Episode Details

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 en