthetically reminiscent of Michelangelo’s La Pietà. This symbolism is further reinforced by a sanctimonious sermon by The Falcon who eulogizes Karli as having died for benefit of others and essentially having been martyred for a worthy cause. That the miniseries employs Christian imagery and symbolism on a terrorist character and abstractly compares a violent terrorist to the pacifist Christ is disrespectful to Christian audiences and symbolically defiles the philosophy of the religious figure. Ultimately Karli’s terrorism is shown to have yielded results by having the proposed legislation she opposed be scrapped which reinforces a theme that terrorism is both justified and effective at forcing sociopolitical change.
Moral confusion is extensively employed throughout F&WS by mismatching characters with assessments and emotions. This intentional mismatching is intended to confuse and manipulate audiences and ultimately creates an ethical haze in which the only acceptable opinion is that which the audience is guided into accepting via the perception management. This mismatching includes:
The Walker character who takes the mantle as the new “Captain America” is shown as being worthy, likable, and honorable. The character is intentionally sabotaged in a manner that seriously detracts from cohesive story-telling. Aesthetic and emotional manipulations are used to goad audiences into inappropriately disliking the character. He is visually depicted in a manner which is augments a subtle aesthetic ugliness and he is rejected and ostracized by the main characters for no specific reason. The character undergoes non sequitur pseudo-redemption arc which is illogical and fails to establish a moral lesson.
The Falcon character embodies psychological inferiority complexes. Self-serving illogical plot contrivances are amply used to portray him as a victim of society. He is ultimately sanctimonious, sermonic, and attempts to legitimize terrorists and their methods. The audience is goaded into liking this sanctimonious iteration of the character despite his disagreeable personality and his unpalatable positions.
Bucky Barnes (aka the Winter Soldier) is a variably feckless character who is bland and uninspiring. This iteration is in contrast to his previous portrayals as deadly and highly effective. Audiences are goaded into having a weakly positive assessment of the character.
Karli the frumpy terrorist is inappropriately humanized despite being unambiguously depicted as as misguided and psychopathic. Contrivances are employed to engineer inappropriate sympathy and inappropriate positive assessment of the character especially after the character has engaged in acts of sociopathic terrorism. Her terrorism is generally excused and downplayed with some ambiguity strategically employed to mitigate proper perception of her actions. Audience are preached at by the Falcon character into accepting her agendas and her methodology.
The character of Helmut Zemo who was previously established as a criminal mastermind and Machiavellian terrorist is now inappropriately depicted as likable and relatable. Audiences are liable to relate to the new iteration of the character and view his motives and actions as sensible and justified. Inappropriately, he is depicted as the most logical and practical of the characters.
The character of Sharon Carter who was established as being a CIA officer is shown secretly managing and influencing international crime. It is established that she sent death threats and is responsible for ordering assassinations. Furthermore, she is directly responsible for arming and enabling terrorists which allows the terrorists to engage in far more serious acts of terrorism than they otherwise would have been able to do on their own. Despite this, she is positively portrayed and her criminality is completely overlooked.
False complexity is strategically used as it concerns the fictional geopolitical crisis and politicians and bureaucrats are portrayed as being “impediments” to “proper action.” A sense of urgency is cultivated in which terrorism is “justified” in order to prevent inept politicians from implementing undesirable policies.
There are no true ethical considerations as terrorism and murder are uncritically justified when performed by unscrupulous characters who audiences are commanded to perceive positively. Similar or lesser acts are unacceptable when audiences are commanded to negatively perceive those characters. The net effect of this web of misguided sentiments and inappropriate engineered opinions is an ethical chaos in which everything is technically permitted and the perception towards people and actions is shaped more by emotional and perceptual manipulation than objective observation and proper reasoning. Ultimately such paradigms are expected to instill egocentric psychopathy and a willingness to accept unethical actions when such acts are favorably depicted. In such paradigms of perception there is a complete absence of concrete ethics, gross distortions of perception, and highly dysfunctional pseudo-reasoning.
Cruella (film)
English author Dodie Smith published the children’s novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1956 which told the story of a pair of sentient anthropomorphic Dalmatians who are forced to embark on an adventurous rescue of their puppies when they are dognapped by the villainous Cruella de Vil. The story is told through the point of view of the sentient dogs who live an idyllic life in London with their humans the Dearlys. Their peaceful existence is interrupted when Mrs. Dearly chances upon Cruella, a childhood schoolmate of hers, who displays an interest in the Dearly’s pair of adult Dalmatians. After the female Dalmatian gives birth to a litter of puppies, Cruella offers to buy all of the Dalmatian pups although her offer is rejected by the Dearlys. Shortly thereafter the puppies mysteriously vanish and the Dalmatian parents formulate and effect a plan to rescue their puppies from the dognapping Cruella.
In the original novel the character of Cruella is portrayed as a deranged and eccentric socialite obsessed with fur clothing. Her obsession with furs goes to the extent that she married a furrier and has him keep his inventory at home in order for her to use the furs at her leisure. Despite the large collection of furs she personally owns as well as an inventory at her disposal, Cruella continues to seek out new furs to add to her collection. Her manner of acquisition includes acquiring live animals for the purpose of harvesting their pelts and she owns a Persian cat whose newborn kittens she personally drowned for this purpose. The character is specifically designed to be unambiguously villainous and diabolical themes and symbolism are amply employed in her representation: from her name (“Cruel Devil”), to the name of the character’s ancestral home “Hell Hall,” to allusions of demonic or demon-possessed ancestors.
In 1961 Walt Disney Productions released the animated film based on Smith’s novel titled One Hundred and One Dalmatians. The film deviates slightly from the source material by reducing the two pairs of adult Dalmatians to a single pair and removing much of the objectionable cruelty of the Cruella character to make it more acceptable for child audiences.
In 2021 Disney released the film Cruella which tells a reimagined story delving into the origins of the Cruella character and her evolution into a deviant socialite. The plot follows the basic structure of the Sympathy for the Devil technique for the rehabilitation of established exemplars of evil. It is noteworthy that there was little to “reimagine” in regards to the Cruella character as in her original iteration she was a one-dimensional diabolical fur-fanatic and animal abuser. Rehabilitating the image of an animal abuser is ethically questionable and artistically bankrupt.
The Sympathy for the Devil plot contrivances include:
Having the character be an outcast as a child in her school being bullied, victimized, and rejected by the other school children.
Rewriting the character of Anita Darling as being a childhood friend to Cruella rather than just a random classmate.
Cruella being an animal lover rather than being obsessed with killing animals for the purposes of harvesting their pelts.
Rewriting Cruella’s obsession with furs and pelts into an obsession with fashion and haute couture.
Dalmatians being the preferred pets and attack dogs of the new villain of the story, a “Baroness von Hellman.”
Cruella experiencing childhood psychological trauma by witnessing Hellman’s Dalmatians push her adoptive mother off a cliff to her death.
Cruella taking up with the Badun brothers as an orphaned child and engaging in criminality in order to support herself. In the original story the Badun brothers were Cruella’s inept and brutish henchmen who assisted her in illegally acquiring animals for pelt-harvesting.
Cruella victimized as a young woman in her first job at department store by her boss.
Cruella being torn between good and evil represented by her “Estella” personality and her “Cruella” personality with her “Cruella” personality ultimately triumphing over “Estella.”
Cruella finds out that Baroness von Hellman is her biological mother and had tried to have her killed as newborn.
Cruella holding a funeral for “Estella” (who she had publicly pretended was a separate person distinct from Cruella) symbolically emphasizing that “Estella” and what she represented were dead.
Cruella secretly gifting the Darly’s their respective Dalmatians. These Dalmatians in turn had been responsible for setting up the Darly’s as a couple. Thus, Cruella had indirectly caused the Darly’s to meet and become a couple.
Cruella continues a theme established from the in the previous Disney film Maleficent of having evil as a parent figure or guardian angel. In the same way the demonic Maleficent was secretly the guardian of the princess Aurora, Cruella is shown as secretly being the one who gifts the Darly’s their original Dalmatians. Furthermore, similar to Maleficent ending up as the official surrogate mother of Aurora, the psychopathic Baroness von Hellman is revealed to be the biological mother of Cruella.
The Dalmatians which had been the foundation of the Smith’s original story are initially ethically inverted into being villainous and the cause of Cruella’s misfortune as it is Dalmatian dogs who pushed Cruella’s adopted mother over a cliff to her death. Presumably this is to explain why in the 1961 Disney film Cruella had antipathy and homicidal intentions towards innocent Dalmatian puppies. As an inversion involving animals being evil villains would have been problematic, the inversion is mitigated by demonstrating that the Baroness was secretly the one responsible for the death of the adoptive mother due to having commanded her dogs to attack via a dog whistle. Regardless, the humane highly-intelligent sentient dogs of the original work are replaced in this reimagining by an iteration of attack dogs that victimized Cruella.
Furthermore, moral confusion is prominent throughout the film: from Cruella’s childhood behavior, to Cruella being a young woman who makes a living from criminal behavior (burglary, pickpocketing, confidence tricks, etcetera), to engaging in criminal behavior in her public feud with her biological mother. As is standard in the application of the Sympathy for the Devil technique, emotional pseudo-reasoning is employed in the apologetics of her behavior. The implication of her ethics are never examined but rather excessive attention is paid to the aesthetics of her person, the beautification of her psychopathy, and the flamboyance of her behavior. This attention to aesthetic and perception establishes a paradigm where superficial concerns are more important than the issues of unethical behavior, criminal acts, amoral psychopathy, and her transformation into an egocentric abuser and victimizer.
Real World Applications
In terms of real-world application these propaganda strategies have a great variety of applications. Some of the applications are overt due to the manner in which the propaganda entertainment products directly allude to real-life events and groups. However, other intended effects must be inferred based on ongoing agendas and previous psychological warfare campaigns. Within this context these specific strategies can be understood as being escalations of pernicious social engineering and psychological warfare. Broadly, these applications can be understood in terms of general applications and specific applications. While the general applications are easier to appreciate the specific applications of these strategies are unnecessarily controversial due to the aggressive politicization of contemporary issues of importance.
The general applications include:
Engineering social dysfunction and dys-social dynamics
There is a general lack of appreciation for the importance of ethics and philosophical traditions. This is especially so for contemporary audiences whose attention span has been radically reduced and whose tastes in entertainment have been increasingly engineered to be excessively puerile. However, the importance of ethics and philosophical traditions is not lost on the ruling establishment, on professional propagandists, nor on think tanks which carefully design long-term strategy.
The reason that these critical issues are often underappreciated by audiences is that engineered ethical decay via social engineering and sociocultural warfare are usually implemented at a glacial pace which sees the gradual erosion of ethical superstructures. Persons who left a region for a long period of time that has undergone significant ethical decay and return to the region (metaphorically representing a cultural “time capsules” of sorts) are far more liable to appreciate the horrific extent of the ethical decay and sociocultural debasement that transpired in their absence. Conversely, those somnambulists who obliviously lived the malignant transformations are liable to be unaware of the extent of the changes and may even defend the malignant transformations of their civilizations which they have come to personally identify with.
The strategies of ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique represent a serious escalation of the war on the ethical superstructure within the setting of long-term ethical decay via SLS methodology. These strategies do not merely wish to weaken specific points within the ethical superstructure but disintegrate the integrity of the entirety of the superstructure. As such, the future detrimental effects should be understood as being universal in scale and holistic in their approach affecting the whole of societies. That these efforts are especially aimed at children represents a genuine existential threat to the ethical and societal integrity. The erosions that will occur as a result will be exceedingly slow but they will undoubtedly have profound effects on the long-term sociocultural evolution of civilizations.
It is noteworthy that though these propaganda trends are variably aimed at adolescent and adult audiences, special attention is being given to the social engineering of children and the upcoming generations. The utilization of The Walt Disney Company, a powerful and influential American conglomerate, for these purposes is especially noteworthy. Disney products are a staple in the entertainment consumption of younger audiences internationally and the aggressive incorporation into their products of these ethical subversion agendas as well as the conspicuous embedding of oligarchic pseudo-liberal propaganda betrays a merciless no-holds-barred approach to social engineering. And increasingly the dovetailing of these themes in entertainment with their weaponized real-life application are conspicuous and undeniable. These contemporary social engineering of the youth portends far more aggressive subversive ethical rewiring and reconfiguration in the decades to come.
The strategies prey upon innate human vulnerabilities and insecurities with the intent of providing a psychopathic outlet to basic human psychological needs. Much of this guidance towards psychopathic outlets is accomplished via the inappropriate psychological intertwining of human needs and emotions with psychopathological behavioral patterns. Sentiments such as the need for acceptance, the sting of ostracism, and the suffering incurred by the abuses of others are inevitable emotions innate to the human condition. Learning to deal with set-backs in a productive manner and managing the range of negative emotions is a critical aspect of human psychological maturation.
However, these propaganda strategies aim to provide a decidedly dysfunctional “option” with how to deal with the darker more destructive aspects of the human condition: egocentric psychopathy fueled by emotional pseudo-reasoning. This anti-moral lesson that hurt feelings justify psychopathic behavior is the antithesis of the historical traditions of the ethical edification of the youth. In the magical realm of nonsensical propaganda, great spectacle and aesthetically-pleasing techniques can be employed to give an appealing flair and deceptive beauty to psychopathy and criminality. However, the real-life parallels of such behavior are ugly, brutish, and cruel.
Furthermore, the design of the Sympathy for the Devil technique preys upon the innate neurophysiology of human empathy in an effort to have audiences sympathize with and project themselves on exemplars of evil. This empathy is then weaponized in an effort to normalize psychopathology, promote ethical decay via paradigm imprinting, and selectively excuse criminal behavior. Through repeated exposure to such inverted paradigms (especially on young impressionable children) the natural dynamics of paradigm imprinting will ensure the core ethics of an entire generation will be adversely affected and rewritten in a manner detrimental to the social wellbeing.
Most children (especially in the majority of the world that incorporates mandatory public education) will go through a phase of insecurity about the core of their identity and will be greatly affected by psychological traits and behavioral patterns they internalize during this psychological maturation process. In the past, children would have been around adults during this phase of psychological maturation with the adults in their lives usually serving as sturdy role-models for children to emulate. In tight-knit communities the children would be free to absorb the best amongst the virtues in the milieu of their environment. With the cloistering of children away from adults into systems of public education, children are denied exposure to the necessary adult role-models and are amassed with other children also passing through a phase of identity formation.
This aggregation of children with unstable senses of self in an environment mostly devoid of strong role models essentially is the engineering of artificial volatility and instability to the psychological maturation process that would otherwise not have occurred in more natural environments. This creates educational environments in which children are liable to engage in uncorrected immaturity, predatory behavior amongst themselves, and develop immature defense mechanisms in order to cope with the chaos of such a dysfunctional environment. Almost universally in such chaotic environments of identity instability, the media and entertainment consumption of children has a magnificently influential effect on their psychological development, a phenomenon that is egregiously abused in social engineer and psychological warfare campaigns.
These propaganda strategies are especially predating on the innate weaknesses of children passing through these phases of psychological turbulence and instability. It should be self-evident that developing children do not have the mental filters to reject propaganda and the subversion of their psychological integrity. When confronted with bullying and predatory behavior by other children, these paradigms in entertainment provide a ready-made immature outlet of egocentrism, psychopathology, and emotional pseudo-reasoning. The integration of such paradigms not merely weakens the developing ethical superstructure of children but are designed to provide them with paradigms of highly dysfunctional self-defeating thought and behavior. The embedding of such dysfunctional traits will negatively affect the lives of children who have internalized and integrated such weaponized paradigms into their psychological framework. While aesthetically-pleasing in the fictional contrivances of subversive propaganda, the application in real-life of similar behavior is conducive to self-sabotage, self-destruction, and social chaos.
An important aspect that is not understood by general audiences is the concept of psychological life pathways. Every individual, while greatly affected by innate components of biological temperament, will also be greatly affected by the choices they make in their individual psychological evolution regardless of whether those choices are made consciously or subconsciously. This involves core issues such as the development of ethics, psychological defense mechanisms, psychological traits, and an individual’s balance of vices and virtues. This psychological superstructure of the individual will affect every aspect of their life.
While an individual may be quite successful at mitigating the consequences of serious psychopathology and may avoid engaging in outright criminal behavior, ultimately their psychopathology and immature defense mechanisms will have profound effects on the quality of their social dynamics with the self-defeating traits being most profoundly felt in their relationships with the people closest to them. The use of these propaganda strategies is intended to skew the psychological life pathways of entire societies in an intentionally self-defeating direction. The epidemic rise of psychopathological traits in turn is expected to seriously degrade the overall functioning of society and diminish social cohesion.
While the effects of these ethical subversion tactics may have variable direct effects on crime rates, by far the most profound effects on societies is the engineering of ethical decay and the rise of sub-criminal behavior. This misunderstanding is often exploited in the apologetics of social subversion campaigns employing ethically subversive entertainment. Sub-criminal behavior is unethical, predatory, or abusive behavior that falls well below the line of what is criminal but is dysfunctional and involves the victimization of others. There is a much stronger direct correlation between subversive entertainment and sub-criminal behavior and the de novo engineering of dys-social dynamics. The rise of sub-criminal behavior in turn has a grating effect on the general health of social dynamics. A civilization sufficiently detrimentally socially engineered will gradually begin to experience the wholesale debasement of social dynamics and a marked decrease in their sense of community solidarity. And once a civilization has reached a dys-social paradigm such a corrupted state tends to be difficult to reverse as it involves multiple generations and the widespread normalization of dysfunction over the course of decades.
The great efficiency of paradigm imprinting allows for the unconsciously absorption of embedded propaganda in entertainment by oblivious audiences. The continued misunderstanding of audiences of the neurophysiology and psychology processes of these methods and their instinctive defense of their entertainment preferences predisposes audiences to continue patterns of self-exposure to increasing toxic propaganda and pernicious social engineering. Furthermore, unlike the parents of the past who would rapidly and unabashedly come to the defense of their children when such subversion was uncovered, contemporary parents are far more tolerant of embedded propaganda in the entertainment consumed by their children. This phenomenon is multi-factorial, however it must be noted that the parents themselves have experienced ethical decay as a consequence of social engineering and there have been propaganda campaigns specifically aimed at the perceptual manipulation of parents and the overriding of their concerns in regards to the subversion of their children.
The expected net effect of the continued ethical subversion of future generations and their inculcation into full-blown ethical inversion and debilitating moral confusion will be a future citizenry with epidemic levels of marked personal dysfunction and self-sabotaging/self-defeating behavior. On the scale of a societies, it will engineer ever greater community disunity with an atomized citizenry incapable of standing united against the totalitarian transformation of their governments and rising abuses by the state. And on the scale of civilizations these propaganda strategies will produce marked debasement in cultures with the permanent loss of time-honored traditions which historically had been their treasured quintessence.
Decline of Republics and the death of democratic principles
The rise of republics beginning in the 18th century was a direct result of the Enlightenment philosophical traditions and the rise of a new set of ethics which enshrined human rights and human liberties as being humanity’s immutable core values. The internationalization of these ethics and philosophies led directly to a fundamental shift in the social contract across the world and the rise of a new model of governance.
In contrast to the spread of Enlightenment values and ethics, the weaponization of conflict in the 20th century saw by design the fascitization of the American republic and the introduction internationally of the neoimperial model of domination and exploitation. The pernicious effect of war so well-understood by the Founding Fathers of the American republic was used on an extended basis in order to justify the covert insidious transformation of the core functioning of the republic into that of a totalitarian imperial model. Furthermore, the neoimperial model utilized by the US and European powers utilized the trappings and rhetoric of republics in order to justify covert action and imperial interventions which introduced anti-republic imperial systems of control and corruption into their numerous international satrapies.
The erosion of democratic principles in the American republic happened gradually and systematically with minor changes aggregating to seismic shifts in the ethics and philosophy of the American citizenry. While this systematic transformation is beyond the scope of this discourse, it is noteworthy that this malignant transformation targeted the ethics of the citizenry, the inter-generational transmission of the philosophical traditions, and the ethical edification of the youth. This engineered ethical decay allowed for newer generations to be far more tolerant of tyranny while simultaneously dissipating popular resistance to continued malignant transformation. As a consequence of the successes of disrupting the intergenerational transmission of ethics and values, the historical resistance to these malignant transformations became increasingly anemic and weak to such a degree that in the contemporary setting the conscientious resistance is mostly nonexistent.
It has been historically well-understood that the ethics of the citizenry of a republic are quintessentially important to the preservation of a republic. Even if a republic is subverted and a tyrannical system is imposed upon it, the resistance of the citizenry (rooted in their republican ethics) will inevitably result in the reconstitution of the republic. Thus, for tyrannical and totalitarian systems to engineer a firm foundation upon which to ensure their longevity, the core ethics of the citizenry must be targeted for debasement and ultimately destroyed with a new set of anti-ethics replacing those which had been rooted in liberty and human rights. This cycle of the death of republics due to ethical decay is well-established. Thus, one of the vital signs of the overall health of a republic is the state of ethics of its people. At such time as the ethics of a republic have been sufficiently subverted, the philosophical foundations upon which the republic was founded will crumble with the loss of this foundation portending overt tyranny and impending totalitarian transformation.
The systematic ethical decay engineered via social engineering and sociocultural warfare campaigns have had a devastating impact on the core ethics of international civilizations. Within such a context, the introduction of aggressive ethical inversion, crippling moral confusion, and the pernicious Sympathy for the Devil technique must be understood as efforts to eliminate the remnants of the ethical opposition to totalitarianism. The wholesale inversion of ethics involved in these propaganda campaigns is the preamble to the engineering of the Orwellian inverted ethics of totalitarian systems in which human rights are heresies and the love of liberty a scurrilous epithet.
The Fascist paradigm so insidiously introduced post-WW2 of surrendering core freedoms for the illusion of “safety” and “protection” has been ramped up in recent decades with the aggressive terrorization of the citizenry in an effort to rapidly eliminate the little that remains of the severely compromised legal structures of rights and liberties. The 9/11 PSO saw the evisceration of sacrosanct human rights and civil liberties sacrilegiously utilizing the rhetoric of patriotism and American values. Furthermore, the recent Coronavirus PSO has once again demonstrated the willingness of an ethically bankrupt citizenry to accept totalitarianism this time masquerading as public health policy and highlighted their abject servile willingness to quickly surrender more core rights when sufficiently terrorized by psychological warfare campaigns. The incredible successes of these psychological warfare campaigns have left little to the imagination as far as the extent of ethical decay that has transpired over the preceding century when even adult populations have demonstrated a willingness to accept ethical inversions of their lifelong tenets given the sufficient application of pressure and fear.
These propaganda strategies can be seen as the coup de grâce to what remains of Enlightenment ethics. The continued ethical inversion and malignant social engineering of the youth will undoubtedly greatly facilitate the transition of civilizations from the neoimperial model of the 20th century into the totalitarian technocratic neufeudal model of the 21st century with the dearth of enlightened ethics ensuring the longevity of such systems of oppression.
Inurement to Neoimperialism
Imperialist powers have historically utilized perceptual inversion in order to engineer public support for imperial conquest and exploitation. From ancient Rome justifying its northward expansion with the rhetoric of bringing “civilization” to the “barbarians,” to the Spanish conquests in the New World being condoned by the Catholic church in order to “save” the souls of the “savages,” to the rape of Africa by European imperial powers being justified by the rhetoric of the “white man’s burden,” imperialism has always required the use of apologetics and propaganda to justify the realities of empire.
The perceptual inversions utilized by empires are generally perfect inversions of reality, not merely attempting to mitigate the perception of the crimes of empire but have these heinous crimes be understood and perceived as their polar opposites: as great and virtuous acts. This has several obvious advantages of which the two most important are:
It preys upon the innate aspect of human nature concerned with humanitarian instincts. Preying upon the prosocial instincts and humanitarian sentiments is liable to generate ardent and enthusiastic support for imperial agendas.
It cripples the ability of the propagandized to properly perceive the realities of empire. By initially accepting the imperial agendas as noble causes and selfless actions, audiences are liable to refuse to accept the opposite as being true. If audiences have not been properly propagandized, they would inevitably reach the proper conclusions when presented with the incontrovertible realities. By first having been inculcated into an inverted paradigm an audience is psychologically hindered in their ability to perceive and reason as it concerns empire. Oftentimes the adherence to the inverted paradigm is sufficiently strong that individuals are liable to disbelieve and reject incontrovertible realities which compromise their inverted worldview.
In the contemporary era these imperial requirements of perceptual inversion are still of great importance. Unlike the propaganda campaigns of the past, contemporary perceptual manipulation is greatly aided by the general ignorance of the citizenry to the realities of the neoimperial model (referred to as neocolonialism). The sham of “democratic republics” that are in truth fully-controlled client states (modern-day satrapies) of the United Sates and European powers allows for imperial expansion and exploitation under the guise of “freedom” and “democracy.” Furthermore, the penetration of journalism by intelligence agencies, the consolidation and centralization of news media ownership, and the ease of online psychological operations and digital censorship has created a new paradigm of totalitarian control over the flow of information. This new paradigm of imperial control allows for an unprecedented domination over perception and influence over the milieu of ideology. Perceptual inversion is perhaps easier and simpler in the modern context than it has been throughout human history.
Post-WW2 the horrific crimes of incalculable magnitude that have been committed by the United States and NATO have been greatly facilitated by the near perfect control over official narratives and the skillful implementation of contemporary imperial apologetics. Although the instances of malicious propaganda and brazen perceptual inversions number in the hundreds of thousands, one case in particular is emblematic of neoimperialism: the CIA’s dirty war in Nicaragua.
The Contras can be functionally understood as having been formed, trained, funded, and controlled by the CIA and American intelligence. Many of their leadership were trained in the School of the Americas (currently called WHINSEC) and had been recruited early on in their careers as agents of American interests. School of the Americas has historically included training in torture and terrorism tactics. At the behest of their Langley controllers the Contras carried out terrorism of incredible scale which included (but was not limited to) mass murder, mass rape, assassination, maiming, mutilation, the rape and murder of children, violent robbery, and the wanton destruction of property.
In order to fund the continued brutal subjugation of Nicaragua, American intelligence engaged in narcotrafficking and arms-trafficking. Both of these criminal activities were not confined to the Nicaraguan operation but were especially visible during the course of this particular dirty war. The narcotrafficking was conducted directly via the CIA and indirectly through Contra narcotraffickers who were given free-rein to import and sell cocaine in the United States. The narcotrafficking by the Contras and CIA led directly to the crack epidemic of the 1980s which resulted in epidemic levels of addiction, an explosion in crime, serious social issues, and increased morbidity and mortality. Within the scope of contemporary political trends, it merits mentioning that the crack epidemic hit African Americans especially hard and had disastrous social consequences on the integrity of their communities. The journalist Gary Webb exposed the CIA cocaine-trafficking operations in the 1990s and was malicious libeled by the American propaganda apparatus. After having had his life surreptitiously destroyed by the CIA, Mr. Webb was found shot twice in the face which was declared a “suicide.” Furthermore, the high-profile Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s revealed illegal CIA arms trafficking to Iran.
Despite the brutal realities of a hybrid war against the Nicaraguan people, President Ronald Reagan had the audacity of referring to the American proxy terrorists as “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” The American founding fathers who embodied the ideals of the Enlightenment and included the likes of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were compared to mercenary terrorists, mass murderers, and violent rapists. Very few amongst American audiences truly understood how audaciously obscene, grossly inverted and sacrilegious such a comparison was. Regardless, such a statement did much to convince American audiences as to the righteousness of the American terrorist war in Nicaragua. Unsurprisingly such brazen imperial criminality requires aggressive apologetics, merciless perceptual inversions, and truly fantastical mythmaking.
Historically, the resistance to imperialism has been rooted in the ethics of the citizenry as well as the efforts of activists to properly inform the masses of the realities of imperial predation. In the American past, universities had been the epicenters of conscientious resistance to imperial slaughter. Notable cases such as the Kent State University mass shootings demonstrate the potency of the popular mobilization of university students which necessitated violent brute force by the Federal government to quell. This natural resistance by concerned Americans possessing ethical integrity required a holistic approach in order to fully subvert the traditions of resistance and preempt future grassroots opposition to imperial escapades. The extent of this strategy is beyond the scope of this discourse, however amongst the strategies that have been employed have been targeted ethical decay and ethical inversion.
The American people have been metaphorically cut off from their traditional ethics and the philosophies of the Enlightenment which would provoked opposition to imperialism. This has been a slow and stealthy amputation barely noticed by the somnambulating American citizenry. The wrath of American indignation towards these imperial atrocities in the past would have presented a serious public relations catastrophe for the American leadership. Quite the contrary, in the contemporary Untied States the American people are taught to hate on-command and cheer the slaughter of peoples they know barely anything about. The propaganda campaigns which historically took months to years to have an effect on the American mind can now be accomplished in a matter of days to weeks. The sturdy resolute ethics of the American people that would have been the foundations upon which resistance would have been erected have been slowly and strategically weakened with the long-term decay resulting in an “ethics” metaphorically resembling a highly-flexible amorphous clay readily shaped by fear and slander.
The ethical decay that has transpired has greatly affected the grassroots mobilization against American depredations and renegade militarism. While the totalitarian control of information and the effectiveness of psychological warfare campaigns against the American citizenry are also of great importance in mitigating resistance, the ethical foundations of resistance that existed in the 1960s and 70s have been debased to such a degree that the American public is hardly able to muster a whimper in their own defense, let alone in defense of the victims of American empire. That the American citizenry are unable to muster the ethical integrity and gumption necessary to protect themselves as the imperial tyranny experienced at the fringes of empire begins to be turned inwards on the American heartland signals the extent of the destruction of ethics of what once was the venerable American republic.
Ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique are interesting developments in that historically propaganda and social engineering campaigns have not attempted to so thoroughly subvert the core ethics of civilizations nor corrupt the ingrained prosocial instincts of the citizenry. Traditionally, perception has been inverted within the framework of a civilization’s core ethics. The utilization of these far more aggressive strategies betrays a desire to pulverize traditional ethics and engineer a total ethical flexibility and heightened susceptibility to perception management. Given that these strategies are being implemented in a time of transition between the neoimperial model of the 20th century and the technocratic-neufeudal model of totalitarian imperialism of the 21st century, such an aggressive strategy is logical albeit ruthless and Machiavellian.
Specific examples:
Ongoing CIA terrorist operations
The CIA employs a standard approach of malicious defamation of the leaders or leadership of countries it wishes to destroy or subjugate. These defamations often involve gross perceptual inversions especially when the leaders of many of these targeted countries are far more honorable than the standard corrupt satraps associated with the neoimperial model. In sharp contrast to the defamation of targeted leaders and anti-imperialist resistance forces, the CIA themselves make ample use of terrorist proxy forces who avidly commit war crimes and crimes against humanity. In general, the CIA’s proxy forces engage in rampant terrorist activities although they are provided media cover by the international press. Depending on the region, these forces are portrayed via propaganda campaigns as “democratic” forces. However, in the Middle East region the CIA has preferred the use of Islamic terrorist mercenaries who (though they engage in similar conduct to other CIA proxies internationally) have not historically received the propaganda white-washing associated with terrorist mercenaries in other global regions.
Given the fake “War on Terror” (NATO’s war of terror and neoimperial conquest) audiences have been propagandized since 2001 into despising and fearing Islamic terrorists. In the following two decades after 2001 this has greatly facilitated the engineering of consent for ludicrously expensive and highly destructive wars of aggression in the region. In recent years NATO has had the need to perform fast-pivots in propaganda rhetoric as it concerns its terrorist proxies due to the growing failure of terrorist proxies in toppling targeted government and crushing anti-imperial resistance forces. These terrorist proxies had been covertly armed and controlled from the very inception of the dirty war campaigns in the region. Some of the assistance given to terrorist proxies was outright denied while on other occasions limited responsibility was acknowledged. Propaganda was used to excuse this by denying directly aiding the worst of the terrorist proxies and claiming that NATO was arming and training “moderate rebels.” Even mainstream outlets within the international propaganda apparatus were acknowledging that the “moderate rebels” simply “defected” to the radical jihadist proxies as soon as they received training, weapons, and supplies from NATO.
However, the continued failure of proxy terrorists to successfully repeat the “Libya model” on Syria and Yemen and their continued military defeats has forced the US to directly come to the aid of their terrorist proxy forces. In turn this has required the sudden and aggressive rehabilitation of the image of these acknowledged terrorist groups. Rehabilitation efforts have included rebranding terrorist factions associated with child-beheading, mass rape, human trafficking, and pseudo-religious torture and slaughter as “civil society groups.” Such propaganda campaigns do not merely require perceptual inversion but the acceptance by audiences of overt unmitigated ethical inversion and their inculcation into highly disoriented moral confusion.
These fast-pivots involve the sudden PR rehabilitation of acknowledged real-life exemplars of evil and are generally greatly facilitated by the application of the strategies of ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique. The increasing acceptance by international audiences of formerly reprehensible ethical inversions and the engineered heightened susceptibility to perception management and image rehabilitation will undoubtedly greatly facilitate current and future dirty wars.
Orwellian Geopolitical Pivots
George Orwell describes in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four how, in the middle of a propaganda campaign being conducted by the fictional superstate of Oceania in which the citizenry was being driven into a hysterical frenzy of hatred against their enemy Eurasia, a speaker giving a propaganda speech at a demonstration is silently handed a slip of paper and in mid-sentence switches the acerbic vitriol directed at Eurasia to the superstate of Eastasia. A sudden change of geopolitical alignment meant that Oceania was no longer at war with Eurasia, that Oceania was now at war with Eastasia and that Eurasia (the previously despised enemy) was now an ally. Without missing a beat, the propagandized citizenry of Oceania redirected their hatred and vitriol at Eastasia. The history of half a decade with all its ancillary evidence was then slated to be retconned with a new “history” being manufactured to make it appear as if this new state of affairs had always been the case.
Historically the American empire has periodically required the rapid pivot in their relationship with a satrap or proxy force due to a change in geopolitical agendas. The hypocrisy of such pivots (which often involve the sudden demonization of a leader who had previously been lauded in the international press) historically has been aided by the general amnesia of international audiences and the fact that the international press is usually used for the purposes of demonization rather than propagandistic exaltation. This means that if a satrap is performing their duties satisfactorily and is in the good graces of Washington, they are generally thoroughly ignored by the international propaganda apparatus and given ample media cover when performing human rights abuses. At such time as they are no longer in the good graces of Washington, a propaganda offensive is performed which suddenly and mercilessly demonizes the leader of that country. High profile geopolitical pivots have included the likes of Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.
Once the American empire has slated a satrap or proxy force for elimination they are excoriated in the international press, written into recorded history as despicable villains, and efforts are undertaken to distance the American empire from its prior collaboration with the satrap. This distancing eventually culminates in the rewriting history to such an extent as to fully deny to future generations that that relationship had ever existed. The strategies of ethical inversion, moral confusion, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique inevitably will grant even greater flexibility in the performance of such magnificent geopolitical pivots. The pivots which in the past had taken place over decades are increasingly being conducted in a matter of weeks to days.
One very conspicuous example of the use of sudden hard pivots is the case of Jamal Kashoggi and Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). MBS has been variably praised and demonized by the international press based on the pivots in American foreign policy as it concerns the de facto ruler of the KSA. When MBS ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Kashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey and had the body of the journalist cut-up into pieces to be disposed of, this incident was intentionally publicized in the international press and not given the standard media cover provided to the KSA and its leadership. It should be noted that the KSA continues to engage in crucifixions, beheadings, maiming, and mutilation as punishments and that their human rights record is amongst the worst in the world. If the world had a truly independent press, press coverage of the KSA would have reports of serious human rights violations on a periodic basis. However, their dismal human rights record is fiercely suppressed by the international propaganda apparatus as to protect the client regime and not compromise the pseudo-legitimacy of the royal House of Saud.
So long as MBS remains a pliable and obedient lackey, him and his family will be provided pseudo-legitimacy and any human rights abuses that are committed under his leadership will be militantly suppressed. The Kashoggi case was an exception as it was used to intimidate MBS and threaten him into compliance. Thus far MBS has been extremely willing to buy highly overpriced American weapons systems and has been dutiful in acting as a NATO proxy doing Washington’s dirty work in the rape of Yemen as well as shouldering the disproportionally high costs associated with that dirty war.
Furthermore, the international citizenry have experienced such extreme ethical decay that they are willing to be inculcated into paradigms of obscene ethical inversion. Increasingly the crippling moral confusion means that international audiences see no hypocrisy in NATO supporting the butcher MBS, the ethically corrupt KSA, or the silent rape of Yemen. Likewise, audiences are willing to engage in selective amnesia and forget the KSA historical association with Islamic terrorists in the region which is internationally recognized. To further compound the hypocrisy, contemporary audiences are perceptual manipulation in perceiving innocent countries with honorable leadership in the same region as heinous and despicable “villains.” And in pursuit of the elimination of the leadership of sovereign countries, the wholesale slaughter and brutalization of peoples by NATO is met with a histrionic orgasm in the American press.
The obscenity of these propaganda manipulations is rarely internalized by contemporary audiences. Undoubtedly, such current dynamics combined with aggressive further debasement of the ethics of humanity will lead closer and closer to humanity reaching a state in which such perfect Orwellian pivots can be conducted mid-sentence on national television with audiences adapting flawlessly to the change in rhetoric.
The Coronavirus Paradigm Shifting Operation (PSO)
The Coronavirus PSO involved as its central crisis a bioweapon. Amongst the goals of the PSO has been the weaponization of medicine for the purposes of forcing a biosecurity state paradigm. This weaponization of medicine necessarily entails the wholesale destruction of thousands of years-worth of medical ethics, medical philosophy, and medical traditions. The implementation of pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific, totalitarian measures are gross violations of medical ethics, international law, and the constitutional law of many republics. These totalitarian impositions have required the wholesale inversion of medical ethics into their opposite.
Rather than an appreciation for enlightened medical ethics and an understanding of the dire need to defend the sanctity and integrity of medical ethics, audiences have been aggressively propagandized into accepting a medical anti-ethics which fundamentally inverts the ethical superstructure of medicine. Furthermore, audiences have been goaded into condemning the honorable physicians who have publicly stood against the encroaching totalitarianism and weaponization of medicine. Ultimately, it is expected that this ethical inversion of medicine will continue which will have significant detrimental consequences to future patients who will be forced to endure a totalitarian paradigm of “medical care.”
Black Lives Matter (BLM)
The year 2020 saw aggressive psychological warfare campaigns and domestic covert actions conducted on audiences internationally aimed at fomenting social divisions and aggressively implementing a Machiavellian divide and rule policy. This redirection of ire was especially necessary as the Coronavirus PSO involved highly unpopular and catastrophic totalitarian mandates which financially devastated billions of people. By far the most prominent application of the divide and rule strategy during the Coronavirus PSO were those associated with the strategy of Neoracism and the engineered rebirth of the politics of the phenotype. Central to these efforts was BLM.
The BLM surge in 2020 successfully redirected attention away from lockdowns and economic decimation. The legitimate public anger that began from homicidal police abuses was quickly redirected towards the general citizenry themselves in order to engineer artificial social divisions. This served to foment disunity during a time in which the people needed to be united against the onslaughts directed at their collective interests. The divide and rule strategy proved successful at redirecting attention and energies and allowed for the decimation of the public’s interests in a manner that was color-blind and indiscriminate.
The engineered civil unrest incorporated soft-terrorism tactics which included attacking buildings, arson, and the destruction of statues. Perceptual inversion, ethical inversion and moral confusion were used to great effect during the reporting of BLM events. One especially notable example involved a CNN reporter standing in front of a burning building with a caption that read: “fiery but mostly peaceful protests.” The intentional juxtaposition of arson with such statements, especially considering the dissonance between optics and rhetoric, is a phenomenon that was implemented repeatedly throughout 2020. Furthermore, the repeated defacement of monuments and the toppling of statues that occurred internationally were excused with effusive apologetics by professional propagandists (pseudo-journalists) and given generally favorable coverage by international media.
The normalization of soft-terrorism tactics and the feigned servility of corrupt politicians to astroturf political “duress” served to engineer an insidious acceptance of a problematic sociopolitical paradigm. Ultimately the normalization of these inverted paradigms and the use of the Sympathy for the Devil technique served to erode the core ethics of republics, invert the paradigms of civic virtues, instill a tolerance for politicized violence, and engineer a general tolerance for the dirty tricks involved in the playbook of covert action.
Extinction Rebellion
The pseudo-populist Extinction Rebellion is an astroturf controlled opposition group whose primary purpose is to champion the transition of international civilizations into the technocratic-neufuedal model. The technocratic-neufeudal model includes amongst its many agendas: energy poverty, deindustrialization, post-consumerism, widespread standardized poverty, increased dependence on government assistance with the Sovietization of the lower classes, corporate hegemonic rule, and post-democratic technocratic rule. The group champions positions which militantly follow the globalist outline as established in international globalist publications. Although purportedly attempting to address “climate change,” the “solutions” of Extinction Rebellion will ultimately be catastrophic for billions of people. The “climate change” con is the primary weaponized pseudo-crisis which will be used to foist the technocratic-neufeudal model on civilizations. Furthermore, the “climate change” propaganda amply utilizes the magical thinking technique and provides generous cover for the ongoing global geoengineering and weather warfare campaigns.
The fictional Flag Smashers of F&WS are an intentional allusion to the very real Extinction Rebellion with both using similar rhetoric of: “we’re fighting for our lives.” The Extinction Rebellion movement, like its fictional counterpart, relies heavily on the inculcation of young people into emotional pseudo-reasoning and both champion brash, sweeping, catastrophic pseudo-solutions which do not factor in long-term consequences. Extinction Rebellion has already engaged in actions such as shutting down freeways throughout cities in the UK which are acts of economic sabotage and historically are tactics used by Western intelligence agencies in regime change operations and color revolutions. Provided the necessary media cover, Extinction Rebellion could easily transition into soft-terrorism tactics as were performed by the BLM movement. Such domestic covert action tactics would undoubtedly be provided the necessary political and police cover and the Sympathy for the Devil technique would be aggressively applied to maintain a sympathetic image even as unethical and criminal acts are committed.
It is also noteworthy that climate change pseudo-science is being introduced into the curriculum of children across the world. This systematic indoctrination of children facilitates their later recruitment by Extinction Rebellion or similar type organizations as well as facilitates their willingness to accept the technocratic-neofeudal model. Ultimately this is the recruitment of children into being agents of their own destruction and takes advantage of their innate vulnerability. Young children do not possess the critical thinking skills necessary to understand the nature of intricate chicanery nor do they have the life experience and maturity to appreciate the well-established pattern of homicidal confidence tricks by the ruling establishment. The indoctrination of impressionable children and their inculcation into zealous belief in these pseudo-sciences will greatly facilitate their acceptance of anti-ethics and totalitarian paradigms.
As the sanctity of traditional ethics represents a significant impediment to the acceptance of oppressive totalitarianism, the traditional ethics of civilizations must be pulverized and moral confusion fomented in order to reforge humanity’s ethical superstructure into the Orwellian anti-ethics of totalitarian systems. These ethical inversions are understood as being absolutely necessary for the acceptance of the paradigms of post-civil rights, post-liberty, post-democratic principles, and post-national sovereignty.
QAnon
The QAnon online psychological warfare operation occurred early on in the Trump presidency and employed to great effect the Sympathy for the Devil technique. The public perception of Donald Trump has been unnecessarily politicized as is standard practice in American media coverage of political figures. What would otherwise have been a straightforward analysis of a disreputable businessman and pathological narcissist become cartoonishly polarized with the political right engaging in blind glorification and the political left employing unnecessary hyperbole and intentionally false accusations. The implementation of these extremes ultimately served to subvert proportional perspective and aggressively foment moral confusion.
The QAnon deception involved narratives that suggested that then-president Donald Trump was secretly combating the Deep State and that there was a faction within the government that was attempting to uproot the systemic corruption. Such a narratives were patently absurd and attempted to portray a one-dimensional con-man as secretly being a three-dimensional messiah. Furthermore, the narrative of personnel within the Federal government secretly being the peoples “guardian angel” and secretly “helping the patriotic commoners” has direct parallels with the tactics used in the rehabilitation of fictional exemplars of evil in Disney films. However, unlike the intentionally illogical plot contrivances of fiction, no such fantastical contrivances or deus ex machina were forthcoming in the real world.
These types of psychological warfare tricks ultimately serve to cultivate a paradigm whereby audiences are unable to accept disturbing realities and instead succumb to self-defeating magical thinking and beliefs that that that which appears sinister and corrupt must in actuality be secretly good. The end result of such pattern of fantastical perception is the increasing inurement to overtly corrupt and psychopathic rulers and the acceptance of overt political criminality and corruption.
Acceptance of overtly corrupt and psychopathic rulership
The application of these propaganda strategies has roughly coincided with the international rise of a new class of overtly sinister political rulers and the slow reveal of technocratic rule. Previously politicians (with assistance of the international propaganda apparatus) had gone to great lengths to mask their psychopathy and conceal their criminal indiscretions. Despite the heinous realities of the neoimperial model the carefully cultivated reputation of professionalism and respectability greatly facilitated the ability of imperial powers to engage in disreputable methodology. This standard historical approach of engineered false respectability has been replaced by a “race to the bottom” approach.
The “race to the bottom” had its beginnings in the 2016 US Presidential elections which saw the sidelining of faux-respectable politicians in favor of two overtly sinister candidates. Since then the paradigm of politics was upended and a new paradigm became the norm of the celebration of psychopathic rule. The new breed of political rulers since then has tended towards the comically villainous, a gaggle of amoral psychopaths who openly revel in their own psychopathy, engage in flamboyant or demented behavior, and indulge in aesthetic eccentricities. Mirroring the real-life political debasement are films and entertainment with themes of the celebration of unabashed, unashamed, and flamboyant villainy. Furthermore, the Sympathy for the Devil technique has been employed in many of these cases which has engineered a widespread pernicious sympathy and inurement to psychopathic rule.
The implementation of these propaganda strategies has also coincided with the slow public revelation of oligarchic technocratic rule. During the Coronavirus PSO, the oligarch Bill Gates and technocrat Dr. Anthony Fauci came forefront of the international stage as unelected rulers imposing their dictates upon a terrorized propagandized citizenry. Bill Gates, the insufferable narcissistic and psychopathic monopolist of the 1990s rebranded himself as a pseudo-amicable sweater-wearing “philanthropist” whose “suggestions” on the international practice of medicine have had an uncanny habit of becoming international standards. The mendacious technocrat Dr. Anthony Fauci, a slick psychopath in his own right, overnight became an Ayatollah or Grand Mufti of medicine whose increasingly ridiculous suggestions were blindly adhered to by millions of cowed credulous people. These propaganda strategies have greatly facilitated the acceptance of this disturbing sudden transition into a new paradigm of psychopathic oligarchic technocracy.
Rehabilitation of real-life Exemplars of Evil
The ethical superstructures of the past were of sufficient strength and fortitude that individuals who were outed as despicable, psychopathic, or criminal would face an unwavering repudiation which would force them to withdraw from public life. This was especially so of politicians and leaders whose careers could be undone overnight upon the public revelation of scandal. This zero-tolerance policy by the citizenry enforced a paradigm of political professionalism and integrity. In the past, disreputable corruption by the powerful required utmost secrecy and the aggressive maintenance of a façade of respectability.
The social engineering campaigns of the last 40 years have engineered ethical decay in a SLS manner. The increasing ethical corruption of the citizenry via weaponized entertainment has caused the controlled demolition of the ethics of civilizations in slow motion. With the increasing internalization of corruption by the people and the debasement of ethics has come an increasing tolerance for overt corruption and criminality from political leaders. The violations of ethics which in the past would have garnered permanent censure and ostracism are now PR nuisances to be quickly overcome. There are few remaining ethical violations that are deemed unacceptable by the citizenry and these few remaining ethical barriers are rapidly being degraded.
By far the most striking example of the state of ethical decay is the case of pedophile extraordinaire Jeffrey Epstein and the muted fallout of the Epstein scandal. Jeffrey Epstein had been reputably established as having been running an intelligence honey-pot operation in which powerful people had been compromised by evidence of pedophilia. Amongst Epstein’s illicit activities was his running of a pedophile airline service dubbed the “Lolita Express” and his hosting of criminal sexual debauch parties on his private island. People that he had compromised included the likes of Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, and Alan Dershowitz.
Notably, Donald Trump was in office when the Epstein case resurfaced. Trump had been a close friend of Epstein for many years, had made public statements alluding to his being well aware of Epstein’s pedophilic preferences, and Trump was documented as having flown on the infamous flying bordello the “Lolita express.” The propaganda coverage of Epstein during Trump’s presidency conveniently omitted the extensive connections between the two men. There were no calls by the public for his resignation due to his association with Epstein nor has his almost certain pedophilia with underaged prostitutes prevented him from continuing his public presence or his continued political ambitions. Conversely, the scandal-prone British royal family was forced to retire Prince Andrew from public life due to his having been outed as having engaged in pedophilia with Epstein’s underage prostitutes.
Alan Dershowitz, despite also being outed by an ex-prostitute of Epstein’s, was regularly appearing on American propaganda outlets during the Coronavirus PSO giving the hapless American citizenry his views on the “constitutionality” of forced mass vaccinations with dangerous experimental vaccines. Likewise, the glib Bill Gates was only too happy to give enthusiastic sermons to the citizens of the world about his special brand of weaponized medicine and the “necessity” for technocratic totalitarian measures under the guise of “public health.” That an outed pedophile was preaching to the American public about the pseudo-constitutionality of totalitarian measures is indicative of the general state of ethical decal within the American civilization. And that an outed pedophile oligarch had the audacity of being centerstage in the international media “suggesting” international health policy is indicative of the general ethical decay of humanity as a whole and the susceptibility of the contemporary audiences to image rehabilitation.
Despite the extent of the scandal, initially Jeffrey Epstein approached the revelations of his industrial-scale pedophilia and pimping of young American girls by attempting to rehabilitation of his image. To him and his circle, industrial-scale pedophilia was merely a PR obstacle to be “overcome.” This proved unsuccessful as the ethical superstructure of the American citizenry is not yet sufficiently subverted as for them to accept the image rehabilitation of a narcissistic pedophile pimp. Although undoubtedly the continued use of these propaganda strategies will undoubtedly allow for the most heinous of crimes to be forgivable given sufficient time.
Conclusions
The principles of the protection of the youth from corrupting influences and their careful and proper cultivation is an ancient concept dealt with at length by philosophers and spiritual leaders of the past. As had been previously mentioned, Plato’s Republic deals extensively with the subject in a meticulous and holistic manner which addresses the major influences which affected childhood psychological development during his era. From the intricacies of music and its effects on psychology, to the religious stories of the gods, to language and vocabulary, to children’s play behavior, to the themes and subject-matter of poets, to the performances of mummers and fabulists, etcetera, no influence was too minor as to be overlooked in the creation of Plato’s ideal republic. The equivalent exploration of the influences on the psychological development of the youth today would address such contemporary counterparts as the use of language and psycholinguistics, video games, cinema, music, social media, digital media consumption, the religious tenets of modern world religions, and so on. Like their ancient counterparts, these areas have incredible influence on the psychological development of the future generations and on the evolution of contemporary civilizations.
Plato understood that the “guardians” of the republic (a class of citizens chosen on a meritocratic basis as the rulers and defenders of the republic) must be of unshakable integrity, of profound wisdom, and embodying enlightened ethics, amongst many other necessary attributes. The careful and considered curation of influences on the guardian youth was correctly understood as being absolutely necessary in order to maintain the integrity of the republic and preserve the tradition of proper leadership necessary to ensure the lasting liberty and sovereignty of civilizations. In the contemporary setting, the equivalent to Plato’s guardians of the republic is the general citizenry of republics. By extension the psychological and ethical development of the general citizenry are quintessentially important to the long-term survival of a republic and the preservation of freedom.
There is a profound irony when juxtaposing Plato’s ideal republic with the contemporary American empire. For Plato, the need to censor and rewrite religious stories as well as popular stories of poets and mummers (the ancient equivalent to cinema and audiovisual entertainment) was to a great extent indeed applied in the American republic in the form of the Hays Code (Motion Picture Production Code) and the Comics Code Authority. While these codes are not looked upon favorably in modernity, it should be noted that these were acts of industry self-censorship and crafted in order to maintain the ethical integrity of the American youth. However, such codes and the general concern for ethical integrity are serious obstacles to the dark arts of malicious social engineering and psychological warfare. The decline of these codes coincided with the rise of American imperialism and the engineered transition between the citizenry’s republican ethics and the anti-ethics of imperial subjects.
Where there once was the strict curation of the influences on the American youth for their proper edification there is now a new pernicious form of even stricter curation, censorship, and propaganda aimed at the general citizenry. However, this aggressive curation of reality is not designed for the benefit of the citizenry but for imperial myth-making and the defense and promotion of the American imperial system. Great efforts are taken to engineer obscene falsehoods of the faux-benevolence of the profoundly corrupt American empire and to sanitize the countless unforgivable sins of the state. All in order to ensure the continued fidelity of the imperial subjects to the religion of the state and maintain their continued support for imperial agendas. These efforts are all highly logical, if American subjects were to realize the extent of the crimes and corruption of the state, they would be liable to become apostates of the religion of the state and heretics in their words and deeds towards the Orwellian false deity that is the American government. A government which has become an abomination to its own people managed by ruthless, profoundly corrupt, and despicable persons.
The care that had once been given to ensuring a wholesomeness of content and a beneficence on ethical integrity is now given to the censorship of material that correctly portrays the rapine and savagery of the empire and to aggressive promote the false “benevolence” of imperial subjugation. And as such there is a constant silent purge of all material which compromises faith in the American empire. And it is this same imperial system which tolerates no impugn of its crimes that is the epicenter of the ethical corruption which emanates from itself onto its own citizens and the peoples of the world internationally. For this imperial system, just like the imperial systems of the past, cannot coexist with the republican ideals and ethics of the citizenry and must replace those ethics with those conducive to itself.
The ethics of the American citizenry have been gradually twisted and perverted in service of the adoration of the state rather than the proper cultivation of newest generations of the guardians of liberty. The ethics of the guardian citizenry which had well-served the republic have been slowly eroded and strategically discarded in favor of the anti-ethics of imperial subjects: credulity, gullibility, incuriosity, apathy, docility, indifference, distractedness, submissiveness, malleability, and obedience. Where there had once been the teaching of civics and the American Constitution in American high schools there is now a conspicuous educational void, and where there once had been wholesome entertainment there is now the strategic infantilization of the citizenry and their inculcation into patterns of debilitating psychopathology.
The philosophies of Plato have gained a profound importance during this contemporary era. Plato understood that for the freedoms of a civilization to be maintained the guardians of liberty must fear slavery and unfreedom above all else and be stoic and indifferent as it concerned the specter of death, that the boys and men destined to be free must be more afraid of slavery than death. For death is nothing compared to enslavement and the totalitarianism of maniacal despots. And yet by all forms of ruses and deceptions the modern citizenry of the world are continually cowed and reduced to trembling children by the dark arts of psychological warfare.
The ethics of free peoples has been subverted and replaced by the paradigms of Fascist totalitarianism, in which real liberties and civil rights are exchanged for the false illusions of “safety” and “protection.” And once inculcated into such a paradigm, the terrorized and trembling masses clamor for the ever-elusive “safety” and “protection” just beyond their reach that no amounts of lost freedoms or abrogated civil rights seems to be able to purchase. That such paradigms are undignified, self-defeating, and unbecoming of true citizens is lost on those who have succumbed to the psychological terrorism.
The use of the far more aggressive strategies of ethical inversion, fulminant ethical decay, and the beautification of psychopathology are merely continuations of ongoing processes of imperial social engineering. The international system of governance requires yet greater malleability from its subjects and this in turn requires a more thorough pulverization of ethics. As the weaker the essence of the spirit of Men and the more debased their ethics the more readily and quickly the pernicious changes they are willing to endure.
Technocratic neufeudalism can be understood in every sense as a great inversion of the ideals of Plato’s republic, a totalitarian “anti-republic” system. This system requires the complete debasement of the people in order for them to accept such a paradigm in its full and overt form. As the Roman republic gave way to the imperial Roman system, which after its collapse led to the rise European kingdoms, which evolved into the paradigm of the collective enslavement of feudalism in Europe, so too have the systems of republics of the 19th century given way to the neoimperial systems of the 20th century which are currently ceding to the globalist totalitarian neufeudal order of the 21st century and beyond.
In order to continue the pace of these malignant transformations and ensure that there will not be a reversion back into systems of republics, the ethics of the people must be crushed in such a manner that the derangement and deformity of their ethics and values will allow for such totalitarian systems to be stable for generations to come. And as such, the fight for the integrity of ethics represents a part of the front-lines of the battle for the future and will be extremely critical in determining whether a neufeudal order will be successfully introduced and established for a thousand years to come or whether the paradigm of republics will triumph over the designs of an odious ruling establishment.
However, the extent of the ethical decay must be acknowledged and its implications understood. Two important juxtapositions merits mentioning as it concerns the difference between the parents of the 20th century and contemporary parents:
The German psychiatrist Fredric Wertham published a highly influential book in the 1950s titled Seduction of the Innocent which dealt with the subversive and violent themes of pulp magazines which were aimed at child audiences. Wertham conveyed to parents the basic dynamics of paradigm imprinting as they were occurring in ethically subversive children’s entertainment. Highly subversive themes had come to predominate the comic books and pulp magazine industry which were highly inappropriate for child audiences and were having a perceptible corrupting effect on the youth. The widespread distribution of Wertham’s book and the awakening of parents to the reality of these trends led to a public outcry and the reformation of the content of comic books and pulp magazines.
It is important to note that the content of these pulp magazines often included illustrated covers with themes of demon-worshipping cultists, cultists in the process of making human sacrifices to dark deities (especially the sacrifice of beautiful women), voluptuous scantily clad women in scenes of imminent danger, and monsters terrorizing nearly-naked highly-attractive women, etcetera. That these images and themes are inappropriate for children should have been obvious to parents of the time. Regardless, Wertham’s personal expertise and his written work led directly to the self-reformation of the industry and that reformation lasted for decades.
As can be imagined, Wertham’s contribution to the safeguarding of children is lambasted and ridiculed by contemporary propagandists. A contemporary retrospective article by the propaganda outlet Vox published in 2015 portrayed Wertham’s work as unreliable and having initiated a baseless moral hysteria which led to a “debasement” in the quality of pulp magazines and comic books. Such articles are intentionally disingenuous and designed to inure parents to the very real harms of ethical subversion and the malicious social engineering of the youth. The article intentionally omits the glut of the illustrated covers showing objectionable depictions and exact nature of the ethically subversive content. Furthermore, it is highly selective and self-serving in the examples it provides. There are practical reasons for this perhaps the most relevant being that a great many of the objectionable illustrated covers involve the sexualization and beautification of violence against women. Such a revelation to audiences would be counterproductive to the intent of inuring of audiences to the ethical subversion of children and is especially problematic given the contemporary political trends. Female nudity and violence against women is currently being voluntarily censored by certain entertainment corporations albeit for highly politicized reasons and are not concerned with the ethical development of children.
In contrast to the deceptive faux-insights of professional propagandists are the far more relevant and valuable insights of FBI profiler and expert on sexual predators Roy Hazelwood. Hazelwood noted in his book Dark Dreams how essentially an entire generation of sexual predators, serial rapists, and sexually-deviant serial killers had been influenced from childhood by the violent imagery of the pulp magazines that had been churned out prior to the reformations of the Comic Code Authority. Unlike the useless tripe of contemporary propagandists, Hazelwood’s professional experience was rooted in detailed interviews with hundreds of sexual predators. His professional duties included drawing up psychological profiles of uncaught criminals and sexual predators and he was involved in this capacity in assisting in their capture. A recurrent common denominator for many of these sexual predators was their early exposure to these illustrated images of sexually-provocative violence against women which was quintessential in their development of violent sexual appetites. Furthermore, these pulp magazine illustrations were used as a form of pornography for the satiety of their blossoming violent sexual urges. Hazelwood’s professional opinions regarding such imagery and childhood development is not ambiguous.
Realistically one must acknowledge the limitations of the data. The raw data necessary to determine what percentage of children who read these magazines were adversely affected simply does not exist. However, that subsequently children were influenced in the development of their sexual appetites, that some of those children developed violent sexual habits and deviant paraphilias, that some of those children developed violent sexual preferences that were sub-criminal, and that a much smaller percentage of those children grew up to become rapists and serial sexual offenders, is undeniable. Attempting to impress such common-sense realities to contemporary parents is made unnecessarily difficult. While parents of the past were swayed by Wertham’s arguments despite not having the luxury of the comprehensive studies and the later insights of Hazelwood. One can only speculate how many thousands of children were spared the corruption of their psychological development due to the comic book and pulp magazine reformation. However, a cohort of the children who had consumed the sexually violent were not thus spared.
The second relevant juxtaposition are the propaganda tactics of Big Tobacco during the 1960s. The Tobacco cartel had known early on the addictive properties of tobacco and had studied ad nauseum the dynamics of tobacco consumption. It was well-understood that adults were less likely to begin using tobacco past a certain age-range and that smokers that began smoking in adulthood could overcome smoking addiction far easier than those that had started their addiction in childhood or adolescence. Smokers who started in childhood were almost guaranteed to be smokers for life with the addiction being far more difficult to overcome. The targeting of impressionable children who could be easily influenced into positively perceiving cigarette use was the most profitable course of action. Such strategies were not merely cost-effective, they were extremely lucrative. Every tactic imaginable was used to make smoking appear cool, popular, hip, fashionable, etcetera, with a special emphasis on influencing the perception and habits of children.
Big Tobacco began to specifically target children aggressively during the 1960s with an entire cohort of children having the jingles of tobacco products seared into their collective memories. The companies would specifically use the television time slots in which the greatest number of children would be watching the programming. The specific targeting of children to entice them into addiction incensed parents and there was significant public controversy over the unethical Machiavellian tactics Big Tobacco was employing.
Even after television advertisement of tobacco was ended by Federal law, Big Tobacco doubled their efforts at targeting children through a myriad of techniques: ads in magazines with high child and adolescent readership, the use illustrations for ads and posters which had a distinctive look reminiscent of children’s comic books, cartoon mascots specifically aimed at enticing children, etcetera. However, the no-nonsense attitude of the parents of the past ultimately put an end to Big Tobacco’s targeting of children in most countries. This no-nonsense aggressive defense of children is unfortunately alien to contemporary audiences who have been propagandized into profound gullibility and complacency when it comes to the defense of their children. Realistically, such a defense of the youth could not replicated by contemporary parents.
There are a great many poignant examples which illustrate the gullibility of contemporary audiences and the willingness of contemporary parents to put their own children in harms way. The tragic reality is that contemporary audiences are highly suggestible and their susceptibility to propaganda allows for the overriding any concerns they may have. While contemporary audiences are woefully ignorant to the effectiveness of subversive advertisement and propaganda, the incredible effectiveness of these techniques was not lost on the tobacco industry in the 1960s as it is not lost on contemporary amoral corporations, ill-intentioned governments, and their gaggle of propagandists and social engineers.
Many of the techniques have not changed drastically since they were employed by Big Tobacco in the recent past. The normalization of tobacco with smoking theme toys or the psychological intertwining of the concepts of “coolness” and “smoking” in advertisements aimed at child audiences are applied in the contemporary setting by Disney to normalize unethical behavior and psychologically intertwine “coolness” with psychopathy and emotional pseudo-reasoning. And yet the obtuse parents of today are simply unwilling to believe that that governments or corporations could maliciously target children despite it being a well-recorded fact in both history and within the contemporary setting.
Parents continually fail to respond appropriately when presented with incontrovertible proof of malicious intent. Revelations of major video game conglomerates hiring addiction specialists to assist in the design of gambling mechanics in video games or the inclusion in popular video games of literal online casinos fails to elicit the uproar that such criminal rackets would have generated half a century ago. In the contemporary setting the repeated targeting of children with increasingly malicious propaganda and social engineering is met by a confused and befuddled parent population, many of whom ultimately excuse the intent to harm of corporations and subsidize the abuse of their own children. The ethical fortitude and gumption of parents of the past that brought low the powerful Machiavellian tobacco cartel has been mostly engineered into extinction and is not expected to hinder the Disney corporation in their social engineering efforts, the video game industry in their criminal child gambling racket, or any of the other many companies peddling weaponized products targeting children.
Meaningful resistance by parents will likely not be forthcoming principally because the integrity of the ethical superstructure of the contemporary audiences is severely weak and malformed when compared to the ethical integrity of the past. The ethical decay experienced thus far is significant enough that parents do not have the foundational ethics and values necessary to appreciate the quintessential importance of the most basic of principles. Once sufficient ethical decay has set in, attempting to engage in meaningful dialogue in the absence of core principles is futile.
It is comparable to the difference between republican Roman citizens and imperial Roman subjects. The ethics and virtues of the republican Roman citizens was renown in the ancient world: their love of freedom, the structure and unity of their families, their unshakable bravery, their unyielding refusal to be conquered, and so on. Before the Romans accepted the loss of their republic, they had first experienced significant ethical decay and the critical debasement of their core ethics. Once the imperial system was introduced in earnest, efforts were undertaken (such as the infamous “bread and circuses” strategy) to ensure the continued ethical subversion and distraction of the citizenry and engineer their collective inurement to imperial agendas.
Attempting to speak to an imperial Roman subject who had never experienced the republican paradigm of values, ethics, and philosophy about the preeminence of enlightened values and civic virtues would have been an exercise in futility. Such a Roman would have been born to a debased culture, would have internalized the corrupted paradigms of contemporary Rome, and would likely be ethical bankrupt as a result. How could such a person be made to understand the value of liberty and civil empowerment if they had been thoroughly influenced by imperial propaganda and were too busy satiating carnal appetites or squandering their time with meaningless diversions at the Coliseum? And if such an imperial subject is unable to champion their own interests, how can they be expected to safeguard the interests of their own children against the predatory practices of the empire? These imperial subjects were Roman in name, but not Roman in ethics.
It has been said that them who are unable to protect their children are finished as a peoples. However, before a peoples have reached the point where they are unable to protect the youth, they themselves have lost the ability to protect themselves and have already succumbed to psychological warfare, social engineering, and crippling ethical decay. Before there was the Hitler Youth, the German people had to have first become infected with Nazi ideology and before the Russians willingly gave their children to the Komsomol they had succumbed to the political-religion of Marxist-Leninism. The peoples of today are themselves mostly helpless in the face of the daily assaults of psychological warfare conducted on them by their own governments. That they are unable to protect their children is a natural consequence of them being unable to protect their own minds. Why “protecting children” is a principle that must not be compromised should not require a dissertation if addressing a knowledgeable audience possessing normal ethical integrity. And that any attempts at indoctrination, subversion, corruption, social engineering, or propagandization of the youth must be stopped immediately and without hesitation is a direct application of such a principle.
Two final metaphors merit exploration as it concerns this discourse:
Ethics can be likened to function of bone in the body. Bone gives form and integrity to the physical form amongst its various vital functions. Like bone, ethics gives form to a person’s psychology and integrity to the overarching psychological superstructure. There are certain pathological processes that can severely compromise this ability of bone to provide sound structure. While there are many pathologies of bone, three specific pathologies will be used for this metaphor.
Deficits in bone mineralization in childhood lead to rickets and can cause “bow-leggedness” in children in which the long-bones of the lower limbs begin to bend as a consequence of the weakness in the overall bone structure. Just like bone, ethics insufficiently hardened during childhood can cause the metaphorical pathological “bending” of the overarching ethical superstructure as a consequence of the pressures placed upon it. The greater the pressure on the “softened” ethics the greater the degree the entirety of the ethical superstructure will bend. The resulting “bent” ethics as a consequence of insufficient childhood ethical development will be decidedly dysfunctional and maladaptive. This “bent” ethical framework will persist into adulthood and will be a source of problems for that individual often for the rest of their lives.
Like trauma inducing bone fractures, extreme trauma and pressures placed on ethics likewise can cause a fracturing of the overarching ethical framework. The harder the bone and the greater the superiority of its internal architecture the greater the stresses it can handle and the more resistant it is to fracture. The same holds true with ethical frameworks. Like bone, ethics tends to fracture in discrete segments rather than being pulverized by stressors and similarly if allowed to mend it tends to prefer reconstituting itself into its original functional form. Like bone, ethics requires a healing process and similarly may at times require the use of external interventions in order to set properly. Ethical superstructures can have incredible pressures placed on them through sudden events such as natural disasters, wars, famines, financial hardships, the loss of loved ones, etcetera. The harder the ethics and greater the superiority of its internal architecture (often via intentional self-improvement, spiritual traditions, the philosophical life, etcetera) the greater the stressors and trauma it can withstand without breaking.
Metastatic cancer to bone is often initially a silent painless process which is usually noted in the clinical setting due to the insidious onset of bone pain or sudden unexpected bone fracture as a consequence of the serious break-down of the seeded bone. The equivalence to ethics are the cancers of the mind, the discrete malignant psychological constructs which are surreptitiously seeded to the mind and the ethical framework during the course of psychological warfare, sociocultural warfare, and pernicious social engineering. Like metastatic cancer to bone, these psychological cancerous constructs cause serious discrete breakdowns in the psychology of the person and erode the ethical superstructure in a manner metaphorically reminiscent of the lytic lesions of seeded cancer in bone. The psychopathological process of propagandization tends to be a slow silent process which eats away at critical parts of the psychological framework and ethical superstructure until ultimately it implodes into pathological diseased fragments that cannot be readily reconstituted into their original functional whole.
However, unlike metastatic bone cancer, the seeding of cancerous ideological constructs to ethical superstructures are surgical in their precision attempting to strike the most vulnerable key-points that uphold the ethical superstructure. As such, insidious propaganda can massively erode the overall strength of ethical frameworks and quickly disintegrate ethical superstructures. When applied to the level of a civilization this entails the implosion of the historical ethics of peoples. These historical ethical frameworks usually evolved in such a manner that they confer an evolutionary advantage to that civilization and function to keep the civilization highly functional and united as a peoples. As such, the targeted destruction of these ethical frameworks serves to undermine their key advantageous traits and their collective cohesion often doing so in a manner not readily reversible.
Within the metaphor of bone, these new tactics of fulminant ethical decay, ethical inversion, moral confusion, the beautification of psychopathology, and the Sympathy for the Devil technique represent attempts to pulverize ethics into a fine powder or dissolve the developing ethical superstructures of children into a paste or liquid form. An ethical matrix (like a bone matrix) that has been metaphorically reduced to liquid or powder is amorphous and does not confer integrity and form to the psychological self. As such both the ethics and psychological framework of peoples thus affected become highly malleable and readily manipulated by the implementation of proper techniques.
What is ultimately desired is to be able to decant atomized ethics into any desired mold for them to be cast and hardened as needed. Orwellian totalitarianism requires the dissolution of ethical systems which were based on human concerns in order to recast ethics into malignant inversions that are not concerned with human values or sensibilities. The desired anti-ethical frameworks that are intended for future generations are decidedly unnatural in form and disadvantageous in function and are designed for the beneficence of the state and ruling system and not the beneficence of the individual.
The second metaphor that merits exploration is that of ethics as the heavenly bodies and logic as the compass. Ethics metaphorically function to an individual the way that the celestial bodies have functioned for navigators throughout the history of mankind. So long as the navigator is well-versed in the constellations and trained in how to use their position to orient himself, he will be able to properly navigate during night or day. When there are severe storms or weather conditions which make celestial navigation impossible other instrumentation such as a compass, nautical charts, and dead reckoning are used in order to approximate one’s position and orientation.
The major guiding points of ethics, like celestial bodies, are constants and immutable. This assertion can be debated by nihilists, ethical relativists, and venal propagandists on the payroll of tyrants and totalitarian regimes, however they nonetheless remain constants. The disregard of these constants produces significant, measurable, and predictable adverse consequences. In such a metaphor, propaganda can be likened to fierce storms, adverse weather conditions, or even mythological sirens beckoning sailors to crash their ships on the rocks.
However aggressive and turbulent the storm of propaganda may be, the well-trained navigator remains unphased, oriented, and on the course they have plotted. When the metaphorical storm disallows the use of celestial navigation the navigator relies on the compass of logic and reason. And even if the adroit navigator is somehow temporarily confused and blown off course, when calm is restored in between propaganda campaigns, the astute navigator will be able to quickly reorient themselves using the constants in the constellation of ethics and continue on their charted course. Furthermore, the wise navigator will quickly learn from their experiences and understand the nature of the propaganda storms and be better prepared for the next inevitable onslaught.
Similar to celestial navigation, the proper navigation under the constellations of ethics requires formal training and ample hands-on experience. The average person is a casual stargazer overconfident in their understanding of ethics and foolishly self-assured in their ability to survive the storms of propaganda they will inevitably experience during their lifetime. While the experienced navigator displays caution and an appreciation for the strength and effectiveness of propaganda storms, the average untrained dilettante is brash and cocksure. When the untrained individual is inevitably buffeted by the storms, they will be at the mercy of propaganda and their direction in life and ethical orientation will be affected accordingly. Furthermore, the modern citizenry for the most part either have a faulty compass or none at all due to the intentional failure to teach logic and reasoning during the course of public education.
Within this metaphor, the strategies that are being employed can be likened to failing to teach children celestial navigation, denying them a compass, and in general augmenting as much as possible their general confusion and disorientation. Moral confusion is the equivalent to a sailboat stuck in a dense fog with a navigator bereft of a compass or nautical charts. In such situations the navigator will be most willing to follow any glowing lights in the distance without concern whether it is friend or foe, especially if they have been instructed during their training never to rely on their own instincts and abilities. In such disoriented states, the ignorant navigator is liable to accept instruction thrust upon them by technocratic “experts” and be swept far off-course by the storms of propaganda. And when a disoriented poorly-trained pilot encounters the strength of the storm, it will be the storm and not the pilot who will be directing the ship.
As can be inferred by the use of this metaphor, the proper strategy as it concerns ethics is always the formal training of young children in ethics, logic, argumentation, and the dark arts of propaganda and psychological warfare. The same way that a navigator would not limit their formal study only to the celestial bodies but would also intensively study weather and meteorology, so too must the comprehensive education of children be complemented by instruction in propaganda and psychological warfare. Increasingly, the parents who wish to make expert navigators of their children, that they may chart an excellent course and follow a path of excellence in life, must take these factors into account.
Children are the future guardians of republics, they are the future caretakers of culture, they are the personal legacy of their parents, and they are destined to be the future. All generations are merely caretakers of traditions greater than themselves, and it is the duty of all generations to properly maintain the intergenerational links that tie together the tapestry of humanity throughout the course of time. It is a prime duty that this intergenerational enculturation and instruction empower the future generations and properly instruct them on the struggles that are yet to come. Their edification, their ethics, their paradigms, and their values are of the highest importance and beyond valuation.