Mass Confusion and American Politics

   "The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent."

     Sun Tzu-The Art of War

Over the years, confusion has been a routine topic of interest to me for many reasons, whether they be confusion as symptoms of brain illnesses or injury or the confusion of languages in the biblical story of the tower of babel or...pertaining to the quote above...confusion as a weapon and tactic of war.

      Confusing an opponent or enemy is not a new phenomenon and has been used throughout the history of games and warfare. When you have successfully confused an enemy while you retain a high level of clarity and functionality, you have a distinct and pronounced advantage over them.

Coupled with distraction, confusion is one of the most effective psychological strategies you can use against an antagonist or opponent. It weakens their defensive capabilities and leaves them vulnerable to attack.

You can terrorize, neutralize, or destroy an enemy more effectively if you have confused them and successfully cloaked your true intentions.

When I was going to school in Missoula, I wrote a short story called "The State of Confusion" and the premise of the story was about two guys on a bus talking about a system established to govern the people by mass confusion and distraction and one of the characters referred to the government of this time period as the state of confusion or confusion state, meaning the government itself was confusion.

     I lost the story, unfortunately, but I remember its main points. One of them was that if you use confusion as a political weapon, not just a military one, you don't even need to limit freedoms to oppress people, you could just use their own freedoms against them to confuse and distract them and create an illusion of liberty by weaponizing the freedom of speech and expression against the people and create a distortion and confusion of what is real and what is not, what is happening, who is doing what, what is right and what is wrong, and so on.

     I see a lot of this in American politics today. Mass confusion is a major problem in our country. With the mass propagation of conspiracies and the dishonesty and lack of forthrightness by our leaders, no one really knows what to believe anymore.

       The greatest vulnerability of the freedom of speech is deception, and American media and the internet are ripe and effective vectors for the transmission of deceptions and falsehoods that serve to distort reality, mislead, and confuse the people, children and adults alike, and keep them from having an accurate and realistic understanding of what is going on. It effectively induces a functional insanity on the population (even though many who act on the deception could have their functionality questioned)

If this is a systematic process, mass confusion could be quite an effective system of control. It could also be used as a strategy to undercut, weaken, or even destroy an established system, like...a government, or a society. Confusion is one of the oldest tactics of psychological warfare in human history. It's just technology like cell phones, computers, and the internet makes accessing people's minds and using confusion to achieve an objective is all the more easy.

If you have clarity and understanding and awareness in politics and war, you have an advantage. A massive advantage, especially over the confused, the disoriented, and the distracted. 

Most Americans these days? They are pretty confused and distracted. Their ideologies are confused, the media distorts and misleads, and the entertainment distracts, all the while people with more awareness and more resources place themselves in very padded and comfortable positions. 

Who is more in control, the wolf in all its superior senses, or the blind rabbit its toying with?

There are people in this country who have a level of awareness and vigilance as well as high quality sensory perception that give them a massive advantage over the confused and the distracted. Some of them act like shepherds to the rest of us, but some of them are wolves hungering to prey upon any confused and disoriented stragglers that they can. 

A massively distracted and confused populace can make this all the more easy, both for the shepherd and the wolf. 

In our society, it is deception that confuses us the most.  Every society's weakness is deception. You can't destroy something good and noble and strong without deceiving its defenders, and deception is one of liberty's greatest pitfalls.

Good night