The Two Wars on the Mind
Will we trust anything in the end—or simply believe everything?
Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter—leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?
- J.R.R. Tolkien, writing to his son Christopher toward the close of the Second World War (letter dated January 30, 1945)
I have been delayed in getting to this latest article, as my free time has been lately occupied with doing some final tweaks to my novel, Exogenesis, scheduled for release by Ignatius Press around the autumn of this year.
The story imagines North America over 200 years in the future, when society has divided into a technologically advanced city-state and a traditional, God-fearing rural people. Think Blade Runner crossed with the Amish, and you will get something of the flavor of the novel.
In many respects, the novel is a platform to express themes that have been explored here at Pilgrims. One of those themes is the battle to monitor and control the human mind, which is also the focus of today’s post: cognitive warfare.
War has been on everybody’s mind of late, with the invasion of the Ukraine grinding toward its second year and Chinese spy devices decorating North American airspace like party balloons.
No bombs have gone off in the West, but the frequent crises and obfuscations are unnerving, so that when a train with 100,000 gallons of toxic chemicals is set on fire in Ohio—with some comparing the poisonous plumes to a “nuclear winter”, and others calling it a “controlled burn” that went “as planned”—you want to scream, What is happening to this world?
It soaks into the mind, that unsettled feeling, like a disorientation that never quite fades. It can leave us ripe for believing almost anything because we want answers, we want things to make sense. An uncertain mind is fertile ground for propaganda.
Over fifty years ago Jacques Ellul wrote:
Step by step, the propagandist builds his techniques on the basis of his knowledge of man, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his conditioning — and as much on social psychology as on depth psychology.
Cognitive warfare is an extension of what Ellul is describing, based on the latest research in neuroscience. In the words of a NATO thinktank report:
The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century [in which] humans are the contested domain [and] future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.
Cognitive warfare is usually talked about in terms of conflict between nations—such as NATO versus Russia or China—but the techniques of this warfare can be deployed for internal purposes.
I have a background in brain and behavioral science, although I won’t pretend to have comprehensive knowledge of the techniques that might be used against us. Still, by taking a look at how the brain functions, particularly its left and right hemispheres, we can start to understand—even predict—our vulnerability to certain forms of attack.
Two sides of the same brain
In The Master and His Emissary, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist describes two ways that our brain perceives the world. To put it succinctly: the right hemisphere tends to understand the world wholistically and experientially, whereas the left hemisphere tends to perceive it abstractly, in parts and divisions, and in linguistic and representational terms.
So, if the right hemisphere is a sponge that soaks up experiences just as they are—unique, in totality, and thick with emotion—the left hemisphere squeezes out the sponge, distills the liquid, and divides its chemical components into different test tubes, each with its own label.
I have woefully simplified a complex subject, but we can apply the basic ideas to cognitive warfare and see how each of our hemispheres is vulnerable in distinctive ways.
It is curious, for instance, that a platform like Twitter, where text messages are limited to a paltry 280 characters, can be so powerful. And yet, they are powerful not in spite of their brevity, but because of it. Brevity inclines us toward abstract and absolutistic language, which are left-hemisphere specialties.
Outrage and hate are also common on Twitter, and anger is robustly associated with left hemisphere activation.
Anger and absolutism—is this not the social media cocktail that has intoxicated a whole generation with hysteria?
And that is just the left hemisphere. Visual media, whether social media, news footage, or movies, can also include absolutistic and outraged language; but through immersive imagery—a row of coffins, a devastated landscape—they tap into deeper and more empathic emotion, which engages the right hemisphere.
Meanwhile, the bottomless scroll of Facebook and other platforms creates, in effect, an endless virtual landscape where we can lose ourselves for minutes and hours until suddenly we wonder: How could I be wasting so much time?
We waste it because the right hemisphere focuses on novelty and change, vigilantly attending to the landscape for new and unknown things—which means if we are not in a physical environment, it will do the same in a virtual environment.
The infinite loop
If our goal was to create propaganda that was maximally powerful, we would have to engage both hemispheres of the mind.
We would include abstract verbal concepts, the kind the left hemisphere specializes in. Examples might be, “Our cause is a just cause” or “Our enemy is evil”.
In essence, this aspect of the propaganda involves the Twitterization of the message. Manifestos, political slogans, cries for justice, and eloquent speeches by elites, all fall into this category—a category that will explode with apps like ChatGPT that can write essays within seconds.
But if the whole mind is to be captured by our propaganda, the right hemisphere must be engaged as well, which means we need to do more than educate people with abstract words. We must make them personally identify with the cause. That means feeling empathy with the cause, and emotionally resonating with everybody on “our side” of the cause—while at the same time experiencing dissonance and dismay with people on the “other side”.
This element of the propaganda could be disseminated through vivid news, video, music, film and other immersive media.
When both elements of the propaganda are at play—the Twitteresque and the experiential—they reinforce each other in an endless loop, and in this way strengthen the message by engaging both hemispheres of the mind.
The self-reinforcing, self-referential nature of the propaganda mind loop creates a digital house of mirrors from which it becomes difficult to escape. No matter which way you look in this infinite loop, you see the same message from different angles and in fresh ways.
The propaganda loop is not the only kind of cognitive warfare to expect in the Machine age, but it gives a bird’s eye view of the two major areas of the mind that must be annexed to subdue the entire mind.
Insofar as the loop seeks to manipulate people, it is a left hemisphere approach to managing society, for according to McGilchrist it is the left hemisphere, not the right, that has this tendency.
The main thesis and warning of McGilchrist’s book, and of his recent sequel The Matter With Things (a 1500-page opus) is that we need a better balance in how we use our minds, one that restores the wholistic right hemisphere to a primary position in how we see the world.
Manipulating the right hemisphere
But it would be a mistake to assume the right hemisphere is always trustworthy and never makes mistakes. It can be deceived, and the emerging technologies of cognitive warfare will make that deception easier than ever.
According to a recent report prepared for NATO, in the near future cognitive warfare may play out in virtual reality environments, such as the Facebook Meta platform.
Consider “Judith”, a young radical who attends a violent demonstration of extremists who chant hateful slogans and set vehicles on fire in the downtown of her city. Whipped up with excitement, Judith smashes a bottle over the head of a counter-demonstrator, and relishes the sight of blood flowing down his face.
But Judith isn’t downtown. Nobody is. She is in her bedroom wearing a virtual reality headset. The simulation is itself disturbing enough; but the problem emphasized in the NATO report is that simulated extremism can lead to real-world extremism.
We might call such techniques not cognitive warfare, but “embodied cognitive warfare”, as they take advantage of the right hemisphere’s particular mode of understanding. This understanding is not represented in words or abstractions, as in the left hemisphere. Rather, this understanding inhabits the body through sense, movement, emotion, and immediacy.
Back to Judith, later the same year, wearing the same headset, now watching a political candidate giving a speech to millions of people in a VR environment. This candidate is more radical than any Judith has ever considered voting for.
However, while Judith thinks she is seeing the same version of the candidate as everybody else, they are each seeing a slightly different version. Here’s how the NATO report explains the technique:
The difference is that for each and every viewer, the candidate’s face has been subtly modified to resemble the viewer. This is done by blending features of the viewer’s face into the candidate’s face in a such a way that the viewer is consciously unaware of any manipulation of the image. The result is that each viewer is more favorably disposed to the candidate than they might have been otherwise.
By the end of the speech, Judith is convinced she will vote for the candidate.
“Good heavens, why would you vote for that candidate?” she is asked later by her fretful parents.
“Because,” Judith replies smugly, “his arguments made sense.” All the while Judith has no idea that the face of the candidate was blended with up to 40% of her own facial features, which is experimentally the amount of manipulation that has been achieved without participants realizing it.
A decade later, and a little older, Judith’s radicalism fades and she ends up working a desk job in a government office. It’s boring, but there are perks, including a brand-new VR headset, which has more sensors than the old model, all of them linked and synched to sensors and devices around her:
Facial muscle analyzers monitor the quality of Judith’s feelings, like sadness, fear, surprise, anger, contempt, disgust and joy.
Galvanic skin response sensors discern how intensely Judith feels an emotion.
EMG (electromyography) measures Judith’s muscle tension, and detects extremely rapid micro-expressions that would be almost impossible to fake.
Eye trackers see what Judith finds visually salient.
Electroencephalography measures how attentive or distracted Judith is at any time.
Judith is now in a relationship of deep symbiosis with her devices. The devices detect the pulse and throb of her body signals with exquisite precision, and in turn, this biometric data can be used against her for propaganda purposes. From the NATO report:
Such monitoring will support the detailed profiling of [users’] behaviors far beyond what has been possible with traditional social media. This in turn will support manipulation of users more effectively than ever before.
Wearable biometrics were also featured in a talk at this year’s World Economic Forum, where Nita Farahany, speaking with utopian left-hemisphere confidence—the kind that would horrify Iain McGilchrist—promised that “Fitbits for the brain” will be the “primary way in which we interact with all of the rest of our technology”—and not in the distant future, but in the “near-term future”.
All this is for our benefit, we are assured.
And things could go further. It may one day be possible to weaponize holographic technology, allowing us to project propaganda into physical landscapes. As suggested by a US Army report in 2017:
If the holographic technology advances to where holographic systems could be portable, the display large enough, and the resolution high enough, holograms could be used as camouflage or to augment reality for deception.
Imagine our Judith, now elderly and repentant of the sins of her youth, yet none the wiser. She decides to join a protest organized by her local church—a peaceful protest this time—against the oppressive technocracy that her world has become, but as she steps out the door, a wondrous vision appears in the sky: it is Jesus himself, encouraging her to return home and to pray instead of protesting.
Astonished, Judith goes back inside and never protests again—and yet she is gladly compliant, believing she has witnessed a miracle.
Many Machines
In a dystopian Machine future, we could all end up integrated with the propaganda we are exposed to. No longer passive viewers of false information, we may become embodied actors in the live theater of the deception. The right hemisphere—which ought to be the mind’s “master” according to McGilchrist—could be duped and more mastered than it is now.
The NATO reports I cited recognize at least two enemies, external ones like China and internal ones, such as political or social groups. This hints at a final point that is easily overlooked, but essential.
We often think of “the Machine” as a unitary thing. Certainly, as a metaphor, “Machine” is useful for expressing the dominance of technology in our lives, controlled by a ruling minority of social managers. But this metaphor is misleading. There is not one Machine, but many.
Two of the biggest are in the West and China. Within the West, the deepening divisions between the political left and right may one day give rise to separate Machine societies—and even if they don’t, the opposing camps are already deploying the tools of cognitive warfare, engaging the left and right hemispheres in self-reinforcing propaganda loops.
The result, for those of us conscious of this warfare, can be a feeling of deep distrust of the media, government, and the internet: a feeling of being continuously influenced, gaslighted, and deceived.
And for those who are not paying attention, the propaganda does not feel like propaganda at all, but factual and true, seamlessly weaving itself into our thought processes, as natural and comforting as fresh air entering our lungs.
Some of us may be conscious of both polarities. We feel caught between experiences of dissonance and paranoia on the one hand, and integration and trust on the other—caught between Machines at war. We are victims in the new war, and strangely, we are soldiers in it too.
Today I went out for a walk with my younger son—a budding rocket scientist, I suspect. He steered a hobby drone ahead of us, gliding it under tree branches and over Mennonite maple syrup lines with slight nudges of his thumbs, controlling its subtlest movements as if it was an extension of his own body.
In the “smart future” that is being planned for us, we are the drones, an extension of the Machine, a peripheral nerve of its own brain, manipulated by the subtle nudges of its digital fingers.
In 1945 J.R.R. Tolkien anticipated the rising power of the Machines, and asked his son Christopher, “What’s their next move?” Now, almost 80 years later, we know the answer: the next move is my move, and yours.
Image Credit: Cybergirl wearing VR goggles