Psychological Warfare and the United States

    I have been fascinated by the ways and means warfare can be carried out for most of my life. I went through phases of being fascinated by the weapons to being fascinated by the tactics and strategies to being fascinated by the types and forms warfare can take and why we fight wars to begin with. 

         The form of warfare I have been particularly fascinated by is psychological warfare, especially in recent years.  From my vantage point, all warfare starts in the mind and the mind remains a massively important theater of all wars.  If you can conquer the minds of your enemy, you don't need to even fire a shot. 

     The more advanced our mind warfare gets and the more advanced our propaganda gets, the potential for influencing and maybe even controlling target groups becomes more pronounced and more effective.  

    Since the human mind is a giant information processor, psychological warfare is at its heart information-based. Information is the primary avenue for psychological warfare and information is how the war for the hearts and minds of your friends and enemies is waged.

     Of course, information is very diverse. There are many types of information and the human mind interprets, processes, and comprehends different types of information differently. We comprehend meaning differently based on different cultures and even languages. We comprehend different ideas and ideologies differently based on cultural factors, upbringing, and even neurology can play a big role in how we process different ideas and beliefs.

        Even with the challenges facing information and psychological warfare, it still is one of the most important, if not the most important, theaters of war. Every ideological conflict, ranging from the war on terror to the war against Nazism and Communism get their source from the conceptions of a few human beings. 

 The tenets of all of our enemies beliefs and goals and the justifications for conflict all come from the human mind and the thoughts of just a few people and put into practice and fought for by their followers. 

 This demonstrates the massive importance of understanding psychology and the psychology of ideas and belief systems. If you can find a way to influence and change the minds of your enemies, physical violence can become unnecessary. 

      In the United States, most of our major problems we face are psychological ones. People both on the left and the right acting under the influence of and on behalf of the ideologies they subscribe to. The storming of the capitol is an example of ideas driving people to commit socially unacceptable and violent actions.  

      The protests in the summer are another example of idea-driven behavior and violence. 

 Both of these events were triggered by information given to the actors by an authoritative source, like the media or the president.  

 It serves as an example of the power of information and the power of ideas over the human mind that once a person or group of people subscribes to an ideology or aligns themselves with a person or group of power all it takes is information from an authoritative source to drive massive protests or political violence. 

   These actions like the ones we have seen this last year show the power the media has in conveying ideas and information to host minds that can lead to some destructive outcomes.  It shows how much power ideas and beliefs have over our minds once we believe them and as a result why psychological warfare and the war for the human mind is such an important theater of conflict. 

 If you can conquer or change a mind, you can prevent political violence and greatly reduce the danger of movements that lead to things like terrorism and the destruction of life or property. 

     The media is how you target the minds of the populace, and if they have a particular agenda and a particular narrative to reinforce, the use of the media to convey ideas and information that is intended to achieve a particular social and political outcome will be quite obvious when put into practice. The fact that the audience is willing to act on the information demonstrates the power over the mind the media has. 

    We see a lot of this in the United States.  The media here is very inflammatory with its reporting and broadcasting, and if you want to see psychological warfare in action firsthand, watch the news with the vantage point of mind warfare, and if you look closely you can see how the media pits people against each other like a sport and how it fuels social and political unrest in the interests of profit margins and power plays.