Battling Archetypes

Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

  1. Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

    HACE 5 DÍAS

    Podcast | Merciless Sovereign Goes Hungry

    The Archetype Series: Recap and Context Last week, we started a new series, which is on actual archetypes, because what I have been trying to do is go back to where all of this began for me, which was in eastern Ukraine, looking at the Russian occupiers’ media. I saved thousands — 10,000 articles from the Russian occupiers’ media from between 2014 and 2018. In them, I found some archetypes at the time, but I did not have the word for it. I have told you the mother and the maiden story, where we had that operation where I was sent to find a common-law wife and her underage daughter who were about to be chopped into tiny pieces by a Ukrainian Nazi. The moment I heard about that operation — I did not know anything about Jung or archetypes — I knew that the story sounded artificial to me. Then I saw the reaction of the people around me and above me in the chain of command. They did not react in the same way that I did. Only one other person did, who was a London Metropolitan Police officer. We were like: what are they doing? This is a ridiculous operation. There began my suspicion that Russian propaganda was, either knowingly or not, using archetypes to manipulate our ideas of right and what is right, beneath our conscious minds. Last week I started with the first three archetypes, and one of them was the merciful sovereign. A Year of Volya Radio Over the year, I have introduced you to the Disinfolklore analytical method. I have gone through several different series. I went through the four years of the war, and everything I did is posted on my website, disinfolklore.eu. That is my main website, and all of the Volya shows up until about two months ago, or a month and a half ago, are there on the Spotify. If you just press play, it starts with me, because it is all about me in this small slot. I have also been posting them a bit more systematically on my other website, which is disinfolklore.net. Disinfolklore.eu is the processed, sliced-and-diced, structured twelve-tool presentation: the origins of the Disinfolklore analytical method. It is over a million words, all in very short passages, over 1,700 short passages. It is a response to people who really liked and were interested in what I had to say and my ideas, but did not or do not have the capability to read the long Substack pieces where some of the material began. Then the 44,000 tweets — all of those have been sliced and diced and put in there as well. On disinfolklore.net, which is based on the Substack and which is part of my tripartite Substacks — Power of Mana, Finding Manuland, and Decoding Trolls — one of which I use to publish pensées, which are basically my tweets with a bit of processing to try and preserve those. Then mainly on disinfolklore.net is where I post, and where tomorrow, for instance, I will post this particular show. Trump’s Tweet on Hungary and Dumézil’s Trifunctional Hypothesis Donald Trump tweeted this week. Let me read what he has to say: “My administration stands ready to use the full economic might of Hungary’s economy, as we’ve done for our great allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán” — spelt correctly, believe it or not — “and the Hungarian people ever need it. We are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. President Donald J. Trump.” As many of you know, I worked out, through trying to process this experience that I had in eastern Ukraine in 2016 with the mother and the maiden story, and ended up looking at Dumézil. Dumézil is one of those people in human culture who discovers something that nobody else has discovered, yet all the data was available to them. To cut a long story short, in the mid-1930s, by looking at various myths from different Indo-European traditions, Georges Dumézil suddenly had a moment of insight, which he then spent the rest of his life articulating and elucidating. The moment of insight was that Indo-European cultures — from Ireland to India, the eight main branches of living Indo-European languages — organised themselves according to three dimensions, three archetypes, three functions: sovereignty, security, and prosperity. All of my work is impacted by this. Donald J. Trump and those around him have probably never heard of Georges Dumézil. Yet here is Donald playing the merciful sovereign. Literally, I am ticking off every element: his message conforms to these archetypes. Obviously, at this point, no one has ever heard of any of my work. These people have not heard of Georges Dumézil any more than I had. Yet they are kind of going through a tick list. He is talking about “my administration stands ready to use the full economic might.” There we have administration — that is sovereignty. The full economic might — that is the third function, the fertility. These map onto the three castes in Indian culture. We have them in Ireland. We have them across the entire Indo-European world. There are some elements of Georges Dumézil’s work which are still discussed and still a bit controversial, but it is widely accepted now that not only are Indo-European myths organised in this way, but the tripartite structure of our governments and of our communities is as well. This stretches all the way back to the Yamnaya in Mykolaivka village on the right bank of the Dnieper River, about 40 kilometres south of Zaporizhzhia. We know that because, generally speaking, if you find an element in a living Indo-European language east of Ukraine — mainly Indian or Iranian — and you find that same element in an Indo-European language west of Ukraine, then you can, on the balance of probabilities absent any other evidence, deduce that that element was present before the split. Before one brother and sister of the Yamnaya community went west from Mykolaivka village or the area between the Don and the Dnieper, and one brother and sister went east, and they both carried with them this element. There are lots of exceptions to this general rule, but when you find an element in every Indo-European language family — all eight living Indo-European families — and then you also find it in the Anatolian family, then you know for certain it is part of the common source and was present. We have a few examples of this. I believe I have identified one, which is the M-N sound. I have written about that extensively. My main mantra is: look for the mana in the meme, look for the energy, look for the psychic energy, the synchronicity, the libido, the X factor — but I call it mana, M-N. In this tweet, he has administration — the sovereignty. Full economic might — the fertility, which maps onto the farmer economy, the female aspect of society, which is the third caste in India. Hungary’s economy, as we have done for our great allies in the past. If Orbán wins, if they ever need it, we are excited to invest in the future prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued leadership. This is archetypal merciful sovereign. We have Orbán himself playing a sovereign, but then we have the big daddy playing the merciful sovereign. He sends over his son, Vance, to go there, and then he decides to weigh in and uses Dumézilian language. What I am trying to teach, and what I now see with X-ray specs because I analysed this corpus — because it was so strange to me — is that I now literally see it everywhere. That is the perspective I am trying to help us see through, because when we see a tweet like this, if we can analyse exactly what he is doing — and it is very simple what he is doing, but he does not know it — these archetypal structures, they are not setting out to play the merciful sovereign, but he is acting in that way. That is just a practical use for what I am trying to teach and the perspective I have learned to see. The Changeling: Stealth Genocide and the Theft of Identity You will remember last week I went through the mother and the maiden; I began at the beginning, the bridge troll; the merciful sovereign — and of course the bridge troll, here we are in the Hormuz Strait, this whole structure is playing out there; and then we had the Ukrainian Nazi, the bogeyman. Now I am going to talk about the changeling: stealth genocide and the theft of identity. Stealth genocide is a phrase I forged — I think in August 2022. I started using the term genocide in respect of the full-scale invasion after about ten days. At the same time, the then president of Poland, who was also a lawyer, started using it. Then, of course, President Zelenskyy used the term genocide when he visited Bucha and when he saw the dead bodies. Lawyers were very cautious about using the term genocide. Russia has been doing everything it can for the past ten years to determine what the term means, because everything they do, as is the case with Donald, is really a confession. You can predict what they are going to do by looking at their language and the archetypal structures in their language and what they are doing. This is actually the hardest archetype to name, but it is one we must learn fastest because it is the engine of what I have come to call Russia’s stealth genocide. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. In Ireland, the Stolen Child — W.B. Yeats wrote an amazing poem about the Stolen Child, which the Waterboys put to music, which is beautiful. If you go into Apple Music or Spotify, you will find it. It is a ridiculously beautiful poem and will transport you through these beautiful valleys in the west of Ireland, which I know very well. In folklore across Europe, the changeling is the child swapped in the cradle. The parents look down and see their baby, but it is not their baby. It is an imp, a revenant, wearing the baby’s face. The parents do not notice for years, but by the time they do, the true child is lost forever in the other world. The changeling tale

    1 h 5 min
  2. Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

    9 ABR

    Podcast | The Corpus and the Elephant in the Room

    This data set of 10,000 propaganda items, which I collected in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018, is the basis of Disinfolklore. It is the basis of my insight about archetypes. I had not really systematically gone through it to take out all of the main archetypes and sub-archetypes from this corpus, as it were. I have done this now, and I have quite a number of individual papers on it, which I thought I would go through. I suppose the first thing to address is the elephant in the room. I have three points to make on Donald at the moment. I cannot think of another orientating topic — or Iran, let us call it Iran then, to avoid Donald — and how it relates to Ukraine. First, I think on one level, this so-called peace agreement, this so-called ceasefire, if it is real, if it was real, would be an appropriate acceptance by the United States, by Donald, and by Vance of their position in this mess that they got involved in. They had one option of escalating and losing a million American soldiers and treasure beyond all comprehension in a war that was impossible to win, given the hundreds of thousands of drones — which we must assume, if not millions — we must assume that Iran has ready for this, and the plans. In a position like that, I would analyse this as an honourable retreat from a situation they obviously should never have gotten into. That is one point. I am quite happy about that because I did not want a war. I understand there are a lot of people now who did not want the war who are kind of quite rightfully trolling Donald with the humiliation of this deal. The humiliation, in my analysis, is not this deal. It is the situation our country found itself in. This retreat is the most honourable thing that could happen. What This Means for Ukraine The second thing is what this means for Ukraine. If — and obviously this is all in fantasy land and total fairy land — if this peace agreement came to fruition and there was peace in our time and Iran had the sanctions lifted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then the example for Russia would be: cut your losses and leave Ukraine. There is no dishonour in realising you have made a terrible error. Look at America. Look what it has done. It has the strength, the capacity to admit this was an absolute disaster. The entire Middle East was about to be depopulated and Iran was going to eviscerate millions of lives, perhaps. Therefore, unlike Russia in early March 2022, when the dogs on the street could have and did understand — and many of us did and many of us wrote about it at the time — we understood the true enormity of the error that Russia had made within a few days. The reverse Napoleon attack, as I archetyped it at the time on the 1st of March: invading Ukraine with too few resources to achieve its goals. Ukraine’s dominant strategy was as Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy is described so brilliantly, with such pathos, such mythos — and it is part of the creation of this archetype of Russia as unbeatable — that all he had to do was draw the French further and further and further in, and that would take care of them. It has gone the same way for Ukraine. Now we have an example of a superpower which realised that it overreached and has done what hopefully most of us manage to do in our personal lives. When we realise we have made a terrible mistake, we just get out of the situation. We understand the sunk cost fallacy, which the Russians clearly do not and just have no conception of: that at any single point in time, everything that you have invested into pursuing a particular strategy is lost anyway. It should not form any part of your decision about whether or not at this moment in time it is the right thing to continue. If this peace agreement held and if the situation stays as it is now for more than the next five minutes — which, frankly, I doubt it will — in an ideal world, this would be a fantastic example to everyone. This is what perhaps J.D. Vance would try and sell as he defenestrates Donald. Donald’s Pattern and the Ceasefire Troll The third thing I had to say was really, obviously, the pattern we all know in Donald: this will not stay because he will realise he has done something terrible, the whole thing is terrible, and he will regret it and then he will send off the tweets, and maybe this is the end of him. I do not think any of us would be complacent about making that prediction. I thought it was the end of him on January 6th. I thought it was the end of him after the January 6th inquiry. I thought it was the end of him when he was held liable for the 34 felony counts. I have learned from that experience. This certainly does not look too good for him because I recognise that my first point is a very — not that many people probably share it. From a strategic point of view, I do not mind that so much. I do not want the people who were opposed to the war in the first place now to troll Donald to such an extent that he is then trolled into resuming the war and bringing about this terrible catastrophe for the United States, and not least for the Middle Eastern countries and Iran. If there was a ground invasion, Iran would do to the United States what has been done to Russia today. That is really all I had to say about that. Maybe the last thing I wrote, which was basically influenced by a data set all of us are really tuned into — though most people in the real world are not, because we have been following Ukraine — to the extent that we can record what has been going on over the past two years with Istanbul peace talks, Riyadh peace talks, Qatar, and all of that malarkey, and then Donald archetyping that he wanted peace, though we all know clearly he does not. He is just surrendering Ukraine to the Russians for whatever reason. This whole re-archetyping of the content of the word peace, of peace talks, of ceasefire, and of threats: this is a big concern in a negative way to me at the moment. Watching everyone fall for this ceasefire troll saddened me — all of these experts — because you are just like: have you not been paying attention to what has been going on in Ukraine? The mirroring where Ukraine offers the ceasefire, then Donald and Putler say they want ceasefires, and it is just all this nightmare of the decoupling of meaning from particular sounds and from peace meaning war, which characterises the last hundred years of Russian history, which Orwell himself picked up well. It was strong enough an archetype and a decoupling from the true meaning even in — when was 1984 written? In 1948, I think it was. Then to hear Donald selling this pup in the public sphere and people, serious people, falling for it and promoting it and not seeing through it. I recognise that is slightly contradictory to what I was just saying about how, on one level, this capitulation to Iran — given where we are today, and given the lack of power to prosecute the war that the United States has, as has been shown over the past few weeks. Iran has not even shown its hand in terms of the drones and everything we have seen Ukraine batter the Russians with. I recognise there is a slight contradiction between saying that and also the fact that archetyping Donald as this Machiavellian who is tricking everyone with his ceasefire — I mean, all of us have an opinion on this, but surely those pictures of him, that film of him beside the bunny rabbit on the balcony of the White House, like the Queen of England, talking about killing millions of Iranians while a bunny kind of waves and Melania — I mean, it is absolutely insane, and he must be insane not to see all of that. If he was a Machiavellian, this whole ceasefire stuff — and maybe they are just holding back while they prepare and put special forces in line — I hope that is not what is going on. I do not get the feeling that is what is going on. We do see this same misuse of language from him, and many people we might have respected before we followed the Ukraine war — who write for the FT or the New York Times, the think tanks, Carnegie people — all suddenly going: ceasefire, it is going to be a ceasefire, that is great. I referenced the experience I have talked about before, where the Russian model of ceasefire is: you call it a ceasefire, you get everyone to agree to it, and then you just continually shoot off your artillery. It is only ever a ceasefire in the information space. I hate that that lesson has now travelled from eastern Ukraine, from Luhansk, from even the Ukraine war space, to now globally. Probably billions of people last night did not sleep very well because they were worried. They woke up this morning, checked their phones to see: has nuclear annihilation happened? Because he said he was going to end a civilisation. I just hate that that trolling has gone from page eight in the New York Post in the 1980s, through January 6th — which was just really only concerned Americans — through all of these other minor incidents, to this mega tweet on Sunday. The conduct of war and peace is not, as it used to be a mere 20 years ago, conducted by diplomats in parliaments, in hushed rooms at the UN Security Council. Now it is conducted basically solely by Twitter, by Untruth Social. The Decision I Made in the Autumn of 2019 On the other hand, I have mixed feelings about this, because I bet everything that I had — all my intellectual power, all my time, all my energy — that trolling and trolls was the most significant phenomenon in our civilisation. That was the decision I made in the autumn of 2019. That was the problem I was going to look into and try to come up with an understanding of what Donald was doing when he roiled humanity through Twitter. As I say, this was pre-COVID even. It was not such a life and death matter then. He had not killed that many. He did not kill a million Americans unnecessarily through COVID, or however many people have died

    46 min
  3. Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

    2 ABR

    Iran, Inevitability Farming, Reflexive Control

    Munich Speech Forecast It’s a very interesting day, a very good day for Disinfolklore and for what I forecast on the basis of data back in February in my Munich speech, February 2025. I see what Donald is doing to all of us, to the markets, to the whole of humanity really, through the medium of all these various things which most of us have never really heard about, like helium and fertiliser and all these things. Basically, Donald is wrapping us up inside a Disinfolklore universe. This for me is the primary purpose of everything that is going on at the moment. It’s good to be able to voice this and talk about this. I was going to talk today — I was on the fifth episode of the five speeches which I prepared after James asked about reflexive control about five weeks ago. This is the final speech. The most perfect example ever of reflexive control is in our information space at the moment, with Donald starting an unlawful war and then expecting everyone else to come and rescue him from it. This is what I’ve called inevitability farming, which is beloved of authoritarians, where you create the inevitability. That, in its essence, is reflexive control. We don’t consider it part of military doctrine as such. If you consider everything that Donald is doing as part of a combat strategy to occupy, dominate our minds and to exercise coercive control over every choice we make in our lives — whether that’s about women over their bodies, whether it involves family, whether it’s about shopping, whether it’s about millions of people potentially starving to death in Malaysia unless they do something — then the reflexive control which we’re watching happen on a global scale now is precisely what I watched operating inside Russian-occupied Ukraine, 2015 to 2018. I was going to talk about that. James’s question five weeks ago is completely relevant today, and the structures which the Disinfolklore analytical method provides enable us to interpret the news which is going on today just as much as five weeks ago, and hopefully onwards into time. Disinfolklore.eu is the main website. That’s where my oeuvre going forward into the future will live, along with disinfolklore.net, where there’s the newsletter. That was my proposal. I had a couple of tweets this week. I was inspired again this week by all of this malarkey, and I wrote a few things which I could talk about briefly and then go on to the main part. Re-archetyping Ukraine Obviously my main project, and many of our main projects since the beginning of the war, was to — now I have the language to describe it — re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine. My ambition for this, as many of you know, is to re-archetype humanity’s perception of Ukraine and ancient Ukraine and the past 6,000 years. What we’re obviously seeing this week in the Middle East, which is bringing joy to many of our hearts after a very hard, metaphorically hard winter for us by comparison to Ukrainians, is President Zelensky in the Middle East, bringing arms and bringing hope and modelling how you act as a superpower. The Comedian, the Druid, and the Dunce Yet again, in my March or February 2025 speech, the Munich speech, I archetyped the entire war in Ukraine as a titanic struggle between Druidy Don — Disinfolklore — Duncy Putin, and the Comedian. Druidy Don: he’s truthy. He’s not really a druid, but he certainly models one. Duncy Putin: he never learns, wakes up each morning like Pangloss or like your favourite folktale hero with no memory of what he learned — or your favourite AI chatbot — with no memory of what he learned from the day before. The Comedian, the arch-comedian: the Russians obviously tried to archetype him as the comedian, as a bit of a joke, but the joke is on them because he’s a great actor, a proper comedian, a proper master of the juridical realm of sovereignty, which is the archetype going back thousands of years in Indo-European culture, and also of the magico-religious. Whereas Don, Druidy Don — no one can doubt his magical powers to wrap humanity, including the markets. I’m following the apocalyptic FT Financial Times app on my phone. It’s quite funny, they keep falling for these trolls that the war is going to be over in five minutes. These are the money people, and every corner of humanity is being wrapped up inside this Disinfolklore universe. On the other hand, we have the Comedian, President Zelensky, who is using his powers for good. No one can doubt he’s got the powers. You see him in Saudi Arabia and all these countries, with the greatest army humanity has seen, blowing up Russian oil wells like there’s no tomorrow. There certainly is no tomorrow for Russia. The next day he arrives in Saudi Arabia, casually as you like, and Don and Rubio and everyone trying to cast negative spells all over him, but they bounce off him like raindrops off a Mackintosh. The Sorcerer and His Apprentice I made this prophecy using the Disinfolklore analytical method. Am I looking at the archetype of the apprentice and the master? I made this a month before Prigozhin’s coup because it seemed to me, looking at the data, that Prigozhin, the Chef, the Chef Sorcerer, was in fact Druidy Duncy Putin’s, the Chief Sorcerer’s, successor — anointed successor. That was just looking at this archetypal story of the sorcerer and his apprentice, which reappears in different Indo-European traditions. At a certain point, the apprentice is ready to take over from the master, but the master is afraid that the apprentice will kill him. That is, as expressed by Georges Dumézil, one of my great influences, the plight of the sorcerer. It just so happens that the Russians archetyped Prigozhin to try and disguise and conceal his role inside the power vertical — maybe not always intentionally, but it had the effect of doing it — as the Chef. An archetypal identity. I then archetyped him as the Chef Sorcerer, as in sauce. The Chef himself had published a book of fairy tales and got Donald elected the first time with his Internet Research Agency and his Disinfolklore propagation apparatus. Prigozhin’s Changing Character One of the indicators I had for why Prigozhin’s role was suddenly changing, his character was changing, was when we started to see him being quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other conventional media operations as a kind of truth-teller, the counterpoint to Putler. Even if Ukraine said this or that, or one of us said this or that on Twitter, no one would listen to us. Prigozhin was being used as a kind of ventriloquist for the truth in these media organs. It seemed to me that this was a change in character, because up until that point, for people like me who had been following Wagner since 2015, when I first physically came in touch with them in eastern Ukraine, this was a brutal operation, a Nazi operation, part of the Russian army, coupled with this Disinfolklore propagation apparatus that managed to get Donald elected and Brexit done and didn’t quite drive humanity nuts. Through the medium now of Donald, they are succeeding down the line and driving humanity nuts with all of this blowing hot and cold, ten-dimensional chess or whatever they’re archetyping Donald’s nonsense as today. It was that change in role of Prigozhin — suddenly from Putin’s chef, someone who was always archetyped as being outside the power vertical, wasn’t quite proper, wasn’t part of the establishment, the security establishment, was an oligarch, archetyped as Putin’s chef. He wasn’t in charge of Rosneft and all that. It was his being given these plum jobs in Ukraine, such as the Kyiv region — assassinating all the political leaders, assassinating President Zelensky — and then given the plum job of Bakhmut or Artemivsk to conquer, which was supposed to be taken by the end of July. He was given Popasna, killed thousands of people in Popasna, and then got bogged down in Bakhmut. Obviously most people in the real world weren’t following this. I was watching how his character was changing in the media. I see that same pattern today with President Zelensky. I wrote a piece about that because I think this kind of magical process is going on with President Zelensky at the moment. Obviously dark days lie ahead and there are dark days on the front in Ukraine, but at the same time I see the same signs that I saw then: that something’s going to happen. Putler Dials Don Up to Eleven I couple that with my insight that I think Putler is on his last legs. I wrote a piece today about how I think Putler has dialled up Druidy Don Disinfolklore to eleven, riffing off Spinal Tap. This is what we’re seeing now. He’s kind of maxing out on it, because he or she who controls Druidy Don Disinfolklore will rule Russia. Whoever has the Epstein kompromat or however they’re controlling Don — the chip in his head, God knows what it is — whoever in the Russian power vertical controls that will control Russia. Putler is hanging on for dear life to it. We see this acceleration of madness: the selling out of all of the allies, permanent changes in our global security architecture, and as far as I can see, the inevitable destruction, sadly, of the American military, if, as I strongly suspect is going to happen, they’re going to do a ground invasion of Iran, which is going to turn into, I believe, a worse disaster than even Iraq. Of course, all that suits Duncy Putin: this chaos. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s bombing Isluga and Yalabuga and all of these things. Long may that continue. As ever, anything Russia touches turns to rubbish. Preliminary Thoughts: Where We Are Today Those were just some of my preliminary thoughts to set the context of where I think we are today. I’m hyper-aware I don’t want to contribute to this craziness that has entered all of our brains. It’s exactly the same craziness we saw in MAGA people in America

    1 h 4 min
  4. 27 MAR

    Podcast | How to Slay the Disinfo Dragon in Real Time (Part 2)

    The Trito Myth Continued Trita is a herdsman whose cattle are stolen by the negation, by the snake. In Vedic India, the negation is called the Naga. Who wouldn’t argue that Druidy Don is today’s negation? Or Duncey Putler, the negation of the post–World War II legal order. Then with the help of Zeus Pater — Zeus Pater, Skyfather, Zeus in Greek, Jupiter in Rome — in Vedic India, or sometimes on his own, Trita manages to get his cattle back. Capital from Cattle After retrieving his cattle, his capital — the word capital comes from cattle, and that’s how fundamental they were — he establishes the first ritual, the first rite of sacrifice, to commemorate, to memorialise and give thanks to the Skyfather. This culture-forming sacrifice, self-sacrifice manifesting as the sacrifice of the twin. We have Trita, third man. Manu, the first man — human, or Mannus in Germanic tradition. In India, it’s Manu. Yama in India, coming from Aryaman, who gives his name to Iran, to the name Iran. In the Zoroastrian era, Yama starts his life as kind of the lord of the treasury, becomes celestialised, archetyped as a deity, and then is transmitted into Tibetan Buddhism and into Hinduism. We see this in Odin, who is on the same level as Yama — again, archetyping, all archetyping along with Indra as well — of the Lord of Death, the first monarch. Again that rich sound at the end of monarch. The first king to self-sacrifice and die and lead all other humans into the afterlife. This is the function of Yama, twin, over Manu, who’s the first sacrificer. Manu is in the same position as Trita. The MN Sound Across Traditions In the Germanic tradition, we have Tuisto, whose name also means twin, and Mannus, with two Ns, different from Manu but pretty close, who’s the first of the Germanic-speaking peoples. In Wales, we have Manawyddan. In Ireland, we’ve got Éremón, who’s cognate, I believe, with Aryaman — the first high king of Ireland in the Indo-Europeans after the three invasions of Ireland. In Iran, Aryaman, who gave his name to Iran. The same immanences in all these traditions, the same archetypes, the same sounds, the same MN sounds in all of these names passed over thousands of years. Skyfather and Ukraine How much do we talk about the sky today? Sky Shield protecting Ukraine’s sky. How appropriate that this should have been an imminence in the minds of the first Indo-Europeans. Skyfather, Zeus Pater, in their village on the right bank of the Dnipro, south of Zaporizhzhia. Zeus Pater lived there. He spread from there into our culture, into our minds through the Trito myth and through Trita’s sacrifice, establishing the rite after he gets his cattle back. Both Sides Archetype as Trita This is my original addition to the Trito myth: both sides archetype themselves as Trita, the good and the bad. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle has been stolen. Donald identifies with Trita and sees himself in Trita’s position. Duncey Putler does too. President Zelensky does too. We do. Everyone identifies with the herdsman whose cattle have been stolen. When we hear Donald and Duncey Putler grievance mining — what I call grievance mining — moaning about this or that, they’re identifying, they’re acting out their feelings of being persecuted. Like Trita was persecuted by having his cattle taken away. Someone has come and stolen our children, our cattle, our houses. They’ve taken away our peace of mind. They’ve taken away our husband, our wife, our girlfriend. Something we value, our love. We overcome obstacles and we retrieve them, either through the intercession of Zeus Pater, or whichever deity you believe in, something in the sky, or just by our own exertions. Both sides do this. Duncey Putler archetypes himself as Trita, claiming Ukraine’s people are his cattle. Donald archetypes himself as Trita. All of these MAGA people, these America First people, these Reform people in England, these AfD people — their origin story is the same. The Need for a Standard If everyone identifies with Trita, we need a standard against which to decide what is right. When is Trita right in retrieving what he sees or perceives as his cattle? When is he not right? When is he sinister? He’s wrong. He’s gone into someone else’s territory claiming their cattle are his and he’s taken them back from there. He has invaded Iran. He has invaded Ecuador or invaded Venezuela. The Troll: The Fundamental Metaphor The fundamental metaphor in the Disinfolklore analytical method is the troll. Again, the TR sound in troll. That’s not a coincidence, because it was in search of some meaning to this pattern which I kept on noticing — Trump, troll, Trump, troll, TR — that I ended up reading the Rig Veda from 1100 BCE. The archetypal troll tale, the Three Billy Goats Gruff — three brothers Gruff, crossing a bridge, looking for pastures new, economic migrants — this is the story of all Indo-European migration. This is how one language family spread from Mykolaivka village south of Zaporizhzhia city into the geographical space between Ireland and India by tradition, and then across the whole of the Americas, and even Australia, apparently. This is the story of all Indo-European migration, and again, this is my original contribution to the interpretations of Three Billy Goats Gruff, immanent in this tale, which was first translated into English in 1860. It immediately became the most popular of all troll tales. There are thousands of troll tales, but this is the archetypal one as evidenced by my search of 33,000 sources in the Dow Jones Factiva database, which I did April–May 2020 when I first started looking into this in seriousness. The Three Billy Goats’ Gruff The troll guards the bridge, like the bridge trolls I dealt with in eastern Ukraine, the Russian occupiers on the other side of the bridge. The troll guards the bridge. First Billy Goat Gruff says, don’t eat me. I’m just going over to the other side for pastures new. A bit of economic migration. I’m going to Stanford to do machine learning. Then I’m going to contribute to the creation of Anthropic. Don’t eat me. My brother’s coming after me, my tribesmen, my fellow Indian machine learning expert. He’s much fatter. Preserve your appetite. He goes by and he goes off and works on Anthropic. The second one comes: I’ve actually got this brilliant idea for an electric car and I’m going to go to MIT, and it’s going to make a lot of people rich and facilitate zillions of new technological trajectories we can’t even dream about right now. My sister is following me, my fellow economic migrant, and she’s really big. She’ll satisfy you for a year. Then the third one comes along and kills the troll. Then he takes over the White House. What’s interesting is the way the story is told. The troll is the negative entity. Yet no one talks about internet goats. We talk about trolls. They’re the ones who lived. The archetypal troll lived. The goats have negative connotations. The word sacrifice comes from the sacrifice of the goat, which goes back to the Trito myth, because after Trita retrieves his cattle, he establishes his first ritual to sacrifice to the Skyfather. Arya: The Geographical Area If Trita decides to move beyond his area — arya, arya, arya, centre — Aryaman describes a geographical area as well, the mana, the energy in the centre. It’s a spatial area. The word area then pops up again in, I think, the eighteenth century in English. This term arya is really common in West Asia, in Armenia — Armenia, which is a distinct branch of the Indo-European languages — as well as in the Aryan or the Iranian branch. It’s so common in the Iranian branch that many people refer to the Iranian branch as Arya. Basically, it comes down to meaning an area. It’s the area where your community lives. It’s your area. The story of all Indo-European migrations is deciding to move beyond your area and to steal someone else’s cattle, whether it’s their women or their children or their cattle or their space. When Trita Is Wrong Then Trita is in the wrong. If he crosses the Don, if he crosses the Donets and attempts to take land which is not his, then by right he cannot call on Skyfather to protect him. He cannot call on international law. He breaches territorial integrity. Nor can he commemorate this in a May 9th parade and expect us to agree he is Trita. He archetypes himself as Trita, but we make a judgement: no, sorry, mate, you’re not. You’re a usurper. He’s justifying moving into someone else’s land west of the Don and taking their cattle by saying these are my cattle anyway, this is Russian land. Donald says Greenland is America. This is the oldest story in Indo-European culture from the same community that left Mykolaivka village. Somehow their descendants took over the entire space between Ireland and India, apart from Basque country and obviously the Hungarians and the Finns and one or two others, but basically most of the area between Ireland and India. The Refugee Convention as Standard If everyone can model themselves as Trita, as the third man — TR again — we need a standard. If those goats crossing the bridge are escaping persecution, if they have a well-founded fear of persecution on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, then they can cross that bridge. They should be free to cross that bridge without being killed. That’s the Refugee Convention, 1951. That’s what I mean when I talk about the post–World War II legal and social order settlement defining the content of what is right. If they’re merely economic migrants and cannot rely on the Refugee Convention, then we have other means. We have visas and other systems. If Trita decides to cross into someone else’s territory and steal their capital, then Trita is in the wrong because we have a standard of judgement to judge that w

    40 min
  5. Podcast | How to Battle Archetyping Disinfolklorists (Part 1)

    21 MAR

    Podcast | How to Battle Archetyping Disinfolklorists (Part 1)

    This is the “what can we do” part. I was concerned that we were going to be wrapped up in the same kind of Disinfolklore galaxy as I watched unfurl inside the minds of Ukrainians stuck in the occupation between 2015 and 2018, and that I have witnessed — and I’m sure many of us have witnessed — people we know who have gone MAGA unfurl inside their minds. What I was concerned about was that this would be a Disinfolklore universe of many different concatenating galaxies. Last time, I talked about the three archetypal characters: Druidy Don, Disinfolklore himself; Duncey Putler; and the Comedian. Tonight, I’m going to talk about what we can do to resolve this problem and to assuage my fears and our fears that we are going to be wrapped up in a Disinfolklore universe. Re-Archetyping and the Future of Disinfolklore It’s really about re-archetyping, and it’s about the future of Disinfolklore. It’s about archetyping and re-archetyping. What I used to call counter-Disinfolklore, which could be called infolklore, but really it’s this mechanism of archetyping and re-archetyping, which I’ve talked about before, which gives us the clue of what is to be done. As I use this term archetype and re-archetype, I want you to focus on the ‘Rch’ element in the signifier Archetype. Arch-e-type. That RCH — the same RCH we have in monarchy — it’s Rch. Reich. Rich, it’s in the same sound in rich, people who are rich, people who have the right/reich. I just want to flag that at the beginning. Archetype, archetype, archetype contains the element in the second most important cryptotypic semantic signalling system in Indo-European culture: words with these Rg / Rt / Reg / Rch / Rit / Rd sounds within them are part of this system: see my seminal: What Meaning Means Three World-Changing Events This Week Let me begin this week with three world-changing events that occurred this week. These events situate my concept of archetype and re-archetyping, which I’ll remind you is quite different from St Augustine’s, from Carl Jung, who got his idea of archetyping from St Augustine. It’s quite different from Joseph Campbell’s and from the concept of archetypes in psychoanalysis. The first world-changing event: a computer researcher in America this week reverse-engineered one of Apple’s M4 chips. He was able to demonstrate through means he described in great detail, which I myself am working through, that Apple’s software masks the true potential of this chip. This semiconductor chip, in its essence, is many more than ten times — ninety times more powerful than some of the most powerful NVIDIA GPUs, graphic processing units. The second world-changing event this week: Apple announced the M5 Max chip in laptops, which you lucky Americans are able to buy now for about $4,000, this new Pro laptop. They have the same capacity in a laptop, independent of the cloud, that thousands of computers had when I first started studying neural network computing as part of my entrepreneurship project during my MBA at Oxford back in the ancient times of 2016. That was just four years after the world-changing AlexNet computer vision model, which described the most powerful computer vision system yet invented. It ran on thousands of computers and was perhaps a hundred times less powerful than the computer vision on your iPhone or my iPhone today. The third world-changing event: ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, announced and shipped a large language model which can run on your iPhone. I wouldn’t advise putting that on your phone, given where it comes from, but it’s not going to be the first. I’m sorry, it is the first, but it’s not going to be the last. Claude Code and Boris Chornyi These three innovations together — and note that the first, the reverse engineering of the M4 chip, was facilitated by Claude Opus 4.6, which is the model I use, the Anthropic model I use with my work; I use it inside the terminal on my computer — these three innovations together tell us something about the future and about the future of Disinfolklore. How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool called Code, which is as important an invention as the internet itself or personal computing itself — perhaps even more significant than both of those, because of the acceleration, the technological trajectories that we can’t even imagine were possible suddenly become possible. People like me can now program and vibe code anything we can conceive of into existence. This researcher was able to use Claude Code to reverse-engineer this M4 chip and discover what its true power is. How appropriate it is that this world-changing tool, Anthropic’s Claude Code, was created by the Ukrainian Boris Chornyi from near Chornomorsk, just east of Odessa. How appropriate that Boris Chornyi comes from a place, Chornomorsk, which is exactly where the archaeological evidence demonstrates that the Yamna community, the creators, the forgers of the first Indo-European language, the ancestor of all living Indo-European languages today — how appropriate that Boris Chornyi should come from the precise place where the Yamna community fused with the Usatova community to create the proto-language that would become Italic, Celtic, and Germanic. Everything we know about Latin, Latin history, Jupiter; everything we know about the Celts, from the part of me which is Celt, to Asterix and Obelix; and Germanic Indo-European languages, everything we know about the Germanic Indo-European language culture and the days of the week, English and all of that — all of that comes from this place where this guy, Boris Chornyi, an engineer at Anthropic, invented this amazing tool. The Terminal Self and the Future How appropriate that someone there would invent a world-changing technology operating inside the terminal on our computer. For those who don’t know, the terminal is this thing you generally — I never went near it, except when something really went wrong with my computer and I tried to solve it. Now I wake up each morning, I’m in there. The seminal work in hypermodern theory and hypermodernism is called The Terminal Self. Now the terminal, which when you look at it is reminiscent of the first computers we encountered in the 1970s and 1980s, is unexpectedly the place where this innovation is happening. The terminal self, this state of acceleration, too much, never enough, dissatisfaction — these two vectors, acceleration and never enough, are always running in contradiction in the hypermodern mind. Obviously, we have other elements in our mind. We may have the postmodern, where we think nothing matters anymore, truth doesn’t matter. We may have the modern, where we think we’re kind of modern, God is dead. We may have the classical enlightenment parts of our minds. The hypermodern mind occupies us even if we have no clue what hypermodernism is or we’ve never read The Terminal Self. How appropriate that that seminal work in hypermodernism should be called The Terminal Self, a play on words about the end of the self as we fuse into the computers, when now we have this world-changing innovation from Boris Chornyi of Anthropic — Claude Code operating in the terminal, which even in its first months after its invention has already accelerated in ways we thought would take decades. Personal AI Modules: The Disinfolklore Module Why is this relevant to Disinfolklore and to archetyping and re-archetyping? Because the future of Disinfolklore and the future of our civilization is all of us having our own individual models — large language models, computer vision models, multi-dimensional space models fused together — running constantly, being trained constantly by our own experience and helping us to become superhumans. We, working with these models, will become better humans. When I say better, immediately we need an evaluative dimension. We need the Code of Positive Trolls. We need the post–World War II legal order against which to judge: are we better or are we worse? There’ll be multiple models of large language models and computer vision models and spatial models, and multiple modules such as Disinfolklore. That’s what I’m creating. That’s my vision of what I am creating. That’s why I’m so excited by these tools, which are now available to me, who is illiterate in coding — but that no longer holds me back. The Disinfolklore module, which you will be able to connect into your own personal set of modules and your own personal network running multiple layers, is what I’m working towards. That’s the future of ideas and the interaction between ideas, the world helped by these architectures, these AI models. Layers of Neural Networks It’s worth noting that the first innovation I mentioned, the M4 chip, is basically running on one layer — one layer of tens of millions of artificial neurons. AlexNet, which was this amazing model, the revolutionary model for computer vision shown in 2012, only worked on one layer as well. NVIDIA’s models have hundreds of layers, dozens of layers, each of which might have billions of artificial neurons, each with a particular distribution of weights. You put in the data, you put in your input. The model’s looking ahead saying, if we try this concatenation of weights, it produces a 52% approximation of this cat, which is the output we’re reaching, but what we want is 75%. We spin it around again, hundreds of different layers up and down like a pinball machine. We don’t actually know when it gets to this level — it’s a black box. We don’t know what’s happening. It’s taking on a life of its own, and I use that term metaphorically. It’s like a pinball machine running around, recursing, concatenating up, down, and suddenly you end up as your output with the perfect cat. This first innovation with AlexNet was just one of these layers. This M4 chip, when he was able to reverse-engineer

    43 min
  6. Podcast | Can't Dismantle a Spell Only by Seizing the Spell Book!

    18 MAR

    Podcast | Can't Dismantle a Spell Only by Seizing the Spell Book!

    The European Union today released its highly anticipated — well, highly anticipated by the likes of me — fourth report on threats on what it calls FIMI, which is a rather unwieldy phrase. It’s not unanalogous to Disinfolklore, but FIMI stands for Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference. The “foreign” in this context means the threat is coming from outside the European Union, which for good, understandable political reasons and constitutional and mandate reasons, the European Union of course doesn’t want to get involved in intra-European Union created Disinfolklore or disinformation. The fourth report which came out today — I just wanted to talk about it in the context of the Disinfolklore analytical method. I’ve talked before about the three previous reports. The first report was published three years ago and it provided a brand new analytical framework and common language through which European Union and non-European Union states could speak about the threat to their national security which Russia, China, and indeed Iran — those three are the main foreign forces that these reports are dealing with — pose. It provided a common framework and a common language to talk about something which was new. From outside of the structure, the word “disinformation” was really operationalised from inside Russia. We have evidence from KGB manuals from the 1960s and 1970s of them using the term disinformation. Therefore, if you’re trying to solve a problem or talk about a problem or come up with tools to deal with a problem that has been created by the Russians, then if you subject yourselves to using the vocabulary and language and tools which the Russians themselves have forged, there is only a limited area for you to operate within. By contrast, if — as I have done with Disinfolklore — you invent a new portmanteau and you elaborate a whole set and analytical method, as I have done through the Twelve Tool Way on disinfolklore.eu, and through my writings, which many of you have been thankfully reading and interacting with since I created the portmanteau in February 2023 — but after thinking and thinking about what Disinfolklore means as an analytical method and also as a narrative form that I first noticed in Russia-occupied Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. It’s now ten years I’ve been thinking and elaborating and writing about this problem, but I’ve only had the term Disinfolklore for the past three years. It was quite liberating to come up with this word. I had from time to time tried to look for a new language in new terms because I recognised from early on in 2015 that what I was witnessing inside Russia-occupied Luhansk was something new and therefore it required a new vocabulary to describe the whole system of information fields, matrices, thick enmeshing matrices — the kind which we’re now experiencing, for instance, in relation to this Iran war. The Colonisation of Thought Even people who haven’t paid much attention to MAGA and who have no idea really of QAnon and what MAGA has been doing since 2015 to create this enmeshing, identity-creating mess inside people’s minds — now, if you are contemplating whether to fill your car with petrol or diesel, or you’re thinking, gosh, am I going to have gas? All the gas in my country comes from Qatar and they’re not going to be able to get this gas to the island of Britain or wherever else you might live. Where am I going to get my hot water? How am I going to drive my factory? That kind of colonisation of our thoughts is a direct line from Donald’s — on the one hand, the war is over; on the other hand, I’m having fun, I’m blowing things up. He is projecting outwards through the medium of Disinfolklore into our minds, into humanity’s minds, this completely enmeshing, confusing mess of nightmarish rhetoric. That is precisely what I had noticed the Russians were doing inside Russia-occupied Ukraine. I didn’t know at the time what they were up to. Only after the full-scale invasion began, I realised — oh my God, this is what they were doing. I was inside what I call a stealth attack. A stealth genocide. The EU’s Parallel Journey The European Union has structures where it has been investing its energy into coming up with a new framework. It’s done this very successfully in these four FIMI threat reports. This fourth report, which is out today, is what I was going to talk about. When I was standing on the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska 2015 to 2018, watching Russian disinformation unfold in real time among real people — soldiers, civilians, spies, traders, all archetypes — the European Union was at the same time beginning to build its strategic communications apparatus from Brussels. Both of us were looking at the same phenomenon. We saw folklore. We saw an infrastructure. The fourth EEAS FIMI report, published today, is the most comprehensive institutional mapping of foreign information manipulation ever produced. It documents 540 incidents. This is the meat and veg, as it were — or the lentil strudel — of what makes the European Union’s operation unique: it has the resources and now the methodology to document tens of thousands of instances of Russian disinformation, and Chinese and Iranian to a lesser extent. We see this sometimes on our Twitter feed as the excellent EU vs Disinfo, which is just one emanation of this whole system, this whole operation. Donald and Cuba: Disinfolklore in Real Time From my perspective, the engine of the operation is to collect instances of FIMI and try to determine the sources of them. I, as a lowly sole operator, use my method — the Disinfolklore analytical method. If I see coercive control immanent in a meme, if I hear, for instance, as I did today, Donald talk about Cuba as if it’s a woman — Today Donald was referring to Cuba as a woman. It’s the same energy that Putler used just before the outbreak of the war. Donald grabs at Cuba the way he and Putler grab women — an archetype of women. This is Donald: “It’s a beautiful island, great weather. They’re not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. You know, they won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.” The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls is generosity. This is ungenerosity, therefore it is Disinfolklore. “They won’t be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.” I’m not sure Cuba has ever asked America for money for hurricanes. But obviously it hasn’t, because according to Donald — and I wouldn’t trust him on this — they have no hurricanes. I’m sure they have hurricanes. It probably breaches the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls — this is probably just totally untrue. Back to Donald: “But I think Cuba’s seen the end. You know, all my life, I’ve been hearing about the United States and Cuba.” This is one of my pet theories about Donald. A lot of what he does goes back to the early 60s, a formative time when everyone was talking about Kennedy. What does he do? He wants to annihilate Kennedy by hiring this Epstein-connected Kennedy guy who wants everyone in America to become really sick. That will destroy this archetype of the good president in his early time. Obviously the Cuban Missile Crisis is part of that. “All my life I’ve been hearing about Cuba and the United States. When will the United States do it? I do believe I’ll do the honour of having the honour of taking Cuba.” This is where the language that we know through the legal cases — that E. Jean Carroll took against him, where he was adjudicated by the judge to be an adjudicated rapist, and two grand juries found that he had in fact assaulted E. Jean Carroll in, I think, Saks Fifth Avenue. We also have the footage we heard in 2016 from the outtake. We understand that this archetype in Donald’s mind is how he treats women. “That’ll be good. It’ll be a big honour. Taking Cuba. Taking Cuba in some form. Yeah, taking Cuba. I mean, whether I free it, take it. I think I could do anything I want with it.” This is the Epstein class. This is what they did to women entrapped on the island at every level. We’ve seen this week women who had jobs as assistants to Epstein, some of whom may well have been complicit in the crimes and in this entire coercive control network which entrapped the most powerful and richest people in the world as well as some of the weakest — women and children. As far as we can see, this is still entrapping people. Putler’s Parallel: “Like It or Not, Take It, My Beauty” I often cite how Putler made his speech to the Russian people on the 20th of February, four days before the full-scale invasion, where he said: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” International lawyers in the first New Lines Institute report on genocide in Ukraine cite this as evidence of genocidal intent because what Putler was doing there was using a vulgar Russian rhyme — it’s from a Soviet-era hard rock song from a band called Red Mold, and the song is called “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin.” Again, Disinfolklore — Sleeping Beauty, one of the core archetypes in European, Indo-European folklore, Indo-European culture. Putler was likening Ukraine to a dead woman, to a corpse, and saying to it: “Like it or not, take it, my beauty.” We see the same spirit, the same energy in the way Donald talks about Cuba today as he contemplates one of his other operations. 540 Incidents: The Scale of the EU Operation The European Union, like me, is collecting incidents of this, but it’s obviously doing it on a much bigger scale. The report documents 540 incidents, 10,500 channels of Disinfolklore, 43,000 pieces of content across 19 platforms. The report introduces a FIMI framework. Even for people like me who spend all day every day in this area, FIMI is still quite an awkward concept. What I’m trying to do with Disinfolklore is provide

    1 h 9 min
  7. 25 FEB

    Podcast | Four Years: The Arc of a War, of one Word

    The Arc of a Word: Four Years of Re-Archetyping I wanted to reflect on the four years of war. So everything everyone’s been talking about for the last hour and a half or so, hopefully it will strike a chord with them. I want to go through the four years of the war, not merely as battles, though we’ll visit some, but as a journey through Disinfolklore, through the archetypes we project onto Ukraine, through the archetypes Russia projects onto all of us, and through how Ukraine has fought back — not just with weapons, but by re-archetyping itself inside our minds. Archetypal Disinfolklore Literacy Because, as I wrote, Disinfolklore is how you conceal a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Disinfolklore is how yohu pull the wool over people’s eyes, and this works both ways. So all of us on Volia and who contribute to Volia from day one have been re-archetyping and counter-archetyping against what Russia has been trying to do to Ukraine in the information space, and what many others have been trying to do to Ukraine unconsciously in the information space. So this is a process we’ve all been involved in. I didn’t have the words for it when the war broke out, but because of the war, I do now. And I want to tell you the story of that word — not the word Disinfolklore, though we’ll get to that, but the word archetype. Because here’s the thing. For the first two years of the war, we were doing something I had no name for and we perhaps had no name for. We were doing it instinctively. We were re-archetyping Russia, re-archetyping Ukraine, re-archetyping the entire war through memes before we had the vocabulary to describe what we were doing. And the arc of what I was going to talk about tonight is the arc of that word, from instinct to naming to power (mana). The Bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska So that word, archetyping. While many anti-disinformation specialists describe themselves as working on the front line of the information war, as many of you will have heard a million times, I worked on the actual zero line between 2015 and 2018, separating Russian from Ukrainian army. I worked at the actual geographical and physical separation point between two of the greatest armies in human history. Because between 2015 and 2022 I was in Ukraine as a diplomat, again as you’ll know, and for three years at that time I was at the bridge at Stanytsia Luhanska. And I intuited there was something folkloric about the situation there. Armed men on both sides, civilians crossing — pensioners, mostly, collecting their Ukrainian pension from one side and returning to Russian-occupied territory on the other side. And at the checkpoints, Russian-controlled trolls. Not internet trolls — actual literal bridge trolls, the oldest archetype in European folklore. Of course, I didn’t really know that consciously at the time. In the manner of a 19th-century folklore collector, I collected the stories that Russia used to brainwash Ukrainians living across the river in Russia-occupied Ukraine. And in 2016, I made a discovery that changed my life: that Russia was using Jung’s theory of archetypes to manipulate the moods, attitudes, motivations, and intentions of consumers of its combat propaganda. In the woods near Stanytsia Luhanska bridge, Russian FSB operatives — archetyping themselves as the Stalinist era’s KGB predecessor, the MGB — in occupied Luhansk, constructed a story containing these archetypes: “my common-law spouse who lives with her underage daughter.” There was, in the labyrinthine layers of this incident, the jarring recognition of artificiality. My jarring recognition. The story contained Jung’s primary archetypes — the Mother and the Maiden — as if someone had a manual containing all of the primordial archetypes and had constructed the story to ensure it contained these elements. Eight years later, I understood. I had discovered how Russia and MAGA purposefully and purposely reverse-engineer tales with fairy-tale and folktale-like emotional resonances as a means of hacking our minds, hacking our consent, and undermining our civilization. Disinfolklore is what I named it — the folklore of disinformation, the disinformation of folklore, both at once. Druidy Don and the Battlefield So in the autumn of 2019, I was really trying to understand what Druidy Don — Trump’s power, his mana — consisted of. I wanted to understand it in order to counter it. At the time, I was a diplomat in eastern Ukraine, based in Dnipro at that point. I could see how Donald’s trolling even then had real-world effects on the battlefield. When Donald withheld Javelin missile systems from Ukraine, demanding that President Zelensky announce an investigation into the son of President Biden, I watched from Dnipro and from areas which are now occupied in Zaporizhzhia as the balance of power shifted. President Zelensky navigated out of that trap. Donald got impeached. President Zelensky escaped. But the lesson was seared into my mind: the information war and the kinetic war are the same war. Year One: Instinct On the morning of the 24th of February 2022, I had been out of Ukraine for three weeks. I listened very carefully to President Biden’s strategic disclosures in the fall of 2021. And by the end of November, after a conversation with my father about them, I had all my car packed. I was ready to leave at ten minutes’ notice. I thought the invasion would probably happen at Christmas, but when it didn’t, I made the decision to leave and I crossed the border on the 29th of January 2022. And I marked it with a tweet on Twitter — just a picture of my cat and me at the border with Poland, but not saying that I was leaving Ukraine or why I was leaving Ukraine. I just slipped out of Ukraine, because I didn’t want to scare the horses and I had no access to any secret information. I just had access to the same information others had, but I became convinced that the invasion was going to come. So that morning of February 24th 2022, I was back home in a remote part of Ireland. And my first tweet was two words: Slava Ukraini. Glory to Ukraine. That’s all I could manage. I was still an OSCE diplomat at the time, and I had to model impartiality. So I was still being cautious online. I’d never mentioned Ukraine online up to that point. Germany’s initial response to the invasion, as our great German listener was still saying — although rightly you have nothing to be ashamed of now — but Germany’s response to the invasion: 5,000 helmets. Not rifles, not anti-tank missiles. Helmets, to fight 190,000 invaders. I remember that the head of the BND was in Kyiv, and I assumed he had been there to try and extricate President Zelensky, in my naivety. But I share your shock that these people had access to all this information, clearly not only did not see the invasion coming — they didn’t see the invasion coming. “You’ve only got a few hours” was how one German official put it to the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany. There’s no point in putting sanctions or exiting Russia from SWIFT. You’ve only got a few hours. Get out, save yourselves — was the basic message, which I also delivered to friends of mine in Ukraine. And maybe I would say the same thing today, but it shocks me and impresses me that many of the people I knew in Dnipro didn’t leave. They were like, “This is our home, we’re not leaving.” RF’s Mythos Is Done And on February 28th, I wrote nine words: “Why Russian Federation is doomed by this venture. RF’s mythos is done.” Russia’s Federation’s mythos is done. I did not have a word for what I was witnessing, but what I was witnessing on day four of the full-scale invasion was the destruction of an archetype. Russia had spent centuries constructing a mental archetype, a mental model, a data-resistant archetype of itself as an unstoppable colossus. In four days, Ukraine broke it. For those incidents that Latyn was just talking about and many others — we were looking at these data points and they didn’t match our archetype of what a proper army, how a properly prepared army would behave. Reverse Napoleon And on day five of the invasion, I made a call that has held true for four years: Russia in Ukraine has done a reverse Napoleon. Tolstoy brilliantly shows Russian Field Marshal Kutuzov’s strategy in War and Peace. Draw the French further and further in so their supply lines are stretched. Napoleon sat in Moscow waiting for surrender. They never did. And so it goes. This is exactly where we are still, four years later. And the evidence I used which prompted this tweet was a Telegram post from the 27th of February 2022 from a Russian soldier complaining that no one of the invading force could communicate with their commanders. “Almost no one can get a hold of central command. It’s not even a matter of jamming. There’s just no long-range comms equipment or relays that went with the troops there.” Now, as Telegram and Starlink are no longer available to Russia’s forces four years later, we see the seeds of the future were imminent in those first few days. And the data point that had led me to understand the significance of this lack of communication was — I always remember reading or hearing when I was much younger about how when America went into Grenada, the Army and the Navy or the Air Force, they couldn’t communicate with each other. They discovered their radios weren’t compatible. So that was always in the back of my mind, and then when I saw this, I thought, this is a good sign for Ukraine but a terrible sign for Russia. Russia had invaded with insufficient forces and overextended supply lines, just as Napoleon had done in reverse. And then I added the Tolstoy inversion: Russia had become the thing its foundational myth celebrates defeating. The national archetype had been inverted. This is what re-archetyping looks like when history does it for you. The Econom

    1 h 7 min
  8. 20 FEB

    Podcast | Two Shaman Tricksters (Don & Putler) vs. The Comedian

    From Prime Ministers to Primary Schools: My Vision for Disinfolklore Literacy My vision for the Disinfolklore Analytical Method took a giant leap forward towards realisation this week. My vision for Disinfolklore is to use its insights to teach universal communications literacy and to build up immunity to manipulating archetypal Disinfolklore. I visualise teams of teachers teaching in Prime Ministers’ offices and Primary Schools throughout Indo-European cultures globally. With that in mind, this week was a huge moment for me in my development. Over the past while I discovered Claude Code, Anthropic's Claude Code. I have been working with it inside the Terminal. It differs from most of our encounters with Anthropic's AI in the sense that it's agentic. It actually executes. It doesn't just write the code for you and then you have to paste the code in. It actually implements the code, solves problems by writing multiple scripts in different computers language, recruits sub-agents to take on sub-tasks within a complex project such as that which I set to build my new platform. While the algorithm takes the initiative, it’s necessary to prompt it continually to ensure it stays on the right track. My new platform took around 600 prompts to bring it where it is now: a perfect representation of my artistic vision.https://www.disinfolklore.com will be my platform for the next few decades. I will continue publishing first here on Substack (https://www.disinfolklore.net). Then I will decant some highly distilled content to Disinfolklore.com periodically. Substack is optimised for email lists and has great potential for community building which I have not yet been prioritising but which I will in the future when I have the bandwidth. Disinfolklore.com contains the million words I've written on disinfolklore since the full-scale invasion, divided into different sections and different passages, short passages rather than long essays. It's arranged according to certain structural divisions which should appeal to people who identify as being quite open and who will be quite interested in the origins of the concept — that's all there. Those of us who self-identify as being more high on the neurotic OCEAN dimension, who self-identify as feeling "I just need... I'm worried about the world. Just give me the tools." There's the Twelve Tools. Then there are certain tools which would be more useful to people than others. I love the graphics. I designed all the graphics with Claude Code, but through about 600 different prompts. For me, I never thought in my lifetime I would be able to create something like this. This revolutionary technology is extraordinary. This will be not only a platform to show what I've done and what I hope is going to be quite useful for decades to come — as a means of interpreting data and dealing with emotion-moving activity — it will also be a platform for teaching and for building more networks with people. It's also just an immersive resource for anyone to spend as much time as they're willing to give to it.It also has the Finding Manuland component, which is the 6,000-year context. Disinfolklore didn't come out of nowhere; it's an emanation of Indo-European culture and of deep history, as I'm talking about. The shaman-tricksters and these archetypes of Finding Manuland are also in there, which is also a very rich read, but these are very succinct, quick passages. The entrance to the site is dark — the first homepage — but then everything underneath it is white and deliberately designed using the best optimised fonts and colours for making an easy reading experience. No noise on the passage pages, just arrows bringing you to the next passage or to the previous passage. Breadcrumbs — which is an interesting use from folklore to describe the bit at the top of the page — show where you are in the site. Then for people who want to read all of the long-form material, everything is linked to the reservoir, as I call it, which contains the long-form essays (most of which first appeared here on Substack) from which the passages are hewn.FROM SUBSTACK TO INDEPENDENCEI started out last November wanting to take everything that I'd written - the 450 articles on Substack - to be held also on an independent and Europe-based codebase. Not least because the same venture capitalists who funded Musk's takeover of Twitter run Substack. I wanted also to be a bit more resilient, interns of the longevity of my oeuvre’s survival whatever happens geopolitically.I thought, okay, I'll just create what's called a digital garden, which is a cross-referenced collection of all my writings in long form — 450 pages. Gradually, as I saw how advanced these AI algorithms have become since I last paid attention to artificial Neural Network algorithms and computer vision as a masters student contemplating building a business based on the automatic interpretation of satellite images at Oxford in 2018. Never having learned to code properly, suddenly being able to code anything I could visualise into existence led to rapid development of my initial Digital Garden project into what you see today at Disinfolklore.com. I love how the platform communicates in very short, pithy passages all of the ideas I've been thinking about for the past three years.DATA-RESISTANT ARCHETYPES AND THE VIEW OF RUSSIANow, moving onto a different kind of model than Opus 4.6 Claude Code’s current engine and the architecture which I used to build Disinfolklore.com, I first got interested in archetypes when I encountered friends whose mental models of Russia seemed immune to data.Underlying what some are saying about Ukraine at the moment as it runs a series of mini-counter offensives and is regaining. some territory that was in the grey zone — that there's some positive chatter about Ukraine — there are very strong, data-resistant archetypes in our culture that resist changing our views about Ukraine and about Russia. Many of us have been on a journey since Russia annexed Crimea. Eastern Europeans, of course, knew what Westerners have only recently, generally speaking — what Westerners like myself have only recently discovered. They've known this forever.I cringe when I look back at some of the things I said or thought even when I was in Ukraine, but certainly from 2015 on, and certainly even before that. I have thought very deeply, or tried to identify immediately in my own mind, what is going on. That has helped me also identify what else is going on elsewhere.In a conversation today I had with somebody who's very interested in Ukraine but doesn't tune in that much — they're very busy — I find them quite a good source because they're generally reading The Economist or listening to the BBC News or very general mainstream news. When they talk about something to do with Ukraine, it tells me something about what normal people who don't spend all their time on this talk about. They mentioned today that their perception was that everyone in the normal media world was talking about peace talks.This talk of Ukraine's advances — which I suppose most of us understand it's too early to say, and I don't think any of us are really getting our hopes up — but the idea that maybe that might change the view of Russia as very strong and invincible... it's not that promising at this point because most people aren't even aware of it. From his perception, he knew about it because he reads other material, but it's not in the mainstream media that he's consuming at the moment. Maybe others have seen coverage of Ukraine's advances — not massive, but somewhat significant advances. The talk is still about the peace talks.PUTLER'S RESURRECTION OF THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR TROLLWhat's going on there is the embedding of archetypes of this view of Ukraine and of Russia. Since 2005, Putler himself reactivated the Soviet-era troll that the only thing that mattered was victory over the Nazi invaders. Now most of us are aware that this war has gone on for longer than the Second World War for Russia, but that doesn't seem to have broken through to the mainstream. It's just kind of moving on.I myself have monitored these May 9th parades and the worship of the ancestors which was reactivated after 2005, and then after 2014 even in Ukraine. It became a measure of how stable Ukrainian society was. For instance, in Zaporizhzhia I would go for several years in a row as an OSCE monitor to monitor the May 9th parade. There was a huge May 9th parade in Dnipro, in which the Dnipro Jewish community played a huge role in 2017. This was seen as a shared cultural moment and historical moment because everyone made great sacrifices in the Second World War. It wasn't, as we see now, an assertion that Russian culture was in any way dominant. It was just a genuine expression of solidarity with the past and with history and with the cultural meaning of it.Many Ukrainians, especially Russian-language-speaking Ukrainians, will have memories from their childhood of having picnics and this kind of thing on May 9th. Really what was going on there, and with the whole use of these parades, as with many celebrations in many of our cultures, is the worship of the ancestors — trying to embed and establish an archetypal history of common history for the community.As I understand it — and maybe there are other people here who have more direct experience of Ukraine or of Russia before 2014 — this had mainly died out during the 1990s. Putler, around 2006, quite consciously resurrected this May 9th, this whole May 9th parades and routines. Then it became an acid test in Ukraine for how tolerant Ukraine was of Russian culture, Russian-language speakers. We, as international monitors, paid close attention to it. My Russian colleagues were always wanting us to monitor aspects of the preparations for these parades in Ukraine.Really what Putler was able to do quite quickly, in a couple of years

    53 min

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Battling Archetypes applies the Twelve Tools of the Disinfolklore analytical method to the folkloric structures hiding inside modern propaganda, memes, and geopolitics. Each episode decodes how Russia, MAGA, and other Disinfolklorists archetype reality — and how Counter Disinfolklore can unmask the wolf in sheep’s clothing.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.disinfolklore.net

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