Unwaging Psychological War
Finding peace and freedom in a world of mental warfare
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Sing it with me Billy Joel:
Harry Potter, DSA, pinkwashing, Lana Del Rey.
Vaccines, drag queens, trans teens, Sleepy Joe.
Secret pedophile rings. England’s got a new king.
We didn’t start the fire.
War is spreading in the Middle East. Covid is spreading in the Midwest. Russian bots are trying to disrupt the election, Eric Adams has been indicted, and Kamala is brat. Brat is now political. Lockheed Martin is now “extremely woke.” Hurricane conspiracy theories flood the Southeast and spread like wildfire in Hawaii. Disaster capitalists laugh all the way to the bank while desperate activists share mutual aid pleas on social media. Or are they really all Antifa super-soldiers?
You can’t trust what you see online. Facebook is full of Russian propaganda. TikTok is full of Chinese propaganda. TruthSocial? Definitely a bastion of unbiased facts. You can’t trust the lamestream media or the lyin’ New York Times. Fox News is no longer even pretending to be “fair and balanced.” The BBC got inundated with complaints about bias in their coverage of the war in Gaza, half saying they were too pro-Israel, the other half saying they were too pro-Palestine.
Anything you see could be a deep fake. Could be the deep state. You can’t trust the experts, can’t trust your own research, and you probably can’t trust me.
Do you feel overwhelmed yet? Mentally exhausted? Confused? Afraid? Alone?
Welcome to a psychological war zone.
These days, it often feels like every step you take could unwittingly detonate a land mine. Tweet the wrong thing and all hell breaks loose. Gen Z TikTok mobs, boomer Facebook mobs, fascists, SJWs and Swifties: everyone is coming for you. Everyone is under attack from one group or another, and all these attacks seem able to do is make us dig our trenches even deeper.
It’s ironic, all the trench-digging online. Out in the real world, we don’t see much of trench warfare anymore. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, the boundaries of war have expanded and disintegrated. Opposing armies no longer meet each other on pre-determined battlefields. Battles are fought through cities and towns, blurring the lines between military and civilian spaces as invading armies blur the lines between combatants and civilians. International law be damned. When the war comes marching in, everything and everyone is threatened.
Just as warfare has diffused into daily life, so too has psychological warfare.
Psychological warfare has a rich and bloody history in the United States. Since as far back as the Indian Wars of the 1800s, the U.S. government has understood that words are just as powerful as guns. In every war, narratives are spun to curry favor for one side or the other. U.S. military PSYOPs, now called MISOs (military information support operations) have been a codified aspect of American warfare since World War I. Passing out leaflets with pro-American propaganda, coopting media to boost American interests or demoralize enemy armies, engaging in aid campaigns to win “hearts and minds,” all these are deliberate acts of war.
The practice of psychological warfare in the U.S. was pioneered by advertiser and propagandist Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) and sci-fi-author-slash-army-intelligence-officer Paul Linebarger, who saw the power of unconscious drives and narrative world-building as weapons of war. The strategy of psychological warfare is to win not with reasoned argument, but with emotions, subconscious associations and myth-making.
The Cold War was an era of prolific psychological warfare. Soviet propaganda could drum up support for the USSR by appealing to the struggle of working-class people searching for freedom from oppression. American propaganda could drum up support for its many coups by fashioning itself a defender of democracy.
The narratives haven’t changed much since the dawn of the 21st century. Why did we invade Iraq? Not for oil. For democracy.
The narratives may not have changed, but the nature of war certainly has. The ratio of civilian casualties has skyrocketed over the past century, from roughly 15% during World War I to some 90% today. The number of international wars has fallen substantially since World War II, while the number of civil wars has shot up. Civil wars today are less likely to end in any sort of military victory, creating prolonged tensions where relapse into war is far more common.
The same is true of the wars waged on our minds. In recent years, the tactics of psychological warfare have decimated American politics and social cohesion. We know about how Cambridge Analytica used targeted psychological warfare to influence the 2016 election, and we know that there are other ongoing attempts from both within and outside the United States to do the same in 2024. What we don’t know is the full extent of the propaganda we take in.
Even the language of psychological warfare has become a narrative weapon. Accusations abound that this political movement or that cultural trend is a “psyop.” Unfounded claims that one protest is funded by a billionaire or foreign government compete with proven claims that another protest is funded by another. Which claim is true? That’s hard to say if you don’t trust whoever presented the data.
Did you know that 72% of statistics are made up on the spot?
In the past, psychological warfare was focused primarily on persuasion. These days, it’s often more about creating mass confusion. “It’s hard to know who our enemies are when Americans borrow our adversaries’ strategies and treat one another like enemy combatants,” writes Analee Newitz in their book Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. We live constantly in what Newitz calls “the brain fog of war.”
Psychological warfare is the practice of weaponizing stories. Narratives become the armies. Minds become the battlefields. Beliefs are the weapons and the maneuvers are written in blog posts and posted in memes. For all you know, this essay could be a psyop. I could be trying to brainwash you right now.
How can we know who to trust if everyone has an agenda? We’re all consuming propaganda, parroting data that could easily be skewed, peddling narratives that are crafted from afar to influence how we spend our dollars and cast our votes. We are all soldiers in this war.
This is psychological total war. There are no non-combatants.
How do you win a war this all-encompassing? What side are you even fighting for? The point of the confusion is: we really don’t know. We just know we’re fighting, that we can’t stop fighting, that no matter what we do, we’re drafted into this.
This is a war that can’t really be won. If the war is to end, it will be ended through us all making peace, not through anyone winning it.
As uncomfortable as it is to sit with, I don’t think the way out of this psychological war will come as a return to objectivity and definitive trustworthiness; at least, it will look nothing like that at the outset. The cat is not only out of the bag, it has bred and mutated and been taken in as a pet in every home.
I think the only way out of this is through it: not clinging to perceived objectivity, but taking radical responsibility for our own subjectivity.
When we recognize that all of our brains have been washed and all of our minds have been conditioned, we’re finally in a position to interrogate our own beliefs. That process of interrogation is understandably daunting, as if the bottom fell out of the way we construct reality.
This is the stage of consciousness-raising American society seems to be in today, and it is a necessary stage of questioning. We cannot come to an authentic story of what’s happening without it.
For a shared story to be any antidote to this psychological war, it must be authentic. It must arise as an aggregate of the subjective views of individuals. Creating a shared story is not about balancing “both sides.” The total war we face has proven that there are far more than two sides. For a consensus reality to emerge amid a sea of biased subjectivity, we must hear from all sides. For our story to be shared, we must all be free to choose, equally and together, what that story is.
All the confusion tactics have unwittingly forced us in an evolutionary direction: we have begun to radically democratize the process of making meaning. With that, we can more deeply democratize the process of making decisions together.
“The opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation,” wrote Jonathan Larson in the lyrics for the musical Rent! If our goal is to create a shared truth from our own subjectivities, rather than to win a war, our differing perspectives are not a hindrance. They are the essential components of what we create together. When our goal is to democratically co-create our society, then disagreement is not an act of war. There are no winners and losers, only collaborators in forging an authentic whole.
This way out doesn’t come by fixing the problem. It comes by shifting our perspective. Through that shift, we can start to flip the whole narrative of psychological war on its head: if everything is an act of war, if everyone is fighting everyone, then what does war even mean?
The power of psychological warfare is that it plays out in the mind. It wages war with narratives. What we often fail to notice is that the narrative that we’re in a war is just that: a narrative. The perception that we’re under constant threat, in battle, fighting enemies we cannot see — this too is a story we tell.
In the 2016 film Arrival, the American linguist tasked with translating the language of visiting aliens expresses alarm that her Chinese counterparts are trying to communicate with the aliens using the game mahjong. “Well let’s say,” she says, “That I taught them chess instead of English. Every conversation would be a game, every idea expressed through opposition: victory, defeat. You see the problem? If all I ever gave you was a hammer…”
Her army colonel coworker finishes her sentence: “Everything’s a nail.”
Are we really at war, or do we just think we are?
From within the perspective of psychological war, we could call this another tactic: make everyone believe they’re at war, keep them afraid and confused, make them prone to lash out and cause chaos and cling to strongmen for clarity.
From beyond the perspective of psychological war, we could see this in a different way:
You see, a physical war does not end when the battle is over. It wages on psychologically in the minds of those impacted by it, leaving a long-lasting residue of trauma that forces the emotional body back into the battlefield long after the armistice is signed. Trauma puts the mind and body in a state of war: fight or flight, attack or retreat.
When you feel like a nail, everything’s a hammer.
So are we active duty soldiers fighting in a war that we must win? Or are we traumatized human beings yearning to heal and be free from our mental prisons?
Either way, we cannot heal the trauma of psychological war without distancing ourselves from the battle and choosing not to fight it. It takes the courage to lay down our arms to choose creation over conquering, democracy over defeat. It is, in its way, an act of surrender, not to an opposing side, but to an internal experience of safety and of faith. From that conscious choice, we begin to find our freedom from the battle.
Finding that internal locus of agency is what allows us to exit the psychological war, and deconstructing the psychological siege of our minds allows us to uncover it. The process is an ongoing dialectic: internal and external, psychological and material. We deconstruct as we put back together, destroying as we create.
I don’t know how to end this essay. To tie it off with a neat conclusion feels like the opposite of the point. The point is that this process doesn’t end. War continues long after the battle is over, morphing into trauma that gets projected, causing psychological violence that turns into sporadic physical violence before erupting into another war. We’ve proven that we’re willing to keep the violence going ad infinitum. If we keep demanding a solution, playing chicken with our trust, insisting that the other side fold first, then the cycle will not end.
We don’t know the solution to this brain fog divisiveness yet. We just know we need to put our hearts and minds to the task of peaceful co-creation, rather than to war. Transmuting trauma into freedom is a process that never really ends. It’s a path each of us must choose whether or not to take, and we can only ever choose for ourselves. We cannot demand that others take it to ensure we’re safe. It’s up to us to take the risk and do it on our own.
Psychological freedom is not a war to be won or lost. It’s a path of healing and surrender, of dissolving and recreating, moving towards a better world one step, one action, one belief at a time.
