Magical Realism and Information Operations

[Stan]

Hey Folks !

Slapout, I checked, he's not in Latvia !

We've seen this effect time and time again over the course of history. This was the sort of thing I was talking about when I said that people play out stories with recognizable plots (or something like that). Both Claude Levi-Strauss (no relation to the Jeans family) and Carl Jung looked at this. I think Levi-Strauss got the structural aspects right (see his Structural Study of Myth) while Jung got the rest of it right.

Marc,
You're not going tell me we went from Djinns and ghosts to Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and psychological type framework, are you ? This would be the same Carl Jung, or another Carl from your "Craft Section" ?

Regards, Stan

[goesh]

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic. Bill Donovan and that old time crowd could have better exploited the potential use of ju-jus and skin changers than we of today can due to the political oversight that guides and directs any engagements we enter into. Guzman from the Shining Path was pretty much considered a Shaman by the locals and we know Noreiga from Panama was heavily into Santeria/Lukumi. 2cd hand reports suggest Che adapted Bolivian ritual magic to wow peasants from time to time and Bustos, one of his henchman, is reported to have been heavily into Santeria. The Jinn are not readily exploitable in the Islamic theatre of operations IMHO because Mohammed didn't employ/exploit them and Islam pretty much tells its followers to ignore the Jinn.

[marct]

Hi Goesh,

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic.

Yupper. Then again, any type of operation like that would be totally outside of the rules of war anyway. If it was done, it would have to be so black an op that it would never appear.

Bill Donovan and that old time crowd could have better exploited the potential use of ju-jus and skin changers than we of today can due to the political oversight that guides and directs any engagements we enter into.

Donnovan also had the advantage of working with Gregory Bateson, who was probably one of the best people to ever come out of academic Anthropology.

Guzman from the Shining Path was pretty much considered a Shaman by the locals and we know Noreiga from Panama was heavily into Santeria/Lukumi. 2cd hand reports suggest Che adapted Bolivian ritual magic to wow peasants from time to time and Bustos, one of his henchman, is reported to have been heavily into Santeria. The Jinn are not readily exploitable in the Islamic theatre of operations IMHO because Mohammed didn't employ/exploit them and Islam pretty much tells its followers to ignore the Jinn.

The profet may not have exploited them, as you put it, but Soloman did. Anyway, it's not so much a case of Islam "ignoring" the djinn, as it is of their existing as "people" who may or may not be Muslims and who are going to take a part in the human world anyway. For a number of Muslims, the djinn are already in this conflict (e.g. for the Northern Alliance).

Marc

[Stan]

Hey goesh !

The UCMJ prohibits doing anything to the dead, so any 'believers' on our side better stick to high tech and real-time digital magic.

I won't for a minute think that one of ours would perform voodu on a corps, but stranger things have happened that will indeed open your eyes. My tours in Korea, somewhere in South American (no tail numbers, no flight plans kinda traveling), and later Sub-Sahara not only opened my eyes, but at times forced me to close them. The dreams will still get you later, no matter how many times you try and close your eyes.

Marc,
Strangely enough, while in Korea and taking night courses in Personnel management (read Pysops 101, first chapter) the instructor insisted we read and retain to memory Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
I would later here about Bateson while undergoing DIA mandatory MBTI evaluations. Wow this Sierra really works

Regards, Stan

[marct]

Marc,
Strangely enough, while in Korea and taking night courses in Personnel management (read Pysops 101, first chapter) the instructor insisted we read and retain to memory Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972).
I would later here about Bateson while undergoing DIA mandatory MBTI evaluations. Wow this Sierra really works

Hey Stan,

Cool! I'm glad they remembered Bateson. If you've read Steps to an Ecology of Mind, you might also want to look at A Sacred Unity and Angel's Fear - they are the completions of his work in a lot of ways. I wish he was still alive <wry grin>.

Marc

[goesh]

- are hard to come by these days and I use the term rogue because the current tone and tenure of Academia is decidedly ant-military, anti-Bush and at best, overtly hostile to the GWOT. I've come across some conservative Blogs by Academics who do so anonymously for fear of scorn and even retribution by colleagues. I did follow one professional Anthro blog for a while and the topic of Anthropology per se assisting the American Administration in its foreign policy was brought up and the vitriol expressed was harsh to say the least. On-the-side, hefty consult fees are another matter though.....

Exploitation of the spiritual is a hard sell at best and the Military is not known for fast adaptation - recall the hoopla over SF troops in Afghanistan being told to shave the beards off and get back in uniform. Nope, I don't look for any Shamans sporting fetishes and ju-jus to be leading any patrols to psych out the indigs any time soon nor to be on any operational/policy planning teams either. It's odd if you think about it, not wanting to exploit spirituality when there are tactical advantages to it.

[goesh]

Not that I am trying to upset any Chaplains or people of faith or anything like that, but I don't see how our lethal enemies can have any fear of our God that is bloody and nailed to a cross with thorns driven into his head. This may be somehow connected to our inability to exploit spirituality.

[marct]

- are hard to come by these days and I use the term rogue because the current tone and tenure of Academia is decidedly ant-military, anti-Bush and at best, overtly hostile to the GWOT. I've come across some conservative Blogs by Academics who do so anonymously for fear of scorn and even retribution by colleagues. I did follow one professional Anthro blog for a while and the topic of Anthropology per se assisting the American Administration in its foreign policy was brought up and the vitriol expressed was harsh to say the least. On-the-side, hefty consult fees are another matter though.....

Take a look at my article in the latest (Vol 7) of SWJ - believe me, as an Anthropologist, I definately agree with you on the anti-military sentiment!

Exploitation of the spiritual is a hard sell at best and the Military is not known for fast adaptation - recall the hoopla over SF troops in Afghanistan being told to shave the beards off and get back in uniform. Nope, I don't look for any Shamans sporting fetishes and ju-jus to be leading any patrols to psych out the indigs any time soon nor to be on any operational/policy planning teams either. It's odd if you think about it, not wanting to exploit spirituality when there are tactical advantages to it.

Honestly, I wouldn't call it "exploitation of the spiritual" at all . I would call it "using all of our allies", and if the djinn want to ally against AQ...

Marc

[120mm]

Hmmmm. Speaking of magical thinking. How can academics dismiss war and war-making as a significant factor in human interaction and still proport to be truth-seekers?

But they demonify it, and drive it from public view, as if that would make it cease to exist.

[marct]

Hi Stan,

Marc,
You're not going tell me we went from Djinns and ghosts to Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and psychological type framework, are you ? This would be the same Carl Jung, or another Carl from your "Craft Section" ?

The MBTI is really a highly watered down version of Jung's work. I was thinking more of his work in Aion and Vol 9,i of the Collected works on Archetypes. MBTI done well has about a 70% predictive value but, as with all typologies, it is hopelessly outclassed by the more complete (and complex!) dynamic system models.

There has been some specialized, and pretty complex, work done on the relationship between archetypes and neurological structures in the brain - e.g. Charles Laughlin's Biogenetic Structuralism, Michael Persinger's God Helmet, and some of Susan Blackmore's work. Blackmore, along with some of the more conventional symbolic anthropologists, has tended to concentrate on the "programming elements" (i.e. symbols), which Lauglin and Persinger have gone more heavily into the neurology. My own stuff, mainly unpublished, tends to straddle the two although I also put more emphasis on the programming elements.

Probably the easiest way to think about this is that we all have similar "hardware" (actually, it's semi-mutable wetware, but that's another story ), but our programming languages differ. Oh, yeah, one other form of Western djinn that got co-opted about 1600 years ago are what the Greeks called "daemons". In the programmin language metaphor, you could think of them as self-propagating computer programs, some of which are really quite complex and powerful.

Marc