Mock Mock Mockery

There are new information warfare tactical cleverness I would describe as "mock for a mock" conditioning among The People, the population of a society. This information warfare tactic manipulates people into factions that mock back and forth, turning the entire population into a big mockery.

Pattern is

1. Politician, business leader, social media leader, Reality TV news network... says something absurd and nonsensical. Mocking a topic they are against: climate change, equality in democracy, equality between religions, economic balancing towards equality. They mock it with some clever or nonsense style of communication / messaging.

2. The People, the crowd, mocks back.

3. Now the entire group becomes a mockery. And people will not stop engaging the tactic, no matter how much you try to expose it.

This has proven to be one of the most powerful tactics of information warfare, peer pressure to LOL and mock back at chaotic and nonsense statements and messages.

Citations on this pattern of making bold nonsense statements and media messages to gain power over an entire population.

1. “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946

2. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

3. Duke University's Rick Roderick's 1993 lectures "Self Under Siege" and his concept of media messages and medium systems to banalize life. I have coined the more modern term "hyperbanalisation" as a information warfare tactic. ToDo: create page on Roderick's points. see also: https://old.reddit.com/r/HyperBanalisation/

4. Adam Curtis of the BBC on December 31, 2014 about information warfare tactics of Russia / Vladislav Surkov: "BBC's Adam Curtis On The "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics" (Link has a video well worth watching on the subject). "What this film is going to suggest is that that defeatist response has become a central part of a new system of political control. And to understand how this is happening, you have to look to Russia, to a man called Vladislav Surkov, who is a hero of our time. Surkov is one of President Putin's advisers, and has helped him maintain his power for 15 years, but he has done it in a very new way. He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics. His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater."

5. "The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains, it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd." - Peter Pomerantsev, November 2014. Surkov - Hidden Author of Putinism 

6. "The victims I meet never talk of human rights or democracy; the Kremlin has long learned to use this language and has eaten up all the space within which and opposition could articulate itself."  ... "The only response to the absurdity of the Kremlin is to be absurd back."  - Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev. November 11, 2014.

7. The Great Dictator film from 1940 staring Charlie Chaplin has a speech in it about cleverness. 1940 (See video below in this page)

Direct time-index link to this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/J7GY1Xg6X20?t=46

Quote from This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, 2019