Warfare is about imposing one’s will on another or resisting the imposition of another’s will. So warfare has always been decided primarily in military “information dominance,” which specialists call “the cognitive domain.”
It’s true now more than ever when the most effective tools of warfare are there in instant social media to undermine people’s will to resist or galvanize them into a certain form of mass psychosis: a sort of mass belief system that ensures uniformity of thought.
Not surprisingly, perception dominance is communist China’s principal strategic tool.
Its adversaries offer no defense; they’re saved to some degree merely by the reality that Beijing is an imperfect practitioner of the art.
Outcomes at the supreme level of warfare are determined by those who dominate the battle of wills. So it matters that we know who we are. Will, based on mental and emotional focus at individual and societal levels, determines what we do and how we survive.
So it’s critical to ask, “Who are we?” and quite separately, “Who am I?”
These questions are the essence of sovereignty: group and individual. And if we can’t answer these questions, then we find it difficult to justify any of our actions; neither can we adequately determine where we’re going as a group or an individual. Any lack of clarity or purpose will ensure our subordination—as a group, nation, or as an individual—to others.
Moreover, a lack of clarity about our deep identity implies confusion about beliefs that evolve from identity, experience, and circumstances.
It’s particularly important to ask these questions when the larger and smaller worlds of our existence are mired in change and uncertainty. It’s at such times that people will hastily accept identities and purpose based on the hysteria alarums of fear, the progenitor of mass psychosis, which gathers people into almost incomprehensible and illogical forms of group recognition so that they can seemingly find protection.
“My own will protect me!”
This is political correctness at its most xenophobic and, ironically, at its most blindly self-destructive.
Political correctness may provide a temporary and totally superficial answer to “who we are” but at the expense of “who I am.” Leadership and balanced, harmonious governance require us to never subordinate the “I” to the “we,” or vice-versa, lest the individual and the society equally lose their way, often down the generations. Defeat, enslavement, relegation, and fear create lost individuals in lost societies.
And just as the “I” versus “we” requires balance, so, too, is the balance critical between belief and knowledge and between knowledge and wisdom.
The long-defeated early peoples of the northern and southern American continent, Africa, Eurasia, and other places, can never return to who they were. Still, they may regain a sense of purpose by preserving some aspects of identity. There’s no going back to a golden past. There’s only the possibility of going forward to a golden future, provided there’s clarity of vision based on clarity of identity.
Rudyard Kipling captured the necessity for self-possession in the eye of the whirlwind in his 1895 poem, “If”:
“If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating ... ... You’ll be a Man, my son!”
This was a call to balance and self-control in difficult circumstances: to stand aside from the crowd of the fear-driven. But this sense of self-possession requires a deep knowledge of self and society—the “I” and the “we”—which can only come with a developed sense of purposefully acquired wisdom deriving from individual experience and introspection.
Where, however, has balance gone? Where has wisdom gone in a world so now devolved from long-term belief systems into short-term materialism and transactionalism?
The “interim belief systems,” like everything else about the transitional phase between historical eras, initially generate a “unified panic,” a psychotic surging of population masses, such as the murmuration of starling flocks, without a predetermined purpose other than to flee before danger. The starlings, like humans, swirl in tight flocks, blindly following the direction of their immediate neighbors.
The fear of breaking formation causes panic.
We’re in that interregnum in history—the period between kings—but this time between belief systems, just as we’re in an interregnum between defined periods of strategic power.
In many respects, the individuals and societies emerging in command of their destiny—and often the destiny of others—have a deep sense of identity and a committed sense of purpose: a grand strategy. And identity is often based on the myths of cultural origins, nationhood, and civilization.
Much of this is derived from the marriage of peoples with geography, creating narrowly specific forms of logic and imperatives of survival to suit our particular circumstances according to the terroir that sustains us.
This evolves into the civilizational sense of context, which brings with it the confidence and apparent sense of a right to name all things, even stars beyond the control of Earth-bound man, and to define all forms of measurement and value. We may romanticize this sense of civilization and mourn—in the “West,” whatever that may be—the “decline of the West.” Still, it’s worth considering that we create and see “our” respective civilizations as the broad atmosphere surrounding the evolution of our individual and group confidence.
To a degree, we can define the phenomenon of “civilization,” but we can less easily define our own civilization. Indeed, if we think about it too much, then it has already evaporated, and we’ve lost the mythical blue-sky ether that encases and defines us.
Civilization is that cloak we carry with us. This warming cloak stirs and flaps with the changing winds and—if we’re unconscious of it but conscious of ourselves—ennobles us with the confidence to determine and control our future and take command of the unknown.
