Avoiding Thucydides’s Trap: Practical Actions, Desired Outcomes (Part II)

Application of Theories to Circumvent Thucydides’s Trap

The goal of this text—to provide a plan of action and source of inspiration to those who wish to prevent America from falling into Thucydides’s Trap—and its relationship to the theories thus covered should not be difficult to surmise. Positional Insecurity Theory, Substitution Theory, and Distraction Theory all provide powerful means to manipulate human behavior. By correctly harnessing them, we—the responsible citizens—should be able to prevent the national elite from initiating a global conflict to dwarf all previous ones. This will not be easy, but it will likely challenge and engage. Here is what to do:

1. We must promote the right sort of infighting to keep the national elite at each other throats until Thucydides’s Trap is well behind us. (Positional Insecurity Theory)
2. We must identify what the national elite want and hold most dear and develop practical substitutes to quench whatever thirsts they have in such a way that their lust for power will either be extinguished or overcome by other lusts of greater strength. Ideally, these substitutes will also be addictive, at least on a psychological level, so that we may retain power over them for a longer time. (Substitution Theory)
3. We must distract, distract, distract! Coherent thought on the part of the national elite must become impossible. (Distraction Theory)

A good tactic is not likely to be rest upon a single theory, but most will rely more upon one theory than another.

Advice, Admonishment, and Encouragement

The tactics suggested throughout this section (Part II) are not meant to be all-inclusive. Rather, they are a starting point—a few ideas for the dedicated and capable American to use for preliminary action. Readers should apply the full force of their creativity. Their ideas are likely to be superior to anything contained herein. And the greater number and range of novel tactics are applied to control the destructive potential of the national elite, the more difficult developing psychological, cultural, or economic countermeasures is likely to be. The only admonishment I offer is this: Keep your actions within the bounds of the law. You will do America (and the world) no good if you are sitting in prison.

Positional Insecurity Theory—Essential Tactics

These are but a few of many possible Positional Insecurity Theory tactics. Build upon them to your heart’s and spirit’s content.

PIT Tactic 1: Promote Overproduced Elite (only the angry ones) to Positions of Power

Fire with fire is time-tested and easily understood. The only question is with what do you set the blaze and where do you start it? In the context of Positional Insecurity Theory, an easy application of this is to promote vengeful overproduced elites to positions of maximum retribution. What are the requirements for ideal (for our purposes) overproduced elites?

1. They must have gone to the right schools—meaning a member of the Ivy League. A few West Coast school (Stanford) graduates might also be included on the list, but no one who completed their degree at a school in flyover country should be considered. (This restriction is a matter of prestige, not quality of education.)
2. They must have an intense hatred for the institutions and people who failed to recognize their greatness. Whatever disdain they have for the commoners must be entirely overpowered by a fury born of rejection.
3. They must have less interest in reforming the elite gatekeeping systems than in vaporizing them.
4. They must not be suicidal.
5. They must have charm, charisma, and the ability to engage an audience.
6. They must be reasonably intelligent (not a given, regardless of prestigious credentials).

The three most obvious positions from which these people may wreak havoc on the established national elite are 1) elected office, 2) political advisor, or 3) media personality.

The odds that one is likely to personally encounter a member of the overproduced elite are not high, but nor are they miniscule, and they can be improved. With the right search parameters and dedication (and a bit of intuition) one should be able to find a few candidates in even a city of modest size.

Such candidates are likely to be discontentedly, desperately grasping the lower or middle rungs of government or education, or affiliated with a non-profit organization. Non-profits seem to be a particularly likely place for overproduced elites to hide from the harshness of the villeins’ world while still maintaining some small shred of dignity. And candidates are more likely to be in smaller, newer cities than in old, established ones, where they might be recognized by their more successful peers.

As for cultivating these people—such is likely to require great care. The useful ones are not stupid. And they may well detect attempts at deception. Thus, honesty is likely the best policy. If you can befriend one of these people, such is best done by expressing what must serve as a shared belief—that the national elites are dangerous and incompetent and that actions must be taken to stop them.

Rather than micromanaging these people, one should collaborate with them towards a common goal, recognizing both their and your unique talents.

The most critical apparatus for ensuring that one is not duped into helping an overproduced elite get into a position of power and then being discarded by said elite is intuition. The overproduced elites you promote must not see themselves as equal to the established elites, but better than them. The overproduced elite must have contempt for those they would replace. Love, hate, fear, and anger can all be transformed and diminished over time, but contempt is durable. Once someone develops it for another, there is little chance of it ever being overridden by another association.

PIT Tactic 2: Encourage Intragroup Attacks Amongst the Established Elites

The average American has little say in policy, but he can at least pick a fight online. And this can be enough. Intragroup conflict amongst the established elite is on the upswing. Such is why the members of the United States Congress are increasingly likely to publicly ridicule each other, consider censuring their peers, and push to expel those they believe have crossed a line. This is good, and this is something upon which we can capitalize.

We have seen senators run from office on the flimsiest of #MeToo accusations. And there is nothing unbiased about #MeToo, with certain weak claims taken seriously, and other more serious claims ignored, establishing that #MeToo is ultimately just another political tool. With a bit of pushing, these intragroup attacks can be made more common. All we need remember is that elected officials are at least nominally human, and most of them are online. With a bit of nudging, any number of them can be steered towards embarrassing themselves or even wrecking their careers with a misworded, impulsively written Tweet.

In theory, the members of the national elite could spurn social media altogether, and some will; however, such is not an entirely feasible option for most elected officials. They need some online presence, and they want some online presence. Bear in mind that Washington is Hollywood for Ugly People—one rarely goes into politics without some desire for attention.

Social media does not favor all voices equally. It is tuned for the most engagement and the loudest—those who are willing to dedicate themselves to a cause or ideology in a manner ordinary people would not or could not—those who are adept at identifying people in need of identity and engaging in the laborious work of cultivating them. Thus, fanatics are favored. They can emerge themselves fully in their beliefs more easily than can most because they oftentimes have nothing else. And their sheer persistence demands that they be heard. This ability to scream above the noise gives them outsized effects on political policy, thus leading to greater political segregation and a more vindictive style of engagement.

We can support infighting amongst the national elite by engaging with the radicals, not in a way that would lead to criminal charges, but by supporting their positions and amplifying them on social media to the extent that we can legally do so. We can also develop and promote absurd and ever-changing ideologically influenced standards of behavior, piling vitriol on any member of the national elite who fails to perfectly conform to impossible to understand and impractical to implement standards of language usage, personal conduct, and doctrinal purity.

The idea behind all of this is to force the established national elites into a Sisyphean game of defense. The more time they spend fending off attacks on their coveted roles, the less time they will have to develop grand strategies to restore the empire.

Positional Insecurity Theory—Final Thoughts

Despite their hubris, even the most egomaniacal of the elite know this: Sic transit gloria mundi—thus passes worldly glory. They know that power can be taken from them. They may deny it, they may pretend that they are the exception, but somewhere in the darkest reaches of their psyche is the guillotine, the noose, or the cellar of the Ipatiev House. Even those with the greatest of certitude in the peaceful transition of power fear banishment to the extreme hinterlands—knowing that without their connections few of them could do much more than adjunct-ing their way from one cow college contract to the next or selling used cars in Tuscaloosa—somewhere so awful they will be able to sense from blocks away the stink of supercenter detergent and vo-tech graduates—where the only way to get a decent ribeye is by overnight delivery.

Some of them would well prefer the Bolsheviks with pistols and bayonets—at least there is some small romantic dignity in death (aside from the children being shot, bludgeoned, stabbed, and then shot again). To the national elites, there is none in teaching remedial poly-sci to partially rehabilitated ex-cons who work seven nights a week at the poultry plant as a part of their court-ordered drug rehabilitation and who complete their assignments using the county library’s Wi-Fi.

Positional Insecurity Theory is a powerful tool for it attacks the very core of the national elites’ identity, but alone it is not enough. If allowed time to regroup and restructure their thoughts, the elites will develop countermeasures to positional attacks. We must never give them time enough to think. Thus, we turn to Distraction Theory and its applications.

Distraction Theory—Essential Tactics

DT Tactic 1: Promote Lunatics and Artists as Generators of Unusual Thought

There is nothing more disruptive to the operation of complex organizational systems than the unknown and unforeseeable. It grinds smooth the gears of pencil-pushing organizations and automatons. Given that our targets—the established elite—derive from their power from bureaucracies, this is worth bearing in mind. And it is one of the reasons that artists can prove so shockingly destructive when they gain dominion over a system (with the other being what we shall consider below).

Adolf Hitler painted and had a strong appreciation for design, so much so that kept an architect (Albert Speer) in his inner circle. Vladimir Lenin wrote extensively. Mao Zedong was a calligrapher, poet, and writer. His most famous wife (Madame Mao) was an actress who wrote and directed operas. Joseph Stalin was a poet. And Idi Ami played the accordion (in addition to being His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular—according to his self-declared and creatively immodest title).

None of these people were virtuosos in the conventional arts, but that is not to say they lacked creative ambition. They had enough inventive ability and conceit to imbue them with both grand visions and a willingness to annihilate—to paint over old canvas, to chip away at the imperfections in the stone. In any artist of real competence, there is a certain supernal cruelty—a willingness to slaughter and abandon their misbegotten creations—with the greatest difference between the dictator and the writer or artist being that the latter has a page or watercolor board upon which he may execute his ideas, the former, an entire nation.

And in dictators, a little creativity goes a long way.

The great strength—and weakness—of creatives is that they cannot think as other people do. And this makes responding to them and their mental gyrations in a timely manner difficult, for the pathologically rigid most of all. Likewise, moderated insanity proves equally confounding. Sorting the ideas of the creative and the insane takes time—they do not fit conveniently into boxes.

Creativity and insanity are not the same, although there is limited evidence they correlate. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the rigid system and the entrenched members of such systems, they both can pose a similar threat in that they introduce unpredictability. Unpredictability leads to delays, and that is enough for our purposes.

The goal of all of this is to distract—to draw the attention of the organization and its member—so that their attention is too divided for them to engage in the tasks assigned to them.

At the legislative and executive level, this application is easy—promote and vote for political candidates who are unpredictable enough to confound and persistent enough to make ignoring them impossible. Only be mindful of giving artists—disgruntled artists most of all—too much power, on the chance that their grand vision can only be built upon a tower of skulls. And be certain to compliment their creations and performances before they are handed the reins of government. This reads as being more authentic than praise given after the fact, and doing so just may save you a (decoratively placed) bullet to the heart.

At the entrenched bureaucratic level, installing creative and unpredictable people gets considerably harder. Bureaucracies are adept at selecting for predictability. (They must be. Their survival depends on as much.) But that is not to say such is impossible. One need only to apply the proper tool to the task.

Understanding Diversity, Weaponizing Diversity

For this section, diversity shall be categorized as being one of two types. The first, conventional diversity, entails exactly what one imagines diversity entails—diversity of skin color, hair type, and sexual orientation. It does not entail a more substantial diversity of thoughts or modes of information processing. It is oftentimes antithetical to as much, as institutions may emphasize more rigidly conventional thinking even as they grow to appear more varied—looks different, thinks the same.

The second category of diversity is mindset, perspective, and thought diversity. Promoting this category of diversity may entail hiring people from different ethnic, religious, or cultural backgrounds, but it may not. Two white men (or two black women or whatever demographic one prefers) may well have nearly identical life perspectives and approaches to problem-solving, but such is not guaranteed. The same could be said for highly diverse sets of people. One selecting for thought diversity one should examine the problem-solving and descriptive approaches of the people involved, not their physical traits.

Conventional diversity is a limited threat to the power structure of the elites. It may reduce cohesion and understanding and produce a more distant and detached work culture, but it does not inevitably affect the operation of the elites’ systems. Even thought diversity is only disruptive to most of the power structure, with some small parts of that structure being able to both tolerate and put to good use diversity of thought.

In theory, thought and perspective diversity could improve the overall efficiency and operation of organizations. The mentally unique could spot weaknesses in procedures and systems that others might well miss and devise novel solutions the conventional would be hard-pressed to create. Those advocating aggressively for a broader model of diversity can make this argument loudly, truthfully, and without reservation. This should work, and government and large corporate interests should be the better for it.

In practice, it will not. There are only a few highly autonomous parts of the elite power structure that can channel unusual and creative thinking into increased power and stability—most of them in (or affiliated with) the military. DARPA, with its long history of innovation, stands out as one of the best examples. And several brave leaders within the power structure of the armed forces have proven dedicated to thinking outside the box—Albert Stubblebine, who played an instrumental role in the United States Army’s psychic research (Stargate Project) certainly demonstrated a willingness to consider unconventional technologies (although his career suffered for it).

A review of some of the more unconventional programs that have existed within government suggests that the military may be more flexible and open to novel ideas than the civilian sector. From Project Iceworm (a plan to hide nuclear missiles under ice caps in Greenland) to the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments (in which many psychoactive substances were tested on soldiers) to a project overseen by behaviorist B.F. Skinner to develop pigeon-guided missiles, the military has imagined and funded many new and unusual ways to turn live enemies into dead ones.

The exact reason that the military seems to better tolerate eccentric problem-solvers is impossible to determine without an investigation beyond the scope of this text, and there appear to be few published studies on the matter. One possibility is that militaries, more than civilian agencies, must demonstrate some flexibility—war is inherently unpredictable and the stakes at play are enormous. From great competition and struggle often comes great innovation.

They may also be more adept at tolerating unusual thinking due to (rather than despite) their chain of command. Once rules are well-defined and authority is delineated, a certain latitude of conduct can be tolerated. Someone is in charge of a certain activity or group of individuals, and that person in charge can rest assured that he or she can give orders, design projects, receive credit, and accept blame within that domain. In a system where authority is hopelessly diffuse and uncertainly apportioned, the natural result is paralysis—no one does anything even slightly risky due to power and responsibility falling upon many people in general and no one in particular. This uncertain-power paralysis accounts for much of the inertia in academia (and tremendous reliance on committees), where everyone has a say, but no one has the final say.

Thus, in keeping in line with our intent to prevent the national elite from allowing us to have our bones crushed in Thucydides’s Trap, creative and unusual people—the authentically diverse—should not be encouraged to join the armed forces. The military is likely to either put them to some practical use or, if they are too unruly in their behavior, discharge them in short order.

Creativity and diversity are not the enemies of military command and discipline—ideology is. The more politically (rather than mission) directed a military becomes, the less likely it is to be able to effectively execute its mission. Constant fear of removal based on politics is uncomfortable and demoralizing for those who are not political cadres or political officers—which populated the People’s Liberation Army and Red Army in considerable numbers. And this undermined (and undermines) command authority. When commanders know that one ill-phrased comment or any apparent lack of enthusiasm for political purges and undertakings can be used against them by those who either want their job or who simply want someone else to have their jobs (as might a displeased subordinate), they will spend less time leading and more time guarding their careers and ass(ets).

And the truly political animal favored by an ideologically managed army is of a dissimilar sort from those likely to lead a nation to victory. There is a reason that excellent wartime leaders—Winston Churchill for one—make for mediocre peacetime ones. The skillset required is different.

There is some evidence that the higher ranks of the armed forces contain at least a few careerists more adept at playing political games than at winning war games. Political careerists, regardless of whatever conventionally diverse traits they possess, want something very different from what a true leader wants. A good and dedicated leader wants authority and is willing to accept responsibility. A careerist wants opportunity (for advancement) and needs deniability. Plant enough careerists in any system, but it an armed one or otherwise, and it will start to look quite a bit like academia—where the closest one ever encounters to fighting is cover-your-rear combat—fascinating to watch, if only because almost all the armor worn by the participants is strapped to their backsides.  

Lunatics: Considerations and Cautions

Finally, there is the matter of promoting the truly mentally unwell or unstable to positions of power. This should be done with some care, if for no other reason than it, if poorly executed, stands to be quite cruel to the unwell person so promoted. Depressives, paranoids, and the deeply fearful should not be subjected to needless derision and attack. Rather, the only lunatics who should be kicked up the political stairs are those who would stand to enjoy the process and not be harmed by it. As for who should be promoted—this is a judgment call. If we promote this person, will he have fun, and will he remain relatively unscathed by the experience? If you can answer yes to both questions, go ahead and start a Loony Tunes for Senate campaign. To do otherwise is to proceed at one’s moral hazard.

Next, sex.

DT Tactic 2: Sexualizing Everything

There is no greater distractor than sex. Dreams of decadent cheesecakes, juicy cuts of meat, delectable vegetables, and fabulous fruit may occupy hours of one’s time. But there are limits. Once the man distracted by the delicatessen is properly fed, his thoughts move to other things, at least for some time. The appetite for sex; however, is never really sated, partially because it is a complex desire, one associated with status, standards of beauty, and sense of self-worth. The other reason: There is a limited supply of even marginally decent sex, whereas food of decent taste and texture is a commodity available to almost anyone, save the very poorest. Thus, there is a sex scarcity to a greater extent than there is a food scarcity (at least in the developed world, although the opposite might well be the case in the developing world). There have been a range of substitutes for sex invented, and these substitutes are of sufficient quality for them to effect a reduction in intrasexual male violence. However, they are not quite perfect and leave at least a little something—as much a matter of perceived intimacy as physical stimulation—to be desired.

Once robotics and artificial intelligence advance sufficiently, sexual (and emotional intimacy) scarcity may well entirely end. Such stands to render at least half of all marketing techniques worthless and make most violent conflict impossible to sustain for anything longer than the participants find amusing. Until then, sexual images and messages remain one of the best approaches to derail an otherwise disciplined mind.

The application of the sexualization of everything can take several forms. First is the sexual scandal. Sexual scandals have been a part of American life since the days of Alexander Hamilton. The modern difference—video and the internet. A cautionary note: One absolutely should not attempt to extort political leaders. This is a serious criminal offense. And extortion is not the point—destabilization of the political status quo is. That is not to say that much cannot be done within this domain.

Sexual Scandals and Political Churn

Most successful politicians are men who are (at least nominally) straight, meaning that those best suited to engaging them in an easily weaponized and career-kamikazeing affair are women. For those womenfolk who truly desire that the world be a more peaceful place, several possible courses of action come to mind. Not all demand a held nose and a hot-hot-hot-the-water-will-never-be-hot-enough-to-wash-away-the-filth shower after the fact. For Anthony Weiner—a man so aptly named for the scandal that befell him that one must consider the possibility that the gods have been conspiring to despoil him since the moment of his conception, if not before—some virtual flirting and a few closeups of his gym shorts proved enough to undo his political career. And in the age of #MeToo, even this much might not be required. Former Senator Al Franken was coerced into resigning because he may have touched a woman’s buttocks a decade before the accusation being leveled and because he held his hands above a woman’s breasts in a joking manner. In effect, he telepathically violated her.

This was enough to devastate his career.

Men can also play a role in manipulating sexually undisciplined politicians. Consider To Catch a Predator—a show dedicated to what borders on entrapment of men who believe that they are communicating with underage girls. In truth, a similar approach can be taken without the use of anyone underage (or even female). Some Youtubers do just that.

Stock photos, convincing text chats—one should brush up on teenage popular culture before undertaking this—and voice changer software can be used to produce a reasonably good simulacrum of a female voice. And developing technologies may make the process of helping politicians to ruin themselves even easier. Consider the case of @azusagakuyu (Yasuo Nakajima), a middle-aged Japanese man with a love of motorcycles and a desire for an audience. With a bit of photo editing and the use of a few filters, he managed to successfully present himself as a young, attractive female biker. Other advancing technologies, such as Deepfake image replacement, may also prove useful in one’s efforts to encourage political leaders to incinerate their professional reputations. (Any person using these technologies should be mindful of the potential legal repercussions of using another’s likeness, particularly without express permission.)

Tactics should not be applied in such a way that one side or the other—left or right—is favored. Rather, the goal must be to promote political churn—the extraordinarily rapid installment and replacement of politicians—which is both damaging to any sense of community and camaraderie within the political system and is (more importantly) profoundly distracting.

Pearl Clutching as Offensive Tactic

Next, there is the matter of keeping the tenor of sexual and political discussion as shrilly Victorian as possible. Given that 89% of the world’s pornographic content is produced in the United States, a reasonable person might reasonably assume that a people none too easily offended by yards of writhing flesh and oil drums’ worth of spraying bodily fluids would have a continental view of sex and sexual liaisons. Alas, outside of law school textbooks, the reasonable person is a rare breed, and his mindset is shared by almost none.

That we can go from pearl-clutching to pearl-necklace making in a matter of minutes is both fascinating and terrifying—boundless hypocrisy makes for much cognitive dissonance and subsequent frustration, confusion, and volatility of conduct. The pharisees’ words are a sharp, double-edged sword—one easily wielded against their owners. And let us make no mistake about it, there are pharisees amongst us, more mahogany-stained outhouse seats than whited sepulchers. They and their duplicitousness are devices well made to our—the responsible citizenry’s—use.

Furthering the state of sexual panic is easy. And one may work from the left or right perspectives. If intending to work on the left, one only need join any radical feminist or radical feminist-ally group and promote the most puritanical and moralistic hogwash to be devised. The key to making this work: Focus on power imbalances and sexual inequality.

Andrea Dworkin­—a mentally disturbed sex-phobic feminist—laid out the theory quite well. Although Dworkin never said that “all sex is rape,” she did state that “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.” And this reflects an interesting notion: Until the alleged power imbalance between the sexes is eliminated, heterosexual coitus and almost all other intersexual interaction remain acts of domination (“Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom . . . ”) and women who consent to sex within a patriarchal society are collaborating with the patriarchy and hurting womankind (“Instead occupied women [women engaging in vaginal sex while living in a patriarchal society] will be collaborators, more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing pleasure in their own inferiority . . . ”).

Said another way: So long as there is any remnant of male privilege (defined in the broadest possible terms) no heterosexual coitus can be fully consensual and non-exploitative.

To understand how absurd this is, one should apply the foundation of her theory—the notion that only agreements between perfect equals are non-coercive—to any other part of law and social interaction to identify its absurdity. Consider transportation.

The average American retail worker makes slightly more than 29,000 USD per year. For a worker in this position who wants to buy a new vehicle of even the most modest variety—a subcompact car, a motorcycle, or the like—financing or long-term saving are the routes most commonly available. Even if said worker chooses something as decidedly undecadent as a Yamaha Zuma 125—a barely highway-legal scooter with a maximum speed of 60 miles per hour—the issue of money remains.

The most practical way to obtain financing for anything with two wheels is likely to be through the dealer’s approved financial services provider—in the case of someone wanting a Yamaha, Synchrony Finance, a company that financed more than 140 billion USD of purchases in 2018. And this apparent wealth affords the organization more than mere lending. Synchrony Finance almost certainly has a stable of attorneys, collection agents, secretaries, and administrative staff that no ordinary worker could ever hope to employ. The point: By any reasonable measure, Synchrony Finance has more resources of every sort imaginable than does the average borrower. The two parties are not economically equal.

Nevertheless, we allow them to enter into a binding legal agreement—to consent to an arrangement founded on mutuality of consideration—and we hold the lesser party (the borrower) to the agreement, just as we do the greater one. Granted, many consumer-protection laws restrict and shape the nature and terms of lending agreements. But no one, save perhaps an actual communist, would suggest that consumer lending agreements are inherently unconscionable.

We tolerate some inequality of wealth, position, and power in contract law. Unless we are to seize and redistribute all personal and corporate resources, we must.

And for those who consider this power differential to be beyond the pale, I invite you to consider public student loans—often borrowed by young people who have no resources of either the economic or experiential sort—making them a strongly disadvantaged group—from the United States government (the most advantaged party on earth), and under terms that make discharge of said debt in bankruptcy legendarily difficult. If the pants-folding scooterist is at a disadvantage to Synchronicity, what is this? What is the student-borrower? Extremely disadvantaged? Perversely disadvantaged? Beyond unconscionably disadvantaged?

Still, student loans continue to be disbursed, and few have advocated they be eliminated.

Dworkin’s thinking is unhinged, impractical, and corrosive. It is also widespread in its application and has permeated education law and family law alike. More than anything else, it is tremendously useful.

Any relationship in which a man has power (and all men have power, we are told) over a woman—no matter how slight, ephemeral, or illusory—is shockingly coercive, profoundly abusive, and only a few steps removed from rape. Such conclusions stem more from an extension and expansion of Dworkin’s thinking to every aspect of life than from her actual words. Such extremism quite effectively casts a pallor over even the most innocent of intersexual dynamics, making cooperation (or much interaction) all but impossible.

And this is the space in which we live. The power of sexual panic from a Positional Insecurity Theory perspective has been evaluated (at least concerning #MeToo), but there is still more useful lunacy within the ore of today’s disordered thinking to be mined and smelted. We may end up with as much slag as pig iron, but there is irony aplenty.

Now that the left’s pathological and contradictory sexual standards have been torn apart at length, the right should have its turn.

Christian sexual morality may be strict and inclined to make for some enduringly joyless marriages, but it is not, if kept within the biblical traditions, unsustainable, contradictory, or biased against either sex. Modern and chivalrous sexually liberated churchian beliefs, however, are so wondrously contradictory that nary a soul, be it still attached to its corporeal form or wandering through eternity, could make any sense of them. The churches now happily fill their pews and pulpits with those who have broken their marriage vows for little reason but boredom, mindboggling complex blended families, and syphilitic single mothers. What, if any, carnal practices are forbidden within the modern church is difficult to ascertain.

There appears to be considerable resistance to accepting practicing (and admitted) homosexuals into most churches, although this is changing. Perhaps recognition of the transgendered is not far behind. Pornography is formally frowned upon (despite a decent number of professed Christians watching it)—because it is apparently considered closer to adultery than serial matrimony, despite Jesus himself making clear that those married, divorced, and remarried are not to be considered married at all. Presumably, child molestation and bestiality are beyond the pale. But those are not much accepted by members of the even the most liberal camps of sexual liberation. There appears much anxiety about sex on the right, but it is the nonspecific anxiety of people who know only that they fear, but not what or why.

In truth, both the fringe left and the conservative right have similar views on sex. They simply are not aware of as much.

Here is what they have in common:

1. They both oppose pleasure. Left or right, ideologues are killjoys. If they knew how to enjoy life, they would not ideologues. Dworkin was terrified of men’s sexuality (however unlikely it was that she was ever on the receiving end of it). The extreme religious right is equally terrified of its own (male) sexuality. Penises are scary. And god or goddesses forbid that anyone enjoy a sexual encounter. Sex must be either political act or religious act. Those who are no more enthusiastic about their liaisons turning into horizontal readings of Das Kapital than they are having encounters drier than a communion cracker (or vice versa) are out of luck.
2. They are confused. Neither the radical left nor the radical right have any substantial sense of sexual morality. They have vague ideas of a romanticized world in which sex is something wonderful? Fantastic? Awe-inspiring? Liberating? Transcendent? They do not know what sex should be, only that it should be something more than it is, despite what it is—an act of reproduction, entertainment, profit, or some combination thereof—being all it can be.
3. They want to stand for something, preferably more than chivalry, but they simply do not know what. And this is the most important point. They dream of having a dream. They hope for hope. They aspire to aspire. This makes them tremendously vulnerable to attack.
4. They are both deeply sexually frustrated and likely to see even the most innocent encounters in a perverse light. Yet their perceptions are counter to reality. It is not difficult for the average man or woman to go through weeks of life without seeing much worthy of sexual note. And there is a reason most of us have never considered careers in adult entertainment: We know that no one would pay to see us naked.

So similar are the two sides in their pathologies and paranoias that the techniques to manipulate them are identical: All the citizenry must do is infiltrate these movements and promote the most deranged voices and irrational moments of panic to the fore. These people—the estrogen-toxic left and the Bible-thumping right are loud. They make noises over almost everything.

And that makes them distracting.

The more fires these useful idiots are encouraged to set, the more time the national elite must spend putting them out. Congressional hearings on satanic dog molestation—that is worth six months of impassioned speeches in the House of Representatives. Breath rape (when a man exhales too heavily within earshot of a woman, I suppose)—the Senate Armed Services, Budget, and Finance Committees need to hold special 14-hour-a-day hearings on the matter. Overly lifelike illustrations of frog genitalia in middle school biology textbooks—who could object to a blue-ribbon presidential commission on that?

The responsible citizen should turn these forces of destruction into something good—a foil against the destructive tendencies of the elite. And there is poetry in this—the out of control, the peripheral, and the paranoid can draw power from the controllers, the established, and the fearless to make the world a bit better.

The Impossibility of Satire

No matter how extreme, how unhinged, or how detached from reality a position or argument is, some community of fanatics will accept it if given time and a bit of prodding, so long as the argument is made with a straight face.

Pure reactionaries, regardless of nominally leftist or rightist identities, are fundamentally unmoored. And that lack of absolute values and core beliefs, aside from disgust and frustration, make them gullible. For extremists, there is no satire (and little humor). And a society dominated by them becomes humorless as well. Dedicated citizens who wish to weaponize the institutions and ideologies of the sexually insecure—radical and academic feminist or purity-pledge ultra-right—need only remember that one cannot go too far! The infiltrator must have no shame. No matter how absurdly repressive the solution offered, there is a real possibility that the extremists will seriously consider it. Even if they dismiss the idea as unworkable, they are likely to admire the infiltrator’s passion.

Knowing this and acting accordingly, one is nearly bound to succeed.

Sex (and Sexlessness) Sells

America is past the age of peak sexually suggestive advertisements. A few companies push against boundaries (or transgress them if you will) well into the realm of hypersexuality, but those companies are at the margins, courting controversy. The rest are quickly being shamed and harangued into body positivity, fat acceptance, and squeaky-clean Virgin-Mary innocence.

Plenty of female social media stars are willing to allow the male gaze to exploit them (for a fee), and adult entertainers (or at least some former ones) are quickly becoming household names. Blunt discussions of sexual orientation, sexual techniques, and transgenderism are so common as to barely warrant the batting of an eye: We are not entirely sexless, at least in our thoughts and discourse.

Instead, this reflects a peculiar bifurcation in our society—sex can be either pornographically and anatomically explicit or entirely nonexistent from a conversation, but there is no acceptable middle. This was not the state of cultural affairs even ten years ago. Such is at least partially the result of the actions of the extremist groups (left and right) described in the last section. Their techniques—consumer boycotts and social media attacks—work some of the time on some organizations, but only if the organizations are concerned with family-friendly appeal. They can easily cudgel Calvin Klein into swearing off ever producing another advertisement like those it made with Brooke Shields and Kate Moss, but Calvin Klein needs available-at-the-mall acceptance. Eckhaus Latta does not.

The victims of this—suggestiveness, nuance, and implicitness—were not long mourned nor may they be much missed. They were quiet voices, easily drowned out by the orgiastic moans of hedonists and the praise-Jesus-and-pass-the-blame-and-all-sex-is-more-or-less-rape-anyway unified shrieking of the radical left/radical right porn-war alliance. Still, the victims had their uses. And a language where all is denotation and nothing is connotation is legalistic at best and algorithmic at worst.

This is the principal effect of extremism run rampant: It is less likely to eliminate serious threats to its underlying beliefs than it is to hollow out of the middle. Dialogues become contract negotiations, elections become battles royale, and speeches become either-you-are-with-us-or-with-the-terrorists prayer calls for loyalty.

Specific to the domain of sex and sexlessness, the current environment offers us a perversely powerful tool against the national elite. All we must do is earnestly make a few schizoid and contradictory demands. They are:

1. We must require that our leaders be sexless on command, have no impure thoughts about their colleagues or subordinates, and are so devoted to their spouses that even a team of relationship counselors can find no fault.
2. We must demand that they show no signs of prudishness or sanctimony and that they are accepting of a laundry list of sexual practices and perspectives of length and complexity sufficient to have driven Freud to overdose on cocaine.
3. We must stress that they demonstrate appropriate respect for the decadence du jour while taking a firm stand against perversion, which we must be certain to define in only the vaguest know-it-when-I-see-it manner (if we choose to define it at all).
4. We must alternate between feigning autism-spectrum literalness and octogenarian church-lady sensitivity to language. When a politician or any other member of the national elite wants to imply something sexual, we must pretend to be so entirely unsubtle that we take a prolonged metaphor of a red-tipped rocket repeatedly crashing into the icy surface of Uranus as a fascinating recounting of an obscure NASA mission. But when hearing statements made in perfect innocence, we must affect such sensitivity that even the most innocuously technical description of inserting a male plug into a female socket sends us to the fainting couch.

Not many politicians can fully comply with these requirements. Some manage to break the rules and charm their way out of disabling sanction and criminal prosecution (Bill Clinton). A very few manage to ignore them altogether, with Donald Trump being the most obvious example. But Trump is not so much a politician as he is a wrecking ball with a spray tan and improbable hair. He is, despite his wealth and status, an outsider elite. And the wondrous power of an angry member of the outsider/overproduced elite is something we have considered at length.

For the rest of the national elite, navigating this environment is an endless distraction. And distractions are what will keep the national elite too busy to execute any grand and grandly harmful plans.

Next, we apply the extremists’ effect—that of making the middle ground impossible—to the broader realm of non-sexual politics.

Substitution Theory—Essential Tactics

The line between distraction and substitution can be thin if it exists at all. Distractions monopolize time and mental energy. They substitute unproductive effort for its more meaningful sibling. And substitutions distract from primary goals. Still, there is a functional difference between the two within this text.

A distraction consumes time but makes no convincing claim to be equal to the thing it replaces. Interference built upon Distraction Theory is obvious to its targets, who know (or will surmise in short order) that their time is being consumed by efforts they find less than enjoyable or optimally productive.

A substitution entices its targets by way of offering something that satisfies an urge or longing for less time, money, or energy than can be had by the original means the distraction supplants. Interference built upon Substitution Theory may never be obvious to its targets, and even targets who eventually determine that they have been subject to manipulation may be so pleased with the substitution that they choose to continue their reliance upon it.

And this is where the extremists’ bimodal effect on public discourse becomes both fascinating and useful. Well applied, it allows for the genuine consensus-based accomplishment to be replaced with a more viscerally satisfying zero-sum game approach to politics. And this is just the sort of substitution needed to keep the national elite from forming cogent plans to remake the world in their image or protect themselves from external threats to power.

ST Tactic 1: Facilitating Endless Arguments: Replacing Real Achievement with Token Victories

The beauty of social media is that it amplifies the id in a manner that is instantaneous, non-destructive to cognitive processes, immediately reversible, profoundly addictive, and often undetectable to its users. It begs for an immediate response. It cries out to crush thought and reason and replace them with the emanations of the heart, the gut, and the genitalia. And it promotes bickering, territorialism, tribalism, and misunderstanding more efficiently than any previous form of communication. The other great effect: Its norms of shoot-from-the-hip impulsivity and endless bellicosity are spilling out and into the realm of politics. Only the most tenacious or thickheaded believe that much persuasion and progress can derive from a Twitter deathmatch. Still, they engage people both rich and poor, educated and ignorant alike.

As this style of debate spreads, less gets done. If we—the responsible Americans—wish to see that the national elites do as little (harmful or otherwise) as possible, we need only to rope them to the Twitter melee and drag them down to the lowest level.

Intelligent and levelheaded people could easily resist this—their disciplined minds could spot the pitfall we have dug and walk around it. Fortunately for us, this is not likely. The national elite have been almost entirely insulated from reproach for much of their lives. They may be happy to heap smugness on others—those of the wrong class or background—but being on the receiving end of mockery of their incompetence is bound to be an incongruous and horrifying experience for them, and resisting the urge to fight back against the ungrateful masses is nearly impossible.

But their record of winning virtual barroom brawls is not great. Thus, they are going to great lengths to block, ban, and shut down any criticism that threatens the credibility and authority of the elite. This applies to social media. It also applies to the comment sections of major websites and newspapers. Our lords and masters do not take criticism well.

This poses an obstacle, but not an insurmountable one. The most apparent approach to escaping the choking clutches of the powers that be is to platform hop—to move from one social media outlet to the next—or to create a platform of one’s own. Another is to develop and use algorithm-confusing code-speak. An additional one is to constantly change avatars and topics. A final method is to adopt a conventional argument that is aligned with the alleged belief of the target elite and accuse the elite of violating some tenant of it.

This is not so much about finding a controversial position as it is about finding the spot of sin and impurity on the target. Saul Alinsky advocated a similar approach—that of make the enemy live up to its own book of rules—the difference I advocate is that you specifically present yourself as a concerned friend and ally who firmly believes those rules. This sort of infiltration aligns with the methods described in Pearl Clutching as Offensive Tactic, but the difference between this method and the former is that this method need have no connection to sex. It also bears some relation to the methods described in Encourage Intragroup Attacks Amongst the Established Elites, but that is restricted to intragroup hostility, whereas this is a broader approach that encourages fights with anyone, anywhere, over any topic. And Positional Insecurity Theory tactics are based on fear. Distraction Theory tactics, with few exceptions, are not.

There are two keys to this tactic. The first is to remember that the topic is irrelevant. The topic is a pretext to draw in the elite, to get them to join in a messy fight in the messiest way possible. Pretend friendship, pretend loyalty, pretend anything necessary to engage them in a ruckus. And if the national elite proving unwilling to battle you online, start an argument on their behalf against their opposition, and plead for their assistance.

The second is this: Be entertaining. Never underestimate the ability to engage people with a snappy comeback, a rapier wit, or a perfectly landed insult. This key is more important than the first. Engage the elite. Make them want to argue with you. Make the crowd cheer, boo, scream, or gasp as loudly as possible. The goal is not to win the fight. The goal is to keep the other side fighting. And if you do win, do not win too hard or too often. A conflict where the winner is certain is not worth watching. If you are the better fighter, toy with your opponent. This consumes his time, makes him angrier, and invites careless moves from him—redirect his energy and his ego. Use them against him.

The other thing to do—cheerlead. People like to be noticed. They like being liked. Monitor the feeds and pages of the prominent national elite and boost the most controversial messages and arguments they make. In doing so, you provide an incentive, however small, for your target to self-radicalize, to bicker with his peers. Even the most elite of the elite love an adoring audience. Many are uniquely vulnerable to the intoxication of one because they have come to expect admiration. They feel underappreciated and confused without it.

ST Tactic 2: Sell the Elites Bullshit. Convince Them of Its Greatness. Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Introduction

This section is the second to present arts and artists as weapons against the elite. A previous section—Promote Lunatics and Artists as Generators of Unusual Thought—considered the opacity of the artist’s mind as a tool for the ensnarement and perplexment of the elites. This section considers the power of the arts themselves.

Caveat

This section contains a protocol that is the most difficult to execute promptly of any within the text. I have included it as much to provoke thought as for anything else. Building up a reputation as an artist oftentimes takes years, and that is time the world does not have if Thucydides’s Trap is not to catch us all. Perhaps more industrious people can take what I have written and apply it to social media or some other emerging media to engage and distract the elites.

To the young and young at heart who read this: I do not doubt your competence in the realms of social engineering and high technology. Little would make me happier than to see your ideas and methods eclipse my own. Above all else, never hesitate to be a bastard.

And enjoy it!

Foundational Statements

Creating art, regardless of form or era—art in the highest and most developed sense of the works of Dürer, Fellini, Hokusai, Park Chan-wook, or any other dedicated creator of note—is difficult. Selling it is less so. Art need not always be attractive: Bosch’s paintings were frequently grotesque as were Grosz’s visual ridicule of the Weimar Republic. Nor must they always be complex: The music of Debussy and the ink paintings of Xu Beihong seem simple enough for almost anyone to create (until they try). But there is a certain degree of skill supporting any art worthy of the name, even if the apparency of that skill is obscured by the simplest of presentations of the most modest of subjects. Spotting this—the quality of the thing—requires both careful examination and an understanding of art that not all causal observers will detect.

Conversely, creating bullshit is easy, but the art is in the deal. The art is in process of substituting the mediocre for the excellent, the repulsive for the appealing, and the wrong and false for the true and beautiful. This is the art of making many copies of planet earth’s most common object—the fool.

For those who can detect quality, trash is obvious. The only requisites for developing an eye to distinguish the junk from the gems are dedication to study, an interest in the media and content about which one is learning, and access to material that is freely available online. This is elite in that only a few are willing to invest themselves enough to achieve competence, but in no other way.

For those who cannot or will not educate themselves, there is no choice but to rely upon the opinions of experts, the wisdom of crowds, or their guts. Experts can be bought or fooled, and the wisdom of crowds varies according to the crowd chosen. There are worse options than relying upon the gut—an instinctive appreciation for beauty or authenticity—but one man’s gut differs from another. And although the gut is not often entirely wrong, it is rarely inclined to favor restraint. Decisions made accordingly are fine for a Lamborghini-driving sheik or the junk-food-loving billionaires of Silicon Valley—people who derive their power from their wealth and the land or companies they own (the capitalists in the Marxist framework)—but for the national elite, such garishness will not do.

One might imagine that the extensive and expensive educations of the national elite would inoculate them to the machinations of grifters. One would be wrong. Brand-name educations are not necessarily of substance—one can study nonsense extensively. And those whose worth within society is solely dependent upon them being better in the general sense, but not in any domain in particular are more easily manipulated by fads, tricksters, and smooth talkers than almost anyone else.

For one who must be better in a way no one can unambiguously define, tastes are so interwoven with merit that to trust one’s instincts or personal opinions is to hazard a loss of prestige (the only currency and reserve of many of the national elite). Beauty can only be seen, but not fully perceived, by those unable to acknowledge that there are things and people greater than themselves. The singularly narcissistic can only look inward—outside of their greatness they can imagine nothing of worth—and appreciating beauty in the fullest sense, the sense of awe, is something forever prohibited by their egos. This is the mental condition of the national elite, collectively if not always individually. Thus, fashion over beauty—and fashion can be shockingly ugly.

There are few better examples of this distorted sense of aesthetic value than The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a tiger shark carcass suspended in a tank filled with a formaldehyde solution—billed and sold as a sculpture by artist Damien Hirst. Given that he made between 8 and 12 million USD for this piece, Hirst has demonstrated competence in business. Yet his skills in taxidermy may not be equivalent—the installation’s shark had to be replaced due to decomposition. (Hirst has asserted that this was partially the result of an error on the part of curators.)

Hirst is British, as are many of the buyers of his art. Still, the lesson of marketing holds. Jeff Koons, probably best known for his balloon animal sculptures and Michael Jackson and Bubbles (a ceramic statue of Jackson and his pet chimpanzee that sold for 6.5 million USD in 2001), is most certainly an American. If he is a sculptor is less certain—he often conceptualizes the works sold under his name but has others do the actual work. (There is nothing more American than outsourcing!)

Considering the obviousness of the works and the way contemporary artists present themselves, a pattern emerges: The pinnacle of artistic success is reached not by practicing the skills of one’s nominal art, but by developing a different talent entirely—that of projecting supreme (and possibly a touch psychopathic) conviction in one’s genius and vision in the company of those of the highest station while subtly mocking them and taking their money.

This is an art unto itself. And it can be applied to almost any domain. The skillful bullshit artist essentially replicates the class-level actions of the national elite but with flair and style. There is a distinct possibility that a considerable minority within the national elite (or at least some gallery curators) recognize this—making the con a meta/self-con of sorts—and so admire the audacity of the premier artist that they are willing to subsidize his charlatanism with a wink and nod.

There is also the distinct possibility that both artist and elite alike tacitly acknowledge that what is being bought and sold is, depending upon circumstances and expense, either a late-stage capitalist act of conspicuous consumption (with the transaction itself being performative) or collaborative chicanery intended to deceive the public into believing that the elite can appreciate that which lesser mortal cannot.

Or the elites could be gullible idiots.

Either way, the recipe for taking elite money and transforming it into your money remains unchanged. This is making a cake without even having to preheat your oven:

Plan of Action

1. Find something ordinary, ugly, or slightly iconic (but in a lower class/pedestrian way).
2. Ironically repurpose the thing or design, making it bigger, smaller, odder, or vaguely off-putting. If the item in question is an example of good industrial design, distort, and deform so that the elegance of the design is lost.
3. Develop an eccentric, enigmatic, or slightly hostile persona. Choose clothing and personal effects that resemble those that one would expect to see on a circa 1950s construction worker, a Cuban revolutionary, or a homeless person. If you cannot manage this because of personal insecurity a) become more confident or b) buy a suit and wear it everywhere.
4. Start showing your work at places singularly ill-suited to refinement and sophistication. Preferably, these places should be old and/or in a state of disuse. Vacant industrial facilities are one option. Derelict schools, prisons, or asylums are others. To have a proper showing, you will need other artists to collaborate with you (more about that later), so start looking for them if you do not presently know of several.
5. Find someone who is already conning the elites, build a relationship with that person, and get that person’s endorsement.
6. Cultivate a skillset in the fields of dissembling, rhetoric, and verbal redirection. Practice the art of saying nothing at length and with irony and misplaced emotional intensity.
7. Practice considering and describing every part of your life, no matter mundane or indistinct from that of any other person, as performance art. The only absolute distinction between art and life is that art has a frame. Frame everything!
8. When you finally achieve some modicum of success, immediately assume an attitude of indifference or reservation. I do not want to become too commercial, you must protest while ratcheting the price of your product (meaning you) to stratospheric levels.
9. Be on time to nothing. Peasants scurry from one assignment to the next. But the meeting starts when the great man arrives. Or if going for the French intellectual presentation (always a challenge for those without gallic blood, but worth considering), show up disheveled and moderately intoxicated.
10. Periodically destroy what you have created, preferably in the most public manner possible. Declare that either no one has understood the message you meant to send (with the subtext being that they are too stupid to deduce the meaning on their own, and you are too important to explain it) or that the work simply does not meet your ridiculously high standards.

With only slight modification, you can apply this process to anything—including cults and multi-level marketing schemes (which can sometimes be one and the same). The thing that matters most: Your confidence. Never lose sight of that, and you will be able to make fools of more elite than you likely imagine possible.

The purpose of the artistic and cultish approach is threefold: First, it allows you to take money from those who have too much and give it to someone who has too little—you! Second, it allows you to further unmoor the elite from reality. And the more gullible they become, the more easily executed the Substitution Theory Tactic 3 (ST Tactic: 3) becomes. Third, it undermines the credibility of the elites. The more moronic their investments, the more warped their aristocratic appetites become, the bigger fools they appear to be.

Keep this in mind when applying this tactic: If enough people say something is art, it likely is. Feel no guilt about lining your wallet.

ST Tactic 3: Disinformation: Insinuation, Implantation, Irresistibility, and Inconsistency

Identifying Ignorance and Bottlenecks of Information Flow

Faking elite status is difficult. It can be done. But this is a grift, not a means of effecting change. The right approach is different. If you want to mislead the elite most effectively, flatter them just enough and in just the right way. This requires a certain delicacy and understanding of human nature, but nothing beyond the abilities of the reasonably intelligent man.

To be a member of the national elite is to take a certain pride in a certain kind of ignorance—a willful ignorance that separates higher beings from the hoi polloi. A less substantial version of this ignorance can be seen in those who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone, who profess no knowledge of popular culture, and who would have you believe that they have never seen the inside of a Walmart. This is prestige ignorance, and although it may be exaggerated by those who possess it, such does not make it false. This ignorance is weakness, as ignorance always is.

The national elites understand little about the mindset of the average American. And if they are to maintain their position in life, they cannot risk learning too much in too obvious a manner. From birth to school to work and to selecting a family and community, the elite are kept away from their inferiors and have no real opportunity to get to know much about them. This was not always the case, but as America has urbanized and suburbanized and social mobility within the country has declined, the perspective and shared-culture gap between the haves and have-nots has widened. Coming Apart, a book written nearly ten years ago, described the mechanics of this quite well. And however extreme the rift was then; it has likely grown. Inequality in the United States has.

So how do the national elite understand their subjects? They rely on social and data science for one—surveys, analysis of web traffic and websites—and they rely on casual informers. These are the few peasants in the national elites’ circles, or even anywhere in proximity to them. These are the plumbers, the electricians, the doormen, and the security staff who serve and protect the national elites (if only from annoying teenagers and leaky faucets).

The process of gathering information from such casual informers is complicated by the discomfort the national elite may have in communicating with those outside their class—or rather, their subset of the middle class, with middle class being what all but a few Americans consider themselves to be. And they likely overestimate differences in language, vocabulary, and communication style between the elite and non-elite (which, combined with their desire to establish their secular moral superiority, can make them seem quite patronizing).

The role of the casual informer is diminished by none of this; however, it does increase the odds that the casual informer does not know that he is serving as a casual informer. It is the nature of the ideologically trained to be both bombastic on the podium and dithering in the flesh. A true ideologue (or anyone trying to make a living by passing as one) cannot speak of too much with surety. He can recite the accepted views, he can compare the major schools of thought within his belief, but he need be circumspect. If he thinks or speaks too much without the appropriate guidance or textual support, he may violate some tenant or technical requirement, however obscure, of the godless religion that butters his brioche.

So the casual informer is likely to find himself being asked questions in the most roundabout of ways, questions about what the plumber thinks of these newfangled electric cars. (The plumber has one, but he lets his daughter drive it. Plumbing pays reasonably well.) Or what the plumber thinks of environmental concerns or immigration—again, asked in the most indirect of ways.

These informal interviews are an excellent opportunity for the responsible citizen to implant irresistible disinformation into the mind of the targeted elite, and if delivered with a cultivated aw-shucks apparent authenticity, the untruths will prove sticky.

Now, we must consider two relevant aspects of this plan: First is the nature of deception. Second are the viable mechanisms of infiltration.

Deception: Lies, Exaggerations, and the Trust Ladder

The best lies are largely true. And the best liars establish trust and then increase the degree of their deception over time. This is the strategy used by every competent confidence man. The casual informer/infiltrator can apply fundamentally similar techniques.

The idea is this: Prove trustworthy on anything that can be positively proven or disproven. This includes factual statements and broad assertions about the politics or the state of the world. Most importantly, it pertains to the professional conduct of the casual informer—timeliness, courtesy, quality of work, fairness of billing procedures, and warrantying. Providing good workmanship at a reasonable rate and with a respectful disposition is the fastest way for the infiltrator to build trust. And this proper conduct must be maintained for the duration of the ruse.

As the good reputation of the infiltrator grows, he will likely be given more referrals—and these will allow more access to the homes and ears of the national elite. Homophily—preference for those like oneself—is a fundamental aspect of human nature. And people of a certain class, particularly the elite, are more likely to trust those recommended to them by their peers than those who have no connection to the in-group.

This process—that of building relationships with the target group and expanding the network of relationships within that group—is the process of climbing the trust ladder. And the higher one climbs, the more misinformation he can spread. As is often the case with ladders, the most difficult process is that of getting one’s foot in the first rung. To do this, one must be in right place at the right time, meaning in proximity to certain neighborhoods and willing and able (licensed, bonded, insured, etc.) to provide critical services. While there is no definitive list of national elite hotspots, the cities and communities below would appear to be ideal targets for infiltration:

1. Washington, D.C.—The political significance of this city is obvious, but one should keep in mind that much of the city is not rich and many communities have little connection to the world of the national elite. Georgetown and Chevy Chase both appear to be prosperous and with a considerable number of elites, but if these are the ideal communities for the infiltrator to focus his attention is difficult to ascertain purely from online research.
2. New York City—Again, most of the city has no connection to politics, and the cost of living in the City is extraordinarily high. One need distinguish between the many millionaires of the City (many of whom have little political pull) and actual shapers of policy and opinion.
3. New Haven, Connecticut—The home of Yale University, its connection to the world of policy and power should be obvious.
4. Cambridge, Massachusetts—Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The significance of the people in these communities in shaping world events would be difficult to overestimate.
5. Stanford, California—The Left Coast and the Midwest (meaning Chicago for these purposes) are not as closely connected to the power structure as are the East Coast cities, but that is not to say that they are without consequence. Stanford is a good candidate for infiltration due to its university, which is the closest that California has to an Ivy League school.

This list of locations is not definitive, nor should the dedicated casual informer/infiltrator/activist assume that one must work or live in a major metropolitan area to efficiently achieve his ends. The power structure of the United States is urbanized, but not to the degree found in many countries.

In Japan, one of the best universities (University of Tokyo), the center of government, and the major producers of cultural content (Toho—the country’s largest film studio—many publishers, and many anime studios), are all within one city. In China, Beijing is both a historical and current capital city and the home of the best universities (Tsinghua and Peking). And it is upon the Beijing dialect that Standard Chinese (Mandarin, Putonghua) is based. In France, the same pattern applies—the nation’s best universities (Paris Sciences et Lettres University, Ecole Polytechnique, and Sorbonne University), the nation’s center of government, and the nation’s prestige dialect (Parisian French) are centered in the same city.

But the United States is different. Washington is not the home of America’s best schools, nor is Standard American English (to the extent it exists) based on the dialect of that city. In the realm of media, the country has not one center, but three—New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville, with other cities, such as Atlanta, of increasing importance. This makes infiltrating the national elite a bit easier. They may have all attended the same colleges, but outside of that bottleneck, they are scattered across communities throughout the United States.

This means that the determined infiltrator may need not travel far. He can direct his attention to select communities that are no more than a few hours’ drive away. And this would likely be preferable to long-distance relocation as it requires little in the development of a cover story: A plumber from Clarksville, Tennessee, is less likely to arouse suspicion when working in Nashville than he would when working in Chicago. He is also saved the time of moving his licenses and professional credentials from one state to the next.

Compiling a list of every community of influence in the United States would be impractical for this text, but finding a local center of power—where at least some of the national elite live—should not be too difficult for anyone so determined. The national elite are usually not the richest members of a given community, and they are unlikely to casually flex their status—such is an undignified act, unsuited to those with real power. Respected universities will attract a few national elites, even if they are not of the highest caliber: Academia is a strange country. Its centers of prestige are few, but influential academics are spread over a larger area. (Just because one went to a prestigious school, does not mean one can get tenure there.) And certain private organizations not part of the government/East Coast academic structure—the RAND Corporation, for example—can wield quite a bit of influence.

The infiltrator must always keep his eyes and ears open. Opportunities to shift the course of history, however slightly, may be closer than they first appear.

Breadcrumbs, Hags, and the Saltine Cracker House

Who, how, and where to deceive have been addressed. But regarding what? The envelope has postage and a label on it, but there is nothing inside.

Rather than advocating a specific set of lies (which would lead to repetition of content and eventual detection of the casual informer/infiltrator), this section includes a few major concepts to be broadly applied so that the infiltrator can develop narratives and instruments for promoting confusion of his own.

Breadcrumbs—Few will willingly leave the comfort of their established beliefs without some guarantee of safe means of return. Thus, breadcrumbs are critical. These are statements, assertions, or generally agreed-upon facts or ideological tenants that provide the target with a visible connection to existing beliefs—markers for the path home. The infiltrator should listen first and foremost and after identifying the critical core of the target’s beliefs, acknowledge and confirm them while gradually leading the target down the path of confusion.

Hags—Nothing brings people together like a common enemy. The hag could be whatever it is that the target despises. The hag du jour has been Trump—evil incarnate, who locks immigrant children in cages before fattening them with government peanut butter and pushing them into the tortilla oven (he likes Mexican if not Mexicans, it seems). This hag has largely retired. New hags may be extremists (however vaguely defined), Vladimir Putin, or any other prominent person or group who may act contrary to the will of the national elite. At least some of the hags of the future are likely to be associated with the Chinese people or government, but who specifically is uncertain. The only certain thing is that there will be a hag. The national elite need a hag to maintain a shared narrative and a shared goal—to defeat the ugliness (and replace it with an ugliness of their own).

The Saltine Cracker House—Without temptation, there can be no deception. But the temptation must not be too delectable. The odds that a casual informer/infiltrator would stumble upon a great conspiracy are slim. The target must not be offered something impossibly good. It is easy to resist ridiculous fantasies. Rather, the infiltrator should offer not the entire meal of a grand narrative, but a few crackers instead—suggestions that someone, somewhere is planning something, acting against the interests of the elite, or otherwise likely to pose a problem. Switching metaphors: The monster is scarier when it is never fully seen. Godzilla’s footprints and his distant roar rattle the nerves more deeply than seeing him in a boxing match with his shiny mecha-doppelgänger. This is the power of imagination. A good infiltrator does no more work than needed. He hints, he nudges, and he lets the target’s mind grow terrified of sounds and shadows.

Nothing too good must be presented. Offer the target saltines. Offer him something just good enough. Let his hunger, not your excellence in the culinary arts, provide the seasoning. Do this and watch him grow more ravenous and more careless by the day.

The Trap Avoided

The reason for creating this text was simple: to help America and the world, rout a march towards Armageddon—a hot war between two nuclear powers. The theory contained herein is only somewhat more complex. And the suggested tactics are meant merely to serve as starting points, to be expanded and refined by the creative and the determined in ways beyond the dreams of the author.

This text advocates the destruction of nothing and no one (aside from a few illusions and delusions of competence). Rather, the tools herein are meant to be used to buy time, enough time for the balance of global power to shift. They are not against the natural flow of things: They rely almost exclusively on accelerating and redirecting existing cultural trends. The world order of the future is likely multipolar, with five major nations (the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and India) having large but rarely overlapping spheres of influence. This does not pose an existential threat for America, and there is no reason to believe that China, Russia, Japan, and India each having domains independent of United States control will cause any harm to the American people.

The destination is fine, but there the road there is likely to be rocky.

The American national elites have reigned over a major portion of the globe since the 1950s and were without peer from the collapse of the Soviet Union to 2019. From this much power, comes arrogance and entitlement. The national elites will not take kindly to being reduced to one elite amongst many. And this is where we—responsible American citizens—come into service. We can confuse, we can obfuscate, we can annoy, and we can delay. This is our potential for a lasting contribution to the world. This should be our legacy.

The Trap does not block every path. We can guide our nation around it. Perhaps some other people will spring the Trap another day, but the evils of the day are more than sufficient.

We—you—stand between peace and war, between tolerable and intolerable futures. And we do not need to be excellent in our endeavor, just good enough to buy time.

The Questions

Do you care enough to stand, to toil for peace? Or will you do nothing? Will you let the elite sacrifice our nation and the world on the altar of their fears, their greed, and their egomania?

These are not rhetorical. Consider them with care.

How you answer them matters.

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Brant von Goble is a writer, editor, publisher, researcher, teacher, musician, juggler, and amateur radio operator.

He is the author of several books and articles of both the academic and non-academic variety. He owns and operates the book publishing company Loosey Goosey Press.