Hypocrisy Weaponized
The right’s pervasive hypocrisy is not what it seems. It’s multi-level deception, and we perceive only the level they want us to see.
On the first level, for tools like Trump and his MAGA foot soldiers it is raw psychological projection. They appear to be ‘giving the game away’ with accusations such as Biden and the left being fascist. This gives us some comfort in that we can figure this out, and some more in thinking that our opponents are so abysmally stupid, as if doing so gives us some kind of edge. But these are just actors following a script in Kabuki Theater, for which we’ve bought a ticket and watch attentively, while our ever-scarcening time to fight back dwindles.
One level up, hypocrisy from the right is a deliberate mode of communication designed to maintain the offensive by keeping the left on the defensive. Pronouncements such as Trump’s that Obama was illegitimate (Birther Scam) are routinely and continuously launched into communications channels to desensitize the left to the content of current and subsequent launches.
Thus, when we face real illegitimacy as with Trump, the Supreme Court, Texas’ Governor Abbott, Constitutional Sheriffs defying their oaths, etc., we don’t react forcefully or quickly enough – we hold our punches and wait for an even better opportunity to point out the hypocrisy. We hope you see that doing so is exactly what the right wants – because it enables them to maintain the initiative – one of the principles of war.
At the strategic level, hypocrisy serves as environmental noise – flooding the channels to confuse us and block out more truthful comms; and to depress the left by making it appear that there is an endless supply of such weapons emanating from the authoritarian arsenal. This deception masks their demographic disadvantages and moral deficiencies behind a smoke curtain.
And it’s working magnificently. We consider ourselves bold when we call out the right’s lies, but they don’t care, and we shouldn’t either. The mature and useful perception on our part must be that such lies are not personality defects that indicate exploitable weaknesses. Rather, each untruth is a brick in a wall of deception that obscures our adversary’s true intent.
Waiting for the emergence of the right’s latest shit, then triangulating on multiple academic and political exegeses of it is in effect negotiating the form of our own control! We must prevent them doing this to us in the first place, not focus on ameliorating the deleterious effects.
This specific finding about strategic deception is the result of our ongoing systems and intelligence analyses of the right. But we suggest here that analysis, admittedly our bread and butter at Revelatur, has its limitations. It has tremendous value to a point – but knowing where that point is – that’s where the payoff comes in. And to determine that point precisely there must be an organizational customer who will “action” the information against an adversary. In short, someone must do something more than just think about this stuff!
Such a customer establishes a threshold for what is called Actionable Situational Understanding. At this point in time, there is no customer on the left to establish this threshold, thus most of the left and the Democratic Party are stuck in analysis paralysis. We don’t know what’s most important, so we tilt at all of it, but without guidance and customer feedback we usually go too deep on a topic – or not deep enough.
If you’ve fallen into this trap – Lord knows we did at first – don’t despair. It’s easy to get people already on the defensive to do this exact thing. Defensive people develop a defeatist and reactionary mindset through what is called “path dependence,” a trap which can become fatal as happened with the French in World War II after being beaten by the Germans in 1870 and for most of World War I.
And analysis only gets us so far anyway. Analysis without follow-on action is counterproductive. We’ve spent thousands of years examining how the elites stick it to us. Only the form of what they do changes – at core it’s all about power, control, and hierarchy.
Karl Marx’ “Das Kapital” is perhaps the best and most comprehensive critique of capitalism and emergent neoliberalism. It was published in 1867, and in the hundred and fifty plus years since then his basic critique has been proven accurate. His work has been, unfortunately, “actioned” by a political rogue’s gallery whose failed states have almost fatally tarnished Marx’ insights.
Having come to an understanding on the right’s deliberate deployment of hypocrisy to own and confuse the libs, we suggest that it is not overly useful to forecast the future communications memes the right will potentially trot out. That effort is just another resource suck that a fragmented left cannot afford. It’s most critical to realize that the right will always be trying that stuff, and, realizing this, we can avoid the outrage cycle that keeps us on the ceiling emotionally -- and on the defensive strategically.
The problem with considering all citizens, or in our case, all Americans, as the “customers” of sociopolitical intelligence analysis is that each of us is at a different level of knowledge at any one point in time, and thus has different knowledge requirements. After a lifetime in intelligence and journalism, Mark can assure you that no one can satisfy all these requirements, although at Revelatur do our best to triangulate and prioritize them based on our methodology.
While we’re waiting for the emergence of the unified organizational customer who will rationalize all this for us, is there a more useful and effective approach? Glad you asked! The optimal framework is that of warfare. Since we are at war with the right – whether we are willing to acknowledge it -- this approach is appropriate.
In war, soldiers don’t need to know how rifles work technologically, they need only know the effective range and ammunition load of enemy weapons so they can account for them in their tactics. Thus, an American infantryman is taught the latter but only learns about the former through optional personal study. If we taught all soldiers to a deep technological level of expertise, we could not possibly get them up to speed on the hundreds of concepts they must integrate to be effective in combat.
These nested problems seem intractable. Is there a way out of this trap? Well, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact had a huge numerical advantage over NATO forces. From the 1960s through the early 1980s we were so certain that this advantage was decisive that all our war games involved the introduction of nuclear weapons by day three. But western leaders became increasingly uncomfortable with such an apocalyptic approach and sought out alternatives.
In response, the U.S. military underwent what it called a “Revolution in Military Affairs” between the late 1970s and early 1980s. The revolution spawned a more offensive and proactive strategy less reliant on nuclear weapons, an empirical approach to intelligence collection to compliment that, and a weapons modernization program designed to offset Soviet quantitative advantage with decisive Western qualitative superiority. This transformation was largely achieved and was a primary driver of the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union.
We advocate a similar transformation of our existing geopolitical state through a “Revolution in Sociopolitical Affairs,” and have detailed its analogous component to the military’s revolution in previous newsletters.
As one result of the “Revolution,” the previously described Just Nation Movement becomes the “customer” that coalesces the forces required to defeat worldwide authoritarianism, and Participative Democracy (PD) becomes the equivalent of nuclear weapons in its ability to revolutionize the fight.
The good news is that the right will have no ability, based on its design and objectives, to wield an equivalent weapon system, thus Participative Democracy enables a full reversal of the current strategic situation from “Advantage: Bad Guys” to “Decisive Victory: Good Guys.”
The better news is that having established a Movement and creating a powerful Center of Gravity, we seize the initiative from the enemy and go over to the offensive, from which we can establish irreversible momentum.
In the meantime, we reiterate our thinking from an earlier newsletter on how you might approach learning just the “right stuff” about the right:
“Prioritize paper and book-length peer-reviewed information sources and de-prioritize television, press articles, social media, salaciousness, and triviality. In the race to keep up with the world through near constant attention to news feeds, we lose the time we need to draft deeply upon works that really matter, and we lose the opportunity to sharpen the critical thinking skills required for analysis and right action.
Specifically, we suggest you read two books per week. Why? This will force you to cut out most of the irrelevant reading you do now. Interestingly, reading just four serious works on a subject gives you more knowledge about a subject than 98% of other people, therefore, you can reach that level of expertise in just two weeks!
This additional benefit of “four-book” expertise is that it provides you an aperture that enables you to learn other concepts more rapidly, which generates a virtual cycle of knowledge and competency that will increase your effectiveness much more surely and quickly than trying to read everything — but only at a surface level.
What should you read? Read history methodically; seek out empirical, unbiased forecasts aggressively; and keep up with science. Specifically, we recommend learning about Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Political Science, and Systems Thinking. Other than and within those, read what interests you, because you’ll pick up on the information more quickly and be less likely to falter.”
Concluding Thought: You may be wondering how we got from an analysis of the right’s strategic use of hypocrisy to a recommendation for a structural solution that does not appear to address the problem directly, if at all. With complex problems and complex adaptive systems such as nation states and societies, the “answers” are not usually found in what is known as the “problem space.”
When we model complex problems we must first identify all the system dynamics that go into “creating” the problem, thereby defining the problem space.
Then we identify the future state of the system we wish to see, in this case, information dominance over the right with the left on the offensive and momentum at our backs.
With this information we identify the dynamics that must be in place to change the current space to that of our desired future. Doing so defines our “solution space,” and from that we seek the optimal path from one state to the other, which becomes our solution. This is how we identified the Just Nation Movement and Participative Democracy as the major mechanisms than can create and sustain the dynamics we seek that will ultimately generate the outcomes we posited.
Through modeling, we determined that the most obvious solution - fighting back directly against the right in the communications space – simply reinforced the existing vicious cycle and was thus counterproductive.