Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

by Annalee Newitz

Bernays had successfully turned his uncle’s project to promote mental health into a system for manipulating people into behaving irrationally. Instead of helping people understand what they truly desired in their unconscious minds, he invited them to displace those desires onto something else, something they could buy.

The Cambridge Analytica team was helping authoritarian politicians target people whose minds were vulnerable to fascist propaganda.

Psyops in a culture war take a different form from those in a kinetic war. PSYOP specialists in the military have a singular goal: convince the enemy to change their behavior. Culture warriors have two goals: convince Americans that some of their fellow citizens are the enemy; and convince “the enemy” that there is something deeply wrong with their minds, and therefore they are not qualified to demand greater freedoms and personal dignity. A culture-war attack divides the nation into two groups: those with good brains and those with bad ones.

Psyops are pernicious because they are designed to create a mental catch-22. If you notice the psyop, your own psychological health is called into question.

Unfortunately the problem that confronts the United States now is that the gaslighter is not just one guy. We are in an era of stochastic, decentralized gaslighting—and the traumas we suffer from psychological attacks began generations before we were born.

When we immerse ourselves in the silence of the library, we learn the most fundamental defense against psyops. Our minds belong to us.