Episode Details

Our mantra: “Look for the Mana in the Meme!”

1. Scan for the ‘Mana in the Meme.’

2. Identify, unlayer it.

3. Characterise the Mana’s Dimensions. 4. Evaluate them.

5. Make the Call: Positive, Negative or Neutral.

6. Intervene, Act appropriately.

I felt bad all week.

I left you on a bit of a downer in this Podcast:

That the mental war that Russia has launched against all of us in all of our countries, wherever we’re from, will continue after Ukraine’s victory.

I wanted to situate that description of how I see that reality- that the Russians’ war against us will continue after victory. Even if, as I do in this piece below, I can foresee the gentle eradication of what Putler referred to as ‘the Russian Ethnos’ which has, as we see in Ukraine, a remarkable propensity to commit war crimes - 300,000 or so registered war crimes in Ukraine since Feb 24 2022.

The German and Japanese Ethnos’s survived after World War Two because they repented, acknowledged their crimes, surrendered their war criminals and got on with credibly rebuilding their cultures, communities and countries with the help of benign occupation forces of Canada, England and the United States.

Russians themselves say that they are going to continue to prosecute their mental war after the end of the kinetic phase. Russia’s mental war is hidden inside Disinfolklore (qua the narrative form which I am the first writer to identify and name and the analytical theory which I invented and which I’m elaborating upon here for parsing all forms of disinformation).

See here how Galina Rymbo, a poet, translator, feminist and anarchist of Moldovan-Romanian and Ukrainian origin who was born and raised in Western Siberia and now has found sanctuary in Ukraine wrote about what I call the Disinfolklore Universe:

I am proposing a solution which many of us can integrate into our own mental algorithms. To vaccinate ourselves against the contagion of Russia’s mental war against us.

Disinfolklore, the analytical theory, is supposed to help us in real time.

The challenge I had set myself was to come up with a method that we can all use on-the-fly in our daily lives to parse data/informational units/memes.

I use those words or those terms interchangeably.

The visual memes that we have come to associate with the moniker Meme. I go back all the way back to, I think it was 1976. Richard Dawkins coined the term or the moniker ‘Meme’ to describe cultural ideas that pass around through the ether, as it were. Through human culture.

It’s always fascinated me that that word ‘Meme’ didn’t need to be created until that book.

Actually, when I think about it, the concept of Mana, which I use a lot in my work. The concepts of contagion or medium - something which is passed between us - actually serves the same purpose as Meme does in the English language.

By meme, I mean any visual, audible phenomenon. Anything that affects our energy, our Mana. Anything which comes inside into your Inner Minds through, through or even actually inside our own minds.

Part of this idea of Contagion, in Cultural Psychology and Anthropology (which I mentioned three weeks ago) that once something is lodged in your mind,that it has its own energy and it works away by itself into provoking our own emotions.

we’ve all had sleepless nights over ideas or woken up thinking of something and can’t get back to sleep about it. And in many ways, the purpose of Russian disinformation is to plant these memes in our minds, these informational units, which burrow away and affect our attitudes, our intentions, our moods and our motivations, those four ideas.

That’s how I look at, that’s the kind of the cognitive model which I use in Disin folklore as an analytical method for parsing Russian and any form of disinformation, but also any form of data really coming in from the outside that it affects the c