Your Brain on War

Right Hemisphere Defences in 5th Generation Warfare

Do the hemispheres of your brain play a crucial role in the war we’re in?

I have been pouring through Ian McGilchrist's epic book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

He makes an incredible case for the ways in which, in the Western world, the left hemisphere of the brain has become a reductionist tyrant, at the expense of the right hemisphere's capacity for holistic thinking. The right hemisphere, he proposes, is best suited to be the Master while the left hemisphere is best suited to be the Emissary.

A master and his emissary

This dynamic has been reversed in the West, according to McGilchrist, causing the Emissary to dominate and betray his own Master. While he lays out the path to this brain based entrenchment as a very complex series of evolutionary and cultural changes, it brought me to some questions about our brains and the fifth generation war we’re in:

How does this modern neurological dilemma fit into the landscape of 5G warfare?

Considering that this particular theatre of war relies heavily on PSYOPs, cyberwarfare, disinformation and other tactics that utilize the manipulation of human cognition, are the two hemispheres impacted differently? 

Does the possibility that we have become entrenched within the left hemisphere leave us weak and exposed to the 5G operations of our enemy? 

But most importantly:

Could strengthening the capacity of the right hemisphere of the brain to see things within a broader context, to exercise doubt, uncertainty, and the possibility of multiple different truths, be helpful in developing defences against fifth generation warfare?

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Fifth generation warfare often involves the manipulation of information and the creation of narratives with the intention to influence people's beliefs and perceptions.

Given these particular forms of manipulation, how relevant is it that the right hemisphere of the brain is often associated with holistic and contextual thinking, as well as the ability to understand and interpret emotions and non-verbal cues?

Note that I said interpret emotions, not experience them. I'll ask the reader to keep this distinction in mind, since interpretation of one's emotions requires there to be a distance from which we observe them. More on this later.

These right brained abilities can be valuable in detecting and evaluating the accuracy and credibility of information, as well as in recognizing when information is being manipulated or distorted. They also give us the ability to apply an intuitive understanding of the information landscape.

This is crucial because, with a keenly developed situational awareness, the right brain is what we can use to place information into the broader context of 5G Warfare.

In addition, the right hemisphere’s ability to exercise doubt, uncertainty, and the possibility of multiple different truths can help to prevent people from accepting false or misleading information without question. This can be especially important in an era where disinformation and propaganda are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to distinguish from accurate information.

It's important to note that, developing defences against fifth generation warfare will likely require a multifaceted approach that involves a range of strategies, including technological solutions, policy and legal frameworks, and education and awareness-raising campaigns. Strengthening the capacity of the right hemisphere of the brain is just one potential component of a broader strategy for defending against fifth generation warfare.

But I believe this solution empowers individuals in a clear practical way that can be put into practice immediately.

Coming back to Ian McGilchrist's work on the hemispheric differences in the brain, he offers important implications for understanding and defending against the conditions of 5GW.

In particular, his argument that modern society has become too reliant on left hemisphere thinking may be relevant to the ways in which people are vulnerable to particular forms of manipulation and disinformation.

The manipulation of people's beliefs and perceptions involving the use of social media, fake news, propaganda, and other forms of media to create a distorted or false narrative that is designed to influence people's behaviour seems, to some extent, to rely on the utilization of the left brain without the balancing influence of the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist's work suggests that people may be more vulnerable to such manipulation if they are overly reliant on left hemisphere thinking, which tends to be more analytical and focused on narrow tasks.

This is because, according to McGilchrist, we are meant to spiral information and experiences back and forth between the hemispheres, towards greater understanding.

We use the left to break things down and understand them in parts, frozen in time, then submit these parts back to the right hemisphere to congeal this new understanding of parts into a dynamic, flowing and holistic conceptualization.

This new holistic concept can then be transformed and expanded upon as the right hemisphere perceives it within a larger context, and then be moved back to the left brain for deeper reductionist analysis in its expanded form. This back and forth is alleged, by McGilchrist, to go on and on ad infinitum.

Do we spiral between the left and right hemispheres towards deeper understanding?

This is his idealized process of the brain being used to understand reality and the self in greater and greater depth.

But what happens when this process is stunted and people become cognitively entrenched within the left brain?

For example, people who are highly educated towards analytical, left brain thinking may be more likely to accept information that appears to be logical or well-supported, even if it is actually false or misleading.

This was exemplified by the use of Fact-Checking sites and articles across the media landscape throughout COVID. Even though many of these fact checks have been proven wrong again and again, they nonetheless worked on a huge portion of the public because this seemingly logical appeal to authority is, to an extent, an appeal to rigidly left brained thinking.

This is partially because the left brain is self-reinforcing in it's view of the world. If someone's thinking stays within the realm of the left hemisphere, it has no impetus to give up its analytical reduction, because this part of the brain seeks certainty and prediction.

Contrastingly, it is the right hemisphere that allows us to be in a space of doubt in which we can hold several different possibilities or outcomes.

Similarly, people who are less able to observe and interpret their emotional responses or are less able to see things in a broader context may be more susceptible to propaganda.

This is a more nuanced angle, since emotions can often be a source of immense manipulation, which is why I emphasized the ability to interpret emotions rather than live from within them, or use them as a decision making tool.

To be able to interpret something we need to have a certain amount of space from the phenomenon we are observing. This is one of the ways the right brain capacity to think about things within the context of the whole can be advantageous in 5G War.

This is also why The Citizen's Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare emphasizes the following:

PROTECT YOUR MIND - CONTROL YOUR EMOTIONS

PSYOP is only one aspect of 5Gw. PSYOP is the underlying non-kinetic [non-violent] part of hybrid, irregular, and unrestricted warfare. Though it is non-kinetic in nature, PSYOP can have kinetic [violent] effects. A PSYOP campaign is not violent, but a riot might be. PSYOP is not new, but now, anyone can have access to your mind through social media, which is contrived for political purposes. Everything is weaponized until something better can be weaponized. You should protect your mind and control your emotions, or your mind will become their weapon.

In order to defend against fifth generation warfare, it may be necessary to strengthen people's capacity for right hemisphere thinking, which is more holistic, intuitive, and attuned to the nuances of social and emotional communication.

This also means being able to identify influences within our institutions that are involved in promoting rigidly left brained thinking. While they may not be compromised in terms of intentional 5GW, they may be cultivating the conditions that weaken people who are targets for particular PSYOPs.

Post secondary institutions are a good example. As evidenced by both Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology, they can train people into hyper specialized forms of thinking that cause people live from within dense ideologies as a form of unflinching certainty for assessing the world.

This kind of certainty is a left brain specialization.

Right Hemisphere Strategies to Employ

This could involve strategies such as promoting media literacy in the context of information warfare and teaching young children critical thinking skills. Or encouraging people to intentionally seek out diverse perspectives and engage with different viewpoints.

It could also involve developing technologies and policies that support a more balanced approach to information processing and decision-making. Elon Musk’s approach to Twitter could be seen as a technological shift away from social engineering designed to create bias through censorship and narrative control. The fact that he often triggers both left and right wing users is, to me, a good sign.

Intentionally utilizing the right hemisphere’s capacities is the opposite of the "trust the experts" influence operations we are now all so familiar with. No one's expertise should replace our critical thinking, and this means that regardless of whatever appeal to authority is at play, we should maintain our capacity to use doubt, and to consider multiple possibilities outside of what certain experts are telling us.

Flex that right hemisphere!

Photo by Bret Kavanaugh on Unsplash

Overall, McGilchrist's work highlights the importance of understanding the ways in which the brain processes information and the potential vulnerabilities that can arise from an over-reliance on one hemisphere over the other. By developing a more nuanced understanding of the brain and the ways in which it interacts with the wider social and cultural environment, it may be possible to develop more effective strategies for defending against fifth generation warfare.

Which brings us to the personal responsibility we have to use these incredible minds correctly within this particular theatre of war.

Do you hold space for not knowing what is going on, for calm, tactical doubt? 

Or are you constantly grasping for certainty? 

Do you practice holding multiple different truths when a new scheme is seemingly arising from the shadowy network we’re up against? 

Or do you assume you know what they’re up to? 

Do you watch your emotions like waves, and wait until they subside to make decisions on how to proceed? 

Or do you allow the emotional waves generated by the chaos of this war to make decisions for you? 

We are each responsible for how we travel through this war.

Perhaps, with enough discipline, each of us can can help pull our society back from the dangerous precipice of living within a left hemisphere entrenchment, and undo the strategic advantage this gives our enemy.

Perhaps we can emerge from these cognitive trenches together towards freedom of thought and liberty for all.

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You can also support me by purchasing or renting my latest film CUT - Daughters of the West, which was developed according to the principles of fifth generation warfare.