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1/10/23 9:38 PM
SUBVERSION
Other Titles of Interest from Georgetown University Press

From Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution
Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, and S. C. M. Paine, editors
Russian Cyber Operations: Coding the Boundaries of Conflict
Scott Jasper
The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace
Oscar Jonsson
Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-­First Century
Andreas Krieg and Jean-­Marc Rickli
 ANDREAS KRIEG

S U BV ERSIO N

THE STRATEGIC

WEAPONIZATION

OF NARRATIVES

GEORGETOW N UNIVERSITY PRESS / WASHINGTON, DC

© 2023 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for third-­party websites or their content. URL links were
active at time of publication.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krieg, Andreas, author.

Title: Subversion: the strategic weaponization of narratives / Andreas Krieg.
Description: Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022022616 (print) | LCCN 2022022617 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781647123352 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781647123369 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781647123376 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Information warfare. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Subversive activities.
Classification: LCC U163.K75 2023 (print) | LCC U163 (ebook) |
DDC 355.3/43—dc23/eng/20221221
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022616
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022617

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

24 23    9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Jeremy John Parker

Interior design by BookComp, Inc.
 CO NTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1
1 The Sociopsychology of Truth 15
2 Challenging the Gatekeepers of Truth 35
3 Subversion and the Contest of Wills 63
4 Digital Authoritarians and the Exploitation
of Liberation Technology 91
5 Subversion and Russia’s Concept of War
in the Twenty-­First Century 119
6 Little Sparta’s Counterrevolution, or How the United Arab
Emirates Weaponizes Narratives 146
7 Toward Information Resilience 175
Conclusion 195

Bibliography 205
Index 233
About the Author 241

v
This page intentionally left blank
 ACKN O W LED G M ENTS

The beginnings of this book take me back to early 2018 as I was putting
together an idea for an edited volume on the Gulf Crisis that had divided the
region since June 2017. For the first time a political crisis between neighboring
Arab Gulf state regimes had spilled into the public sphere, polarizing and mobi-
lizing the people of the region and beyond. At a diplomatic stalemate in 2018,
the crisis appeared to have moved entirely into the information environment,
where ­weaponized narratives kept fanning the flames, with tangible effects
both on regional civil-­societal mobilization as well as academic and policy­
making discourse in the West. The research on the origins, motivations, and
solutions to the Gulf Crisis, which was only formally solved in 2021, opened
my eyes to the potency of information and influence operations. I am ever so
grateful for the often-­polarizing academic debate on this issue.
I would like to express a special thanks to the members and colleagues at
the Royal College of Defence Studies, with whom I had the pleasure of test-
ing my concepts and theories. Their practitioner’s input has been extremely
important in shaping the direction of this book. Likewise, my gratitude goes to
the ­reviewers of the book, whose comments and recommendations have been
instrumental in sharpening the focus of this book, which transcends a variety
of different academic disciplines. Pushing the boundaries outside conventional
thinking about warfare and conflict is particularly hard when the crux of the
argument is fundamentally about the perception of truth. A special thanks
goes also to the Royal Automobile Club and Royal Airforce Club in London,
whose libraries and business centers have provided me with refuges in which
to read and write over the past three years.
Above all, I would like to say thank you to my amazing family—my wife,
Zohal; my daughter, Amalia; and my son, Issa—for their patience with me as
I spent months with research and writing under the most difficult of circum-
stances during the COVID-­19 pandemic. They provided the necessary balance
in times of writer’s block, tedious editing, and self-­doubt.

vii
This page intentionally left blank
 A B B R EVIATIO N S

AfD Alternative für Deutschland

AGSIW Arab Gulf State Institute in Washington
AIPAC American Israel Public Affairs Committee
ARD Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Rundfunkanstalten Deutschlands
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
CBC Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
CDU Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands
CGTN China Global Television Network
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
CNN Cable News Network
COVID-­19 Coronavirus disease 2019
EU European Union
FARA Foreign Agents Registration Act
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
FDD Federation for the Defence of Democracies
FPÖ Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs
IRA Internet Research Agency
ISIS Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
KGB Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti
MENA Middle East and North Africa
MbR Mohammad bin Rashid al Maktoum
MbS Mohammed bin Salman al Saud
MbZ Mohammad bin Zayed al Nahyan
MI6 Military Intelligence Section 6
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NBC National Broadcasting Company
PSYOPS Psychological Operations
PR Public Relations
PVV Partij voor de Vrijheid
RT Russia Today
SRMG Saudi Research and Marketing Group

ix
x  Abbreviations

Stratcom Strategic Communication

TbZ Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan
UAE United Arab Emirates
UKIP United Kingdom Independence Party
UN United Nations
USIA US Information Agency
USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
 Introduction

The Armed Forces . . . has been called by the Egyptian people

for help, not to hold the reins of power, yet to discharge its civil
responsibility and answer demands of responsibility.
—Wilson Center, “How Egypt Unraveled”

The words above are how then–chief of the Egyptian Armed Forces, General
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, announced the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi by
the military on July 3, 2013. After months of growing protests across a country
that had not found calm and stability in the postrevolutionary context since
2011, the Egyptian military seemingly answered the call of the street for politi-
cal change to expel the country’s only ever freely elected head of state. Yet the
narrative of the Egyptian military selflessly stepping in on behalf of the Egyptian
people was part of a carefully planned subversion campaign. The military coup
that would constitute a watershed moment in the Arab Spring, turning the tide
in favor of the counterrevolutionaries, did not just feature the Egyptian armed
forces and intelligence community but had also received support from a rising
regional power: the United Arab Emirates (UAE).1
Obsessed with the threat of Arab civil society to regime security, the UAE, a
small state in the Gulf, had been waiting for an opening to fight back against its
self-­proclaimed nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood, which had won the first free
elections in Egypt in 2012. Amid widespread sociopolitical and socio­economic
grievances in postrevolutionary Egypt, Abu Dhabi had found a receptive audi-
ence among secular liberals in the country alienated by the incompetence of
the Brotherhood government. Instead of relying on conventional hard power,
the UAE began to target the sociopolitical consensus in an already-­polarized
information environment in Egypt in early 2013. While channeling funds to
a small group of disenfranchised secular liberals, the so-­called Tamarod, to
build a protest movement against the ruling party,2 Abu Dhabi simultaneously
reached out to the leading news networks in the country in an effort to change
discourse on the Brotherhood.3 Weaponized narratives started to vilify the rul-
ing party and president as “un-­Egyptian,” as a threat to national security and
responsible for domestic instability.4 These narratives fell on fertile ground
with an aggrieved public whose expectations of political reform and economic

1
2 Introduction

stability postrevolution were not met. Thereby, the UAE was able to ripen civil-­
societal mobilization against the political status quo, building up the Tamarod
from a fringe grassroots group into a movement that would operate as a front
group to translate weaponized narratives from the virtual domain to the streets
of Egypt.5 What looked like genuine civil-­societal activism in June and July 2013,
with millions of protesters on the street, had in fact been strategically ripened
through a variety of information networks, to be exploited by the Egyptian
armed forces as a pretext to overthrow the government.
This episode shows the potency of weaponized narratives used by an exter-
nal actor to (de)mobilize civil-­societal activism in the information environment
in an effort to erode the sociopolitical consensus or the sociopolitical status
quo. Weaponized narratives had been carefully orchestrated into a subversion
campaign that would not just alter the dynamics of public discourse in Egypt
but also mobilize parts of civil society to reject the political status quo in the
country. Thereby, these narratives were not necessarily all built around dis-­or
misinformation—many were based on facts repackaged into palatable storylines
that resonated with the biases, identities, and beliefs of targeted audiences.
Thus, the issue of weaponized narratives is far greater than disinformation or
the lack of factuality per se. Narratives are the stories that structure our reali-
ties, create and maintain identity, and provide meaning to people, institutions,
and cultures.6 Narratives are integral elements to build a societal consensus
on “truth”—and whether this “truth” is then built on facts or false information
becomes a secondary consideration. That is, even the “truth” can be subversive
if orchestrated through weaponized narratives that subtly and gradually alter
the building blocks that provide meaning to the world where we live.
However, not all weaponized narratives are necessarily subversive in their
impact. To achieve subversion, weaponized narratives require a level of orches-
tration and strategic effect to undermine a sociopolitical consensus or status
quo—as was the case in the UAE’s subversion campaign in Egypt. In this book,
subversion is defined as the strategic exploitation of sociopsychological, infra-
structural, and physical vulnerabilities in the information environment by an
external adversary to erode a sociopolitical consensus or status quo. As an attack
on the integrity of the public sphere, weaponized narratives undermine the rela-
tionships between individual members of civil society as well as the relationship
between civil society and the governing authority. It is here that weaponized
narratives have the power to disrupt discourse in such a way that the public is
first unable to reach a consensus among itself and then finds it even harder to
translate it into consensual policy outcomes. Over time, weaponized narratives
thereby do not just undermine the sociopolitical consensus but also ultimately
alter the sociopolitical status quo—that is, how a community, a government, or
a state defines itself and its core policies.
 Introduction 3

In so doing, this book explores how vulnerabilities in the sociopsycholog-

ical, infrastructural, and physical domain of the information environment can
be exploited by external actors trying to achieve strategic objectives through the
subversive potential of weaponized narratives, below the threshold of war. Thus,
subversion needs to be understood as a tool of twenty-­first-­century statecraft,
expanding the information level of power and influence in an effort to achieve
strategic ends without having to go to war. It is about the careful engineering
of narratives to exploit an audience’s sociopsychological and emotional state to
“deliver information to the target to incline it to voluntarily make the predeter-
mined decision desired by the initiator of the action”—a strategy built around
cybernetic research by the Soviet mathematical psychologist Henri Lefebvre
on how to control and potentially manipulate social systems in the gray zone
between war and peace.7

STATECRAFT BELOW THE THRESHOLD OF WAR

Subversion has developed into a means and a way for states to compete in the
twenty-­first century in a geostrategic environment that is globalized, privatized,
securitized, and mediatized. The digital revolution has transformed all aspects
of human life, accelerating globalization and global interconnectedness. Con-
cepts of geography and time become meaningless in a world where humans
interact increasingly in a public sphere that is borderless and where informa-
tion and ideas are shared rapidly around the globe.8 All interactions, activities,
and transactions between individuals, communities, states, and private sector
organizations are either shaped or take place in the global commons where the
regulatory power of states and governments is limited. In this globalized space,
international norms are contested from the bottom up, challenging the interna-
tional rules-­based order that developed in the post–Cold War era.
The information environment, “constituted by all informational processes,
services, and entities, thus including informational agents as well as their prop-
erties, interactions, and mutual relations,” is one such globalized space where
information technology has allowed for new, open-­ended communities to take
shape that connect and integrate via heterarchically structured, decentralized
networks.9 Although states and governments become nodes in these networks,
only a few digital authoritarians have found means and ways to subvert the indi-
vidual’s communication power—power that the individual in a liberal context
can wield widely and while enjoying full autonomy from society and state.10 Like
the international system itself, the information environment is characterized by
a degree of anarchy due to the absence of a higher regulatory authority.11
The perception of anarchy in the global information environment is further
reinforced by relatively low barriers to entry for a variety of actors, of which
4 Introduction

state organizations are only a small minority. The information environment is

truly privatized because, apart from the infrastructure being owned and oper-
ated by the private sector, norms and rules in this globalized space are subject to
multistakeholder initiatives.12 It is particularly in the information environment
where the state’s authority has been withdrawn as the state dispatches authority
and control to private entities outside the state’s command and control. Assem-
blages between the state and private sector are being created, whereby activities
in the information environment are delegated by the state to the private sec-
tor—creating a level of dissociation between the state and the executing agent
that provides the former with a degree of plausible deniability.
Another distinct feature of the geostrategic environment in the twenty-­first
century is the securitized way with which states in particular develop their strat-
egies and policies. Faced with the intangible challenges arising from within an
apolar or multipolar international order, policymakers, the media, and civil
society find it ever harder to agree on tangible threats. Instead, risks are being
securitized in a highly subjective discourse, which polarizes the information
environment and—as in the case of the COVID-­19 pandemic—make it ever
more difficult for policymakers to adequately allocate resources. The process
of framing challenges and prioritizing policy responses is severely undermined,
particularly in liberal democracies, by how narratives can mobilize or demo-
bilize first the public and then policymakers. In the postmodern “risk society,”
as Beck defines it, rationality and hysteria often coexist and overlap and can be
manipulated through targeted narratives.13 As this book intends to unpack, it is
these loose ends of strategic discourse that are most vulnerable to the workings
of weaponized narratives.
This leads to the last defining element of the twenty-­first-­century geostra-
tegic environment: mediatization. Information is created and shared instantly,
multidirectionally, and interactively with an almost unlimited reach, scope, and
scale, leading to a process of mediatization where any attitude and behavior of
any actor in the sociopolitical space is shaped by (social) media discourse. The
information revolution sustains networked societies that transcend virtual and
physical spaces and are held together merely by evolving channels of communi-
cation. Without traditional media acting as gatekeepers, the impact of social
media on the information environment appears to be a double-­edged sword:
celebrated by some as “liberation technology,”14 while criticized by others as
mere “slacktivism,”15 for the indignant pseudoactivist in the “age of anger.”16 The
mobilization power of information, both online and offline, has created new
vulnerabilities as narratives influence public discourse and potentially activate
aggrieved audiences. Power has been effectively diluted from existing authori-
ties to leaderless masses, whose aggregate power in both the virtual information
space and on the street does more than just disrupt, as the 2021 storming of
 Introduction 5

the Capitol Building in Washington demonstrates. The power of narratives to

mobilize “activists” can be exploited to challenge existing authority structures
in liberal and illiberal societies alike. Thereby, the hypermediatization of the
twenty-­first century has made information not just a source of power but also
power in itself.17
It is against the backdrop of a globalized, privatized, securitized, and medi-
atized geostrategic environment that governments increasingly seek means
and ways of competition to achieve strategic ends with plausible deniability,
discretely, and at low political, human, and economic costs.18 The reason is that
conflict in the twenty-­first century exists on a continuum with no clear begin-
ning and no clear end. Competition is a constant and takes place in what Lucas
Kello defines as a permanent “state of unpeace.”19 Hence, governments and states
need to remain engaged in activities that are neither limited in geographic space
nor limited in time—something that fundamentally challenges conventional
statecraft and strategy making. Most of these activities do not fall within the
conventional parameters of war but take place below the threshold of war in a
space that some define as the gray zone.20 As Nadia Schadlow writes, “the space
between war and peace is not an empty one—but a landscape churning with
political, economic, and security competitions that require constant attention.”21
Although some of these activities might involve the military lever of power,
competition becomes more efficient and sustainable when other activities
outside this lever take precedence. The Russian notion of a full-­spectrum war
thereby draws on a whole range of activities that ultimately revolve around
influence rather than brute force.22 Widening the spectrum of conflict thereby
means that all elements of a nation’s power are being used to achieve influence—­
namely, affecting the attitudes, decisions, and ultimately behaviors of the com-
petitor or adversary. In the case of Russia or China, for example, the levers of
influence are not just institutions of the state but also influence networks that
draw on the whole nation, comprising individuals, the private sector, and non-
governmental organizations. A defining characteristic of these influence activi-
ties in the gray zone is ambiguity about the influencer’s intent, the participants,
and the legality or normativity of these activities.23 Most important, these net-
works of surrogates allow states to operate with plausible deniability because
the attribution to the sponsor of an activity is nearly impossible.
The evolution of statecraft that goes along with this development has been
well described by Daniel Ronfeldt and John Arquilla in their concept of noopoli-
tik as an antithesis to conventional Realpolitik. Derived from the Greek word
noös, the mind, noopolitik describes statecraft in the information age essentially
as securing spheres of influence not through hard power but other activities
that shape ideas, values, norms, and narratives.24 The information environ-
ment becomes the most important sphere for statecraft, where states operate
6 Introduction

through heterarchical information networks that link state and nonstate actors
to work conjointly. In many ways the conventional hierarchical setup of state-
craft, whereby the government delegates intent to executive branches of the
state, are unfit for the tasks of dominating spheres of influence. Conventional
hard power, which today still consumes most resources in foreign and security
policymaking, delivered by men and women in uniform, is incapable of provid-
ing success when victory today is no longer about “whose army wins, but whose
story wins.”25 Instead, statecraft in the age of influence requires states to develop
networks outside the core institutions of government that allow the state to
utilize the full spectrum of a nation’s capabilities and assets.26 Though the state
remains a key dispatcher in these networks, the nodes of the network develop
more organically and, unlike traditional institutions of statecraft, are not man-
aged hierarchically but in a heterarchical, decentralized manner creating a level
of dissociation between the sponsor of activities and the executive agent.
The overall objective of full-­spectrum influence activities or noopolitik
remains the contest of wills—to draw on Von Clausewitz’s fundamental defi-
nition of the nature of war—except that the means of warfare might be more
sociopsychological and sociocultural than kinetic.27 Taking place in the gray
zone of a globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized geostrategic envi-
ronment, the clash of wills in the twenty-­first century is part of a global Kultur-
kampf, though not necessarily between civilizations but belief systems. Unlike
in Von Clausewitz’s conceptualization of the clash of wills, coercion takes a back
seat. The weaponization of narratives is rarely coercive; it is much more subver-
sive, eroding an adversary’s will gradually, subtly, and most often without the
adversary noticing.

THE ARGUMENT

Subversion is thus a twenty-­first century activity that exploits vulnerabilities in

the information environment to achieve strategic objectives below the thresh-
old of war with plausible deniability and discretion. It makes use of weaponized
narratives to achieve influence on the strategic level, allowing an external adver-
sary or competitor to undermine the sociopolitical consensus and ultimately the
sociopolitical status quo. It is an attack on the sociopolitical center of gravity,
with the intent to “undermine the military, economic, psychological, or politi-
cal strength or morale of a governing authority.”28 Subversive activities target a
community’s information-­psychological core that affects how individuals stand
toward one another and how individuals interact with and trust authority, most
notably those established authorities that produce, vet, and disseminate infor-
mation and knowledge, ranging from the political establishment and the media
to the scientific community.29 The subversion of trust between community and
 Introduction 7

authority eventually weakens the bonds that hold together society and can
help mobilize unrest both in the virtual and physical spaces.30 This subversive
potential can work overtly and sometimes, as in the case of Russian meddling
in Western election campaigns, more covertly. Thereby, “distinguishing sub-
version from legitimate expressions of political dissent is a problem only for
democracies; for totalitarian regimes, all opposition is inherently subversive.”31
Nonetheless, while authoritarians might be better equipped to defend against
weaponized narratives, the victims of subversion are not only liberal democra-
cies, just as the perpetrators are not necessarily only authoritarians. Though this
book focuses on how authoritarians have successfully employed subversion, it is
conceivable and probable that liberal democracies learning how to compete in
the information space against weaponized narratives are going to engineer their
own subversion campaigns.
The ultimate goal of subversion is to control and manipulate civil-­societal
activism via weaponized narratives in order to undermine the integrity of the
public sphere where the sociopolitical consensus is built. Weaponized narra-
tives can undermine not just discourse but also the relationships of individuals
with one another and toward the governing authority, which in extreme cases
can cause a change in the sociopolitical status quo—that is, in how a commu-
nity, a government, or a state defines itself and its core policies. Following the
cybernetic concept of reflexive control, weaponized narratives are to incline
target audiences, both collectively and individually in the case of key decision-­
makers, to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the infor-
mation warrior.32 Thereby, weaponized narratives generate effects, measured
in terms of mobilization, on an influence continuum that ranges from under-
mining social media discourse on one end of the spectrum to a strategic shift
in policymaking on the other end (see figure I.1). These effects might occur
sequentially, simultaneously, or coincidentally and are therefore difficult to
attribute to a particular perpetrator or singular operation. As the case studies
will show, weaponized narratives are usually inserted on various levels simulta-
neously to generate maximum effect. The cumulative effect of these activities
is measured based on the level of mobilization achieved, which ranges from 1,
a low level of mobilization, to 5, a high level. Only when levels of mobilization
reach factors of 3 and above are weaponized narratives actually subversive—
that is, they affect the relationship between the government and the governed
and are therefore policy relevant. However, because influence develops its full
potential over time and draws on a range of activities taking place simultane-
ously, an activity triggering tactical mobilization on the lower end of the spec-
trum might ultimately reinforce or support mobilization on the higher end.
For example, Russia’s ­erosion of public trust in the United States’ electoral pro-
cess after its meddling in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections required
8 Introduction

Strategic (multidomain)

Russian Ukraine UAE anti-MB

info ops campaign

Psyops support
for military
operation

1 2 3 4 5

Mobilization effect
1. Social media discourse
among genuine social Low-level
media users influence op by
2. Offline civil-societal NATO in Estonia
discourse involving
conventional media
3. Policy-relevant
discourse between
experts and
policymakers
4. Nonvirtual civil-
societal
(de)mobilization (e.g., Tactical (single domain)
protests or riots)
5. Strategic shift in Levels of orchestration
policymaking

FIGURE I.1. Levels of Mobilization and Orchestration on the Subversion Continuum.

low-­level social media mobilization to coincide with high-­level mobilization on

the policymaking level to generate the overall cumulative effect.
This is why the other axis in figure I.1 features the level of orchestration
as another key indicator for the subversive effect of weaponized narratives.
For weaponized narratives to be subversive, they need to be disseminated
across a variety of different domains that activate multiple important nodes in
the subverting power’s information networks. A tactical influence operation
by NATO trying to get Estonians to engage with an anti-­Russia narrative on
social media is therefore not subversive, even if it is shared or liked, unless it
is plugged into other simultaneously ongoing activities. Likewise, a psycho-
logical operation by a military psyops unit managing to persuade an adversary
force to withdraw from an objective might have a small subversive effect but
is not tied into a strategically orchestrated subversion campaign and achieves
only a low mobilization effect. Psyops as an operational support tool for a mil-
itary campaign on its own does not undermine the sociopolitical discourse
or consensus—that is, the discourse or consensus between the government
 Introduction 9

and the governed. Subversion campaigns integrate a full spectrum of influence

operations, releasing weaponized narratives across a variety of domains, and
require tactical activities to be tied into a larger strategy. Only then can a tacti-
cal influence operation travel up the mobilization ladder, shaping attitudes and
behaviors beyond the immediately targeted audience.

A MEANS OF WARFARE

Looking at subversion in the context of warfare, this book draws on concepts of

hybrid warfare,33 surrogate warfare,34 and full-­spectrum warfare35 to illustrate
that weaponized narratives are a malign tool that, albeit considered widely a
measure short of war,36 can be just as effective in achieving strategic effect as
conventional, kinetic operations. At the same time, subversion operations are
not the prerogative of the state, as they are delivered by information networks
that are not state-­centric and therefore make it a tool that should lie outside
the scope of the conventional military. Because subversion takes a whole-­of-­
nation approach, concepts such as psychological operations (psyops), executed
predominantly by the military, are too narrow to grasp the complexity of these
activities.37 The weaponization of narratives in part falls within the parameters
of information operations, but because the concept (at least in US military doc-
trine) is still very state-­and military-­centric, it is too narrow to grasp the full-­
spectrum element of it.38
Nonetheless, the argument in this book contends that the strategic orches-
tration of subversion by an external adversary to exploit an audience’s sociopsy-
chological, infrastructural, and physical vulnerabilities could be considered a
means of warfare. Therefore, the metric of violence that is often considered to
be a paramount threshold for the definition of war is considered in this book in
a much wider context across the spectrum of conflict, which exceeds traditional
boundaries of organized violence. Instead, subversion constitutes a means of
warfare that, despite its primary effect not being kinetically or physically violent,
can and does generate spillover effects that should be considered physically vio-
lent. When weaponized narratives mobilize people to take action in the physical
domain through protest, sabotage, or riot, then the secondary or tertiary effect
of changing peoples’ will is violent. In this way, especially political violence, as
an extreme form of civil-­societal activism, can be triggered through subversion
to ultimately disrupt the sociopolitical consensus or status quo. Thus, taking an
outcome-­oriented approach, this book agrees with the general observations of
Thomas Rid that the effect of information operations “is less physical, because
it is always indirect. It is less emotional, because it is less personal and intimate.
The symbolic uses of force through cyberspace are limited. And, as a result, code-­
triggered violence is less instrumental than more conventional uses of force.”39
10 Introduction

However, this book argues that subversion campaigns of weaponized nar-

ratives can have cumulative effects that amount to an act of war—an idea Rid
rejects. The reason is that when orchestrated strategically, subversion delivers
death by a thousand cuts, whereby ripple effects of weaponized narratives are
eventually violent.
For subversion to be a means of warfare, it needs to be attached to a political
end, namely, linked to a political objective. A single troll or influencer, regard-
less of his or her followership, weaponizing narratives without being tied to a
broader organizational and political agenda cannot be strategic. Further, sub-
version needs to affect the wills of actual human beings—something that is hard
to measure. Disruptive discourse on social media that is maintained merely
between trolls and bots with occasional human engagement is not strategic.
This relates to the final attribute; subversion needs to have a spillover effect
in the physical world. That is to say, subverted or subverting discourse can be
strategic only if individuals as social or political actors transport narratives
into the physical world. Subversion needs to draw on the power of discourse to
mobilize or demobilize individuals both online and offline. Subversion cannot
be strategic without physical action or inaction triggered directly or indirectly
by the cumulative effect of weaponized narratives. This physical effect tends to
develop into physical violence over time.
Subversion, so far, has been a means of warfare mastered by authoritarian
countries that find it difficult to compete conventionally in the twenty-­first-­
century geostrategic environment. The two main case studies in this book,
Russia and the United Arab Emirates, have been purposefully selected because
their cases demonstrate how weaponized narratives can be first orchestrated
strategically and second achieve high mobilization effects. The ability of disrup-
tive discourse polarized by Russian trolls during the 2016 and 2020 US presi-
dential elections, to affect individual decisions to vote or abstain from voting,
undermined public trust in the integrity of the US electoral process.40 The same
can be said about a campaign by the United Arab Emirates to affect the deci-
sion of British prime minister David Cameron to launch an investigation into
the Muslim Brotherhood in 2014.41 Though China, among others, is an equally
important information warrior in the twenty-­first century, so far, the physical
effect of its subversive activities in the information environment could only
be measured domestically and within the extended, Mandarin-­speaking public
sphere. However, the potential of China to transfer its lessons to subversion
campaigns overseas, particularly against Taiwan, is high.42 Russia’s war against
Ukraine for the first time showed how China as a fellow digital authoritarian
could help amplify Russian narratives against a common ideological adversary
in the West43—yet the physical and strategic effects of this alliance of disinfor-
mation still need to be seen.44 What seems likely is that the Chinese information
 Introduction 11

infrastructure developed around the globe will be used eventually to shift from
strategic communications to subversion.
Having learned how to control and manipulate the civil-­societal space at
home, digital authoritarians have already applied their lessons of domestic
subversion to the global public sphere to achieve strategic ends. Nonetheless,
though liberal democracies are currently on the defensive in the information
space, they are eager to close the gap. Although posturing as defensive informa-
tion warriors, units such as the United Kingdom’s Seventy-­Seventh Brigade have
capabilities that are used offensively and could become subversive if plugged into
more strategically orchestrated whole-­of-­nation campaigns.45

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

This book commences by posing the fundamental question “What is truth?”

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the sociopsychological and cognitive barri-
ers to objectivity. Apart from the philosophical debate on the concept of truth, it
is important to understand the cognitive realm of the information environment,
which has become ever more vulnerable in the era of microtargeting through
technology. Effective subversion campaigns rely on a sound understanding of the
biases and potential heuristic shortcuts that a specific target audience employs
to process information. Moreover, in chapter 1 we draw a connection between
the individual cognition and the wider sociopsychological effects that shape the
perception of “truth.” The concept of “truth” as a social phenomenon explains the
potential ripple effects of subversion on social cohesion and sociopolitical stability.
Chapter 2 looks at the informational or media domain as the “gatekeeper
of truth.” Building on the previous chapter, we show how vulnerabilities in
the sociopsychological domain are being exacerbated by vulnerabilities in the
twenty-­first-­century informational environment. Civil society as the public
sphere, which is defined by the media environment, must be understood as the
most important contender of political power and authority, and not just in lib-
eral society. Consequently, the role and function of the media, both conven-
tional and social media, as traditional gatekeepers of truth shapes the extent to
which the public sphere acts as a stabilizing or destabilizing factor in sociopo-
litical affairs. The chapter looks at the various vulnerabilities arising from the
expansion of the social media sphere, where trolls, bots, and big-­data-­fed algo-
rithms create artificial echo chambers and media trends that frame objectivity
and set agendas for public discourse. Finally, chapter 2 links the media sphere
with academia, where “experts” do not just set agendas but more importantly
also set the parameters and metrics for “truth.”
Chapter 3 examines in greater depth the concept of subversion to show how
the vulnerabilities in the sociopsychological and infrastructural domain can be
12 Introduction

exploited in the physical domain of the information environment. After out-

lining the history of information operations, we show how subversion can be
more effective in the twenty-­first century due to fundamental changes in the
information environment. This chapter assesses the potential of subversion as
a strategic instrument of power in an essential contest of wills. In a context of
ambiguous warfare, the chapter shows that the weaponization of narratives fol-
lows a six-­step process that can potentially deliver powerful strategic effects on
a range of virtual and physical domains of the information environment.
Chapter 4 unpacks the dichotomous contest between “liberation tech-
nology” and “digital authoritarians,” showcasing the (de)­mobilizing potential of
weaponized narratives in the domestic domain. Although the Arab Spring had
initially been hailed as a success of liberation technology, the counterrevolu-
tionaries have subsequently shown that the revolutions in information tech-
nology can be abused to enhance regime security over public security. Whereas
the “Al Jazeera Effect” in 2010 and 2011 showcased the mobilizing power of new
media in breaking the barrier of authoritarian monopoly of truth, the response
by authoritarians, not just in the Arab world, has been one of usurping and sub-
verting the public sphere. In so doing, regimes in China, Russia, and the UAE
have put subversion to the test in a domestic environment, providing important
lessons that could be applied to subversion operations overseas.
Chapter 5 sheds light on the dimensions of Russia’s information network
and on how the Kremlin has invested in subversive information operations as
one of its most powerful tools in full-­spectrum warfare. The Russian doctrine
of dezinformatsiya builds on the KGB’s experience during the Cold War but has
found new means and ways via extensive on-­and offline information networks
to promote its disruptive narratives. We deconstruct the subversion strategy
of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the context of a contested information
environment in which the strategic effect of information operations can be more
far-­reaching than in the past. This chapter goes beyond Russia’s experience in
Georgia, Estonia, and Ukraine to look at how its extensive lever of information
power can in the future exploit fundamental vulnerabilities in liberal informa-
tion environments, as in the case of the 2016 US presidential election.
Chapter 6 widens the debate on information and influence networks to
focus on the UAE as an information warrior—a small Gulf state that in the past
fifteen years has built an extensive network of media, expert, and policymaker
surrogates across the Arab world and the West to strategically shape discourse
and affect political decision-­making. Threatened by the developments of the
Arab Spring, the regime in Abu Dhabi embarked on a counterrevolutionary
campaign to disrupt and suppress the public sphere across the region. Simul-
taneously, as this chapter shows, the UAE activated its extensive information
and influence network to not just boost its own image in the West but also to
 Introduction 13

change public discourse on regional developments and actors in Washington,

London, and Brussels. Most remarkably has been the UAE’s success in target-
ing influencers and policymakers in the United States, where its alliance with
neoconservatives provided it with considerable political capital during Donald
Trump’s presidency. At the same time, the UAE has become a subverting power
in the Middle East, shaping how millions of Arabs look at political Islam, the
state, and civil society.
Finally, in chapter 7, we look at how communities can become more resil-
ient in the information environment, across the sociopsychological, infrastruc-
tural, and physical domain. Accepting the fact that weaponized narratives will
become a constant within public discourse, liberal societies in particular need
to find ways to withstand the onslaught of weaponized narratives more res-
olutely so as to limit their subversive impact. Because weaponized narratives
cannot be contained entirely, resilience in the information environment means
minimizing the effects they can have on target audiences. This chapter suggests
potential countermeasures to weaponized narrative campaigns that could help
liberal societies preserve their character while ensuring that individuals and
communities are not falling prey to polarizing and disrupting content of weap-
onized narratives.

NOTES

1. Butter, “Sisi’s Debt.”

2. Kirkpatrick, “Recordings.”
3. Holmes, Coups, 252.
4. Elmasry, “Unpacking Anti-­Muslim Brotherhood Discourse.”
5. Na’eem, “Egyptian Crisis,” 51.
6. Allenby, “Age of Weaponized Narrative.”
7. Vasara, Theory of Reflexive Control, 7.
8. Rosenau, States.
9. Floridi, Information, 9.
10. Castells, Communication Power, xxxix.
11. Krieg and Rickli, “Surrogate Warfare.”
12. Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare, 44.
13. Beck, “Living in the Risk Society,” 335.
14. Diamond, “Liberation Technology.”
15. Morozov, Net Delusion, chap. 7.
16. See Mishra, Age of Anger.
17. Kello, Virtual Weapon, 5.
18. Krieg and Rickli, “Surrogate Warfare,” 71.
19. Kello, Virtual Weapon, 74.
20. Hoffman, “Examining Complex Forms.”
21. Schadlow, “Peace and War.”
22. Galeotti, “Hybrid?” 291.
14 Introduction

23. Barno and Bensahel, “Fighting.”

24. Ronfeldt and Arquilla, Whose Story Wins? 23.
25. Nye, “Information Revolution,” 7.
26. Jonsson and Seely, “Russian Full-­Spectrum Conflict,” 2.
27. Scales, “Clausewitz,” 34.
28. US Department of Defense, DOD Dictionary, 224.
29. Moscovici, “Notes,” 225.
30. Rosenau, Subversion and Insurgency, 6.
31. Rosenau, 16.
32. Thomas, “Russia’s Reflexive Control Theory,” 237.
33. See Hoffman, “Hybrid Warfare.”
34. See Krieg and Rickli, Surrogate Warfare.
35. See Ryan, Full Spectrum Dominance.
36. Kennan, Measures Short of War, 4–14.
37. See Austin, “Psychological Operations.”
38. Joint Publication 3-­13, “Information Operations.”
39. Rid, Cyber War, 37.
40. Jamieson, Cyberwar, 104.
41. Delmar-­Morgan and Miller, UAE Lobby, 35–36.
42. Roberts, China’s Disinformation Strategy.
43. FPC, “How the People’s Republic of China Amplifies Russian Disinformation.”
44. Bandurski, “China and Russia.”
45. Wired, “Inside the British Army’s Secret Information Warfare Machine.”
 ONE

The Sociopsychology
of Truth

In 2017, Britain’s BBC confronted people on the street with a riddle: “Father and
son are driving in a car. They get into a car accident. The dad dies and the son
gets rushed into A&E. The surgeon says ‘I cannot operate. This is my son.’ Who
is the surgeon?”1
Most respondents came up with the most abstruse answers about who the
surgeon could be. Only a handful stated the obvious: the surgeon was the boy’s
mother. The riddle was supposed to expose people’s unconscious gender bias,
triggering them to automatically assume that a surgeon was male.
This exercise highlights how we filter information to create our own reality,
our “truth,” consciously and subconsciously. Even when we consider ourselves
“enlightened” thinkers prioritizing rationality over emotionality, and critical
reflection over mindless pondering, our brain is wired in a way that our cogni-
tive processes remain intact, despite the exposure to an overload of information.
Many of these cognitive functions that help us stay sane and focused amid an
unfolding infocalypse present vulnerabilities that can be manipulated so as to
disrupt our age-­old quest to find unmediated “truth.”
This chapter commences by diving into the philosophical debate on what
truth is—the fundamental question that, in the age of “alternative facts” and “fake
news,” needs to be addressed. The Greek aletheia and Latin veritas describes a
concept that refers to the reliability in the construction of links and relations
between observations. Thereby, the debate on how to derive knowledge and
scientific truth (i.e., epistemology) lies at the heart of the modern sciences and
is under constant attack by those trying to usurp the scientific method in the era
of “alternative facts.”
It is in the presentation of facts where the sociopsychological barriers
to truth, which are discussed in the second section of this chapter, become
essential. The question of who says what, in what way, to whom becomes a
more important metric of the information value than the extent to which the

15
16 Ch apter 1

information relies on facts. The source of the message, the content of the mes-
sage wrapped in emotions and narratives, and the audience’s susceptibility to
how it is being said determine the extent to which the audience considers some-
thing as being truthful.2 An audience’s biases become the determining factor in
how information is being received and evaluated. The constructivist dimension
of truth is highlighted by Nietzsche, who described “truth” as “a movable host of
metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human
relations that have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and
embellished, and that, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical,
and binding.”3
From this point of view, truth and absolute knowledge do not exist per se
but are always the product of a social consensus. And our cognitive functions
are being shaped by our social context—something that can explain how the
perception of what is truthful and what is not has become bent in the face of
the infrastructural revolutions in the information environment. In the era of
social media, the recognition of “truth,” and even “fact,” has been democratized
to make “truth building” an inclusive exercise unconstrained by centuries-­old
norms of scientific inquiry—rendering the quest for “truth” entirely meaning-
less. More importantly, the democratization of “truth building,” where each
voice, whether learned or unlearned, is morally equivalent, leads to a gradual
erosion of the societal consensus. This challenges sociopolitical discourse and
thereby the stability of sociopolitical affairs.
We conclude this chapter by showing that the perception of truth originates
in the individual’s interaction with its social context, essentially making the
point that while truth is subject to social construction, facts are not. However,
our sociopsychological vulnerabilities become barriers to how we use facts to
build narratives to make sense of the world around us.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUEST

FOR TRUE KNOWLEDGE

Without getting bogged down in the philosophical debate about whether

“objective truth” is actually achievable, it is important to start the discus-
sion on the weaponization of narratives with an inquiry into the norms and
standards that have been developed over centuries in the arts and sciences to
arrive at a consensus of truth and fact. Although the philosophical debate on
“truth” is infinite, it should not be used as a caveat to any attempt to separate
facts from fiction. That is, while appreciating the sociopsychological process
underlying “truth finding,” scientific tradition has laid down means and ways
to arrive at facts—something that is often disregarded by those who try to
establish a moral equivalent between scientific fact and opinion. Whereas
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 17

there are opinions and alternative opinions, there cannot be facts and alter-
native facts.
In liberal thought, the journey to discovering the objective truth began in
ancient Greece. Living in an oral society, the classical philosophers Plato and
Aristotle were confronted with an information environment where information
was communicated by the means of recitation. The memorization of Homer
meant, for example, that students would internalize poetry and relive history
through their own eyes, thereby losing the objective detachment from the infor-
mation. Plato, possibly the first “scientific man,” therefore advocated the written
word, arguing that information transported in text would allow for an abstrac-
tion of the object observed, creating a more objective detachment between the
observer and the observed.4
Plato most famously illustrates this point in the Allegory of the Cave, where
he describes prisoners having lived all their lives being chained to the wall of a
cave having to experience the world behind them in reference to shadows on
the wall. Their reality or truth is based solely on the shadows being projected by
objects passing by a fire behind them. Only after one of the prisoners breaks his
chains and is able to slowly ascend from the cave does he realize that his senses
had misled him: He discovers that reality is quite different from how he thought
it would be.5 He realizes not only that the shadows he accepted as reality were
mere reflections of objects but also that these objects were effigies of reality. The
prisoner’s journey out of the cave toward the sun is used by Plato metaphori-
cally as the individual’s intellectual evolution through education, namely, the
rejection and overcoming of the sensible world. At the end of this journey, the
discovery of the sun symbolizes the individual’s true emancipation from sense-­
experience to see reality objectively through reason.6
Aristotle appears to be somewhat less purist in his observations on rhetori-
cal proof. He argues that persuasion through dialogue might never be based just
on logos, or reasoned logic, but also depends on ethos and pathos. That is to say
that we accept being persuaded when a logical line of argument is conveyed by
ethos (the way the speaker’s character is being perceived as being truthful) and
pathos (the extent to which the speech grasps the emotions of the audience).7
Aristotle’s idea of a golden mean of truthfulness lies in finding the balance
between falsehood and brutal honesty, with the latter potentially antagonizing
the audience.8
For Aristotle, truth is about how statements correspond to observations of
reality or facts and concepts that have already been proven to be true. Yet cor-
respondence theory, to which Plato subscribes as well with caveats, still relies
on a circular argument, because we as humans have no means of establishing
facts other than through our senses.9 The fact that our senses can deceive us,
as Plato contends, again calls into question whether any observation of reality
18 Ch apter 1

can ever be the same as reality—or whether reality as such actually exists. Take
a look at the statement “the Australian viper is the most poisonous.” Most of us
cannot verify this statement just using our own senses. So the perception of the
truthfulness of this proposition depends on how this proposition corresponds
to other facts that we have become to accept as true. As Christian Unkelbach
and Sarah Rom show, the proposition that “the Australian viper is the most
poisonous” is more readily accepted as truthful by an audience than the propo-
sition that “the Swedish viper is most poisonous,” simply because we associate
Australia more with dangerous animals than Sweden.10
Fast-forward to the seventeenth century, and the debate on objective truth
still revolves around how observations can be verified without being distorted
by human senses and sensation. Emerging from the era of religion, where belief
was the predominant metric for truth, the philosophers of the Enlightenment
reclaimed the philosophical tenets of antiquity: reason, rationality, and logic.
Descartes’s famous maxim of “cogito ergo sum” reduces the debate about
truth to only one certainty: that nothing exists beyond a doubt but oneself and
thoughts.11 Nonetheless, for Descartes, interrogation following rules such as
problem deconstruction, skepticism, and critical reflection could help the phi-
losopher with the establishment of true knowledge.12
It is in the constitution of liberal epistemology—namely, the method of gen-
erating knowledge—that the Enlightenment, by returning to the premises of
ancient Greece, laid the foundation for what we as scientists today consider
to be factual and objective knowledge. The “scientific” approach to generat-
ing knowledge based on either the ancient tradition of deduction or Francis
Bacon’s revolutionary method of induction might be the most important legacy
of “enlightened” philosophers. Though deduction derives conclusions from a set
of proven premises, Bacon contends that induction can derive probable conclu-
sions from generalizing repeatedly observed phenomena.13
Bacon’s method of inductive reasoning challenging the Aristotelian method
of deductive reason was not without criticism. David Hume argued against it,
stating that making generalizing conclusions on the basis of causality defies
rationality.14 For example, the famous causal inference “All swans must be white”
from the observation that “All swans I have seen are white” shows the limitations
of induction. The truthfulness of the conclusions that can be drawn from induc-
tion depend on seriality and sequence and can therefore not provide certainty
but only probability. Hume argues that in induction, a single observed fact is
inflated to build an entire belief—something that makes induction particularly
vulnerable to abuse in support for conspiracy or pseudoscientific theories, as is
discussed below.15
Immanuel Kant objects to Plato’s purist thinking of truth as well, arguing
that our mind can only experience reality as a system that is bounded by certain
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 19

rules and laws. Consequently, no scientific or theoretical knowledge would be

possible that is inconsistent with the boundaries of our cognitive abilities—
something with which Hegel largely agrees.16 For Hegel, direct apprehension
or unmediated knowledge detached from beliefs and assumption is logically
absurd.17 Therefore, the quest for “objective truth” is a circular one, if only
unmediated knowledge counts as such.
Hence, in their critique of pure reason, Kant and Hegel provide a legitimi-
zation for empiricism as the foundation of the modern sciences. The method of
empirical observation, the experimental method, albeit sense-­based, constitutes
the foundation for the institutionalization of knowledge and truth. It allowed for
the sciences to no longer appear just as “natural philosophy” but to develop into
a system of knowledge generation based on general truths and laws obtained
and tested in a peer review process. For the empiricists, true knowledge had to
be dynamic, exposed to constant testing, review, and reflection, to allow one’s
own and other’s findings to be both verified and falsified. Nothing was meant to
be excluded from critical examination, interrogation, and potential falsification.
As John Locke, one of the main English empiricists of the seventeenth century,
writes about his own research, “As soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand
shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire.”18
Nowhere was the institutionalization of the sciences so apparent as with
the foundation of the Royal Society in London in 1660, providing a platform for
the sciences to develop their own system of scientific discourse. Scientific truth
became a product of a social institution that would remain open for public scru-
tiny to build trust between the authority of science and the wider public.19 The
idea of the gentlemen philosophers who developed their own conventions and
codes (those of trust, civility, honor, and integrity) might sound antiquated.20
But it shows the standards that scientists at the time were expected to meet in
order to become reliable authorities on truth. The institutionalization of knowl-
edge laid the foundation for a “regime of truth,” as Foucault calls it, or “a system
of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation
and operation of statements.”21
From these standards and practices evolved a set of norms that ought
to guide scientific inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge. According to Robert
­Merton, who outlined the normative foundation of science in a 1942 article
titled “A Note on Science and Democracy,” the sciences ought to be guided by
four norms: communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skep-
ticism.22 The first norm relates to collective ownership, whereby all scientific
research should be open and accessible to the scientific community, allowing for
testing and falsification of new theories and findings. The second norm, univer-
salism, refers to the ambition to make science universal in its applicability and
testability, regardless of the status of the researcher. Third, disinterestedness is
20 Ch apter 1

what should guide scientific research rather than personal gain or particular
interests. Finally, organized skepticism refers to both methodology and institu-
tional codes of conduct that ought to facilitate critical and reflective scrutiny on
any finding or theory.23
Thus, though these norms and standards of scientific inquiry might not
provide a silver bullet to do away with the philosophical concerns over the
existence of “objective truth,” they nonetheless provide a handrail to follow to
establish or test facts. Although facts and scientific findings will hardly ever
be unmediated, critical scrutiny, healthy skepticism, triangulation, and con-
stant peer review can minimize some of the effects of sense distortion—while
accepting that peer review and scientific inquiry are themselves processes sub-
ject to human bias.24
The closest we might be able to come to depicting an objective reality is a
responsibly epistemic evaluation of sense data. The closer scientists can come to
identifying constant, individual-­independent, lawlike patterns amid a stream of
sense data, the closer they come to “objectivity.”25 The epistemic responsibility of
the scientist remains to build arguments on substantiated evidence and facts in
keeping with the norms and traditions of the scientific method.26 In fact, for the
scientist and the layperson, as well as the journalist and the media consumer,
the human mind (as the processor of sense data) might be the biggest barrier to
the idealist concept of “pure reason” and “objective truth.”

COGNITIVE BARRIERS TO TRUTH

The greatest vulnerability in any information environment remains the human

brain. The way we process information sets us up individually and collectively
for manipulative exploitation, causing us to create our own “truth” and “reality”
that might be dissociated from the complexity of the real world around us.
Sociopsychology distinguishes here between two main types of biases, cognitive
biases and motivational biases—the former are biases based on unconscious
cognitive processes, while the latter are biases that are motivated by preferred
outcomes. For example, our tendency to seek out information that confirms
existing beliefs is a cognitive bias. Our tendency to accept information from
a source we trust as credible or like-­minded is a motivational bias. Another
distinction is between “hot” and “cold” cognition, where the former is cogni-
tion colored by feeling and the latter is cognition not mediated by emotion.27
This section commences by discussing cold cognitive barriers before looking
at social and emotional dimensions—that is, hotter dimensions of cognition
that shape the reality in which we live. As Dacher Keltner and Robert Robin-
son write, “There is perhaps no more dangerous force in social relations than
the human mind.”28 Its manipulation can trigger, escalate, and entrench group
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 21

conflict. Understanding the extent to which our cognition erects barriers that
distort our created image of reality and truth is important.
One of our brain’s most characteristic features is its efficiency and prac-
ticability, triggering our perception of truth to always take the path of least
resistance.29 Confronted with information and sensory overload, our brain
has developed ways and means to remain operational, both in the process-
ing of information and in information-­based decision-­making. In his theory of
“bounded rationality,” Herbert Simon makes the case that humans are satisficers
seeking optimized rational solutions rather than optimal rational solutions due
to cognitive and temporal constraints.30 As the riddle in the introduction to
this chapter shows, our brains unconsciously process information via heuristic
shortcuts to come up with a solution that is practical but often suboptimal,
illogical, or irrational. The unconscious bias that surgeons are male is a heu-
ristic shortcut that allows us to solve problems quickly but, as in this case,
not always optimally. We humans, as Fiske and Taylor highlight, are cognitive
misers, adopting strategies to simplify complex problems—strategies that pri-
oritize efficiency over effort in the cognitive processes of generating a decision
or solution.31 That is to say, heuristics provide us with good enough answers,
not necessarily with accurate answers.
Thus, heuristics are responsible for many of our biases as our brains try
to cope with their information-­processing limitations relating to selection,
decision-­making, and information storage as well as emotional and moral moti-
vations.32 In particular, when thinking under uncertainty, in an ever more con-
tested information space, where categories of true and false are more indistinct
than ever, we tend to resort to cognitive shortcuts that rely on past experience or
perceived probabilities. They help us make decisions, solve problems, or provide
answers. The case of the surgeon who cannot operate on his son illustrates such
a so-­called representativeness heuristic, namely, the tendency to judge the likeli-
hood of the surgeon being female by the extent to which it resembles the typical
case33—and the typical case expected here is that most surgeons are male.34
Cognitive biases are therefore integral parts of our brain’s information pro-
cessing and often operate unconsciously. Despite the fact that these cognitive
barriers to objectivity are inherent features of human cognition, we all tend to
believe that others are more biased than we are. Part of our need to maintain
an overall self-­image of being moral and therefore truthful is our naive realism
to assume that biases are the other side’s problem. Ego defensiveness and the
need for self-­enhancement means that we approach “truth” individually from a
standpoint of seeing our own biases as the norm.35 Further, there appears to be a
pervasive belief that one can dissociate oneself from biases to see the “objective
truth” and that anyone would make the same judgment if provided with the
same information as oneself. Consequently, following naive realism, a person
22 Ch apter 1

who disagrees with us is either provided with different information or is irratio-

nally constrained by their own biases.36
Related to the phenomenon of naive realism is confirmation bias, which
triggers people to favor information that confirms their existing beliefs and pre-
conceptions. As humans, we are highly averse to being proven wrong, often
making us more likely to adopt a falsehood, even when confronted with a log-
ical, rational argument—that is, as long as this falsehood confirms our previ-
ously held biases.37 Thereby, confirmation bias is as much founded on heuristics
as it is founded on cognitive dissonance, namely, our need to ensure that our
actions and beliefs are in harmony. Information that contradicts our predispo-
sitions, beliefs, and biases causes dissonance and conflict with our need for har-
mony, inclining us to surround ourselves not just with like-­minded people but
also with confirmative information.38 This need for cognitive coherence affects
­professional-­and nonprofessional-­information consumers alike, including jour-
nalists and academics. As gatekeepers of knowledge, particularly the latter are
supposed to be open for the falsification and refutation of their arguments—
something that distinguishes true science from pseudoscience. Nonetheless,
academics tend to be drawn to research that supports their claims rather than
research that refutes it, in the same way that journalists often seek interviewees
who support their own personal or their editorial biases. Would the liberal-­
leaning CNN America invite a climate change denier onto the show, or would
the conservative-­leaning Fox News have an Islamist on air? And if so, would
their argument be heard or merely presented as a straw man to be attacked?
The consequences of confirmation bias on information processing are there-
fore significant. We are inclined to block out evidence that runs contrary to our
preconception, and we are discouraged from seeking alternative information in
an effort to broaden our horizon.39 What confirmation bias does, then, is per-
petuate and deepen existing core beliefs as “data and feedback discrepant with a
core belief typically either escape notice altogether or undergo reframing to be
consistent with preconceptions.”40 Even when confronted with the same infor-
mation, people tend to extract different conclusions from it as the “truth,” which
is clearly filtered through preexisting biases. That is to say, we tend to see flaws in
the evidence that undermine our position while we overemphasize research and
facts that support our position.41 This explains how news events can be inter-
preted completely differently by journalists, experts, and analysts—­particularly
when the assessment is a “hot take” and under time pressure, as is often the
case with breaking news coverage. Moreover, our desire to keep our existing
preconceptions in harmony with new information leads us to reactively devalue
information that comes from a source that we either do not trust or consider
antagonistic. During the 2020 US presidential election campaign, statements
made by incumbent President Trump were at times rejected outright by many
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 23

voters with liberal core beliefs in the same way as statements made by Dem-
ocratic candidate Biden were often rejected by many voters with conservative
core beliefs—and all that without checking the veracity of their statements.42

The Social Dimension

Typically, most heuristic shortcuts tend to take the route of existing beliefs and
worldviews. Biases draw on our existing ontological predispositions, namely,
existing prisms through which we try to make sense of the world around us.
These prisms are defined by beliefs that act as templates for the individual to
process reality—templates that evolve through a process of collective experi-
ence. That is to say, our individual core beliefs about how the world works are
products of our social environment. As social beings, our individual cognitive
processes might occur on the individual level but are exposed to and shaped by
the same conditions and contexts as those of other members of our ingroup—
regardless of whether this ingroup is ideological, religious, national, or ethnic in
nature.43 Moreover, shared cognition within our ingroup facilitates social inte-
gration. Common points of reference and shared cognitions on certain topics
and issues help us to maintain our bond with our social surroundings.44 We
either consciously select our ingroup based on shared beliefs or develop com-
mon beliefs as a consequence of being part of a group—nowhere is this phe-
nomenon more apparent than in the virtual socialization on social media, as
the next chapter shows. These beliefs are organized around common themes
and consist of contents such as collective memories, ideologies, and myths45—
contents that are often the source for group identity.46 Hence, societal beliefs
provide shortcuts to a collective experience of “truth,” which might be shared by
the great majority of group members or only part of them.
These societal beliefs “establish an order which will enable individuals to
orient themselves in their material and social world and . . . enable communica-
tion to take place among the members of a community by providing them with
a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously
the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history.”47
Societal beliefs help us to understand ourselves vis-­à-­vis others by plac-
ing them into “our” world.48 This is especially the case in the context of ideol-
ogy as a collective belief system that not only provides a positivist framework
explaining how the world functions but also a normative framework for how
the world is supposed to be.49 As such, ideology is not just an abstract meaning
system used to explain social, political, economic, or political phenomena, but
is often also understood as a recurring pattern of ideas that offers a distorted
view of reality.50 The latter pejorative approach to defining ideology as a form
of illusion or systematically distorted communication thereby underestimates
24 Ch apter 1

the important sociopsychological role of ideology in defining the sociopolit-

ical landscape of the twenty-­first century. A more value-­neutral approach to
the concept of ideology is taken here to understand how ideology as a social
belief system is experiencing a resurgence after Bell famously declared the “end
of ideology” in the 1960s.51 Looking at the polarized public debates in liberal
and illiberal societies today, ideologically anchored narratives appear to dom-
inate public discourse. The storylines that are being used to make sense of the
world across ideological spectrums are founded on simplistic dichotomies and
patterns that try to bring order in what is for many an overly complex world of
uncertainty. Being confronted with a “messy” transnational environment that is
globalized, privatized, securitized, and mediatized, the individual finds refuge
in ideology as it provides an illusion of sociopolitical order, either affirming an
existing order or providing normative support for an alternative order.52
Traditionally, the political ideological landscape has been divided into “left”
and “right” or “liberal” and “conservative,” with the former in both dichotomies
being broadly understood as embracing social change against the status quo,
and the latter being opposed to social change and embracing the status quo.53 A
liberal seeks to change the current order in an effort to achieve more equality,
social justice, and pluralism. Change in liberal ideology is not just perceived
as the motor for progress but an integral part of a healthy evolution of socio-
political order.54 Conservatives, on the contrary, prioritize stability and order,
system maintenance, family morals, and traditions, while accepting a degree
of socioeconomic inequality as part of a merit-­based reward system.55 Though
this dichotomy has evolved from a liberal political tradition that is fundamen-
tally Western, versions of this liberal–conservative continuum exist around
the world. The expression of political ideology has thereby become ever more
hybrid, blending traditionally conservative and liberal predispositions. The
notion of identity politics merges these hybrid forms of political ideology with
grievance-­based group identification, where the split between ingroup and out-
group no longer takes place along political ideological lines but rather divides
itself between aggrieved individuals on both sides of the political spectrum.56
These ideological predispositions not only shape sociopolitical views and
behavior but also determine an individual’s social integration. We tend to seek
confirmation within our social environment, causing us to be drawn more
toward our ideological ingroup. Liberals tend to socialize more with liberals,
and conservatives more with conservatives, as it provides them with identity
security when their own predispositions are being confirmed—something that
makes ideological ingroups vulnerable to “echo-­chambering” and confirmation
biases.57 Likewise, attribution bias emerges from us dividing the world into “us”
and “them,” whereby our attitude of liking or disliking the purveyor of infor-
mation has an impact on how we receive information.58 That is, if information
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 25

is conveyed by an authority we trust or with whom we share the ideological

ingroup, we are more likely to accept this information than when the informa-
tion is conveyed by an authority we do not trust—something subversion cam-
paigns exploit.
Thereby, the perception that conservatives are more ideological than lib-
erals in their information processing mostly stems from the observation that
conservatives tend to identify as such more readily and consciously.59 To state
the obvious, however, liberals can be just as dogmatic as their ideological coun-
terparts and are equally affected in their information processing by their ideo-
logical bias.60 On both the “left” and “right,” ideological predispositions guide
selective processing of information, causing distortion and the oversimplifica-
tion of complexities.61 We therefore tend to favor narratives and stories that
speak to our ideological predisposition: though a conservative might embrace
the narrative that authoritarian leaders are better at upholding stability in the
Middle East than democratic leaders, a liberal is more inclined to reject this
narrative of “authoritarian stability”—something that explains why Russia and
the United Arab Emirates tailor their narratives in a certain way, as chapters
4 and 5 show. The clash over ideologies has become most pronounced in the
realm of domestic politics, where the extreme ends of the spectrum propagate
irreconcilable positions, particularly on questions of immigration and multi-
culturalism. Conservative pledges for immigration control are often framed as
xenophobia by liberals, while liberal Willkommenskultur (welcoming culture) is
viewed as a fundamental threat to national security by the “right.”62
Conservative ideas and beliefs seem to thrive on the basis of sentiments of
fear, pain, and the prospect of loss, as the immediate aftermath of the Septem-
ber 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States clearly shows. The social
psyche of Americans having experienced the trauma of the terrorist attacks, and
the subsequent feeling of helplessness, created an audience that was susceptible
to conservative policies that focused on law and order, military strength, and
limitations on civil liberties.63 The perception of uncertainty and threat situa-
tionally prompts individuals to adopt more conservative standpoints regardless
of their disposition—a cognitive vulnerability that can be exploited in the era of
disinformation. The US reasoning in the run-­up to the Iraq War of 2003 is a case
in point: the framing of the Saddam Hussein regime as a threat to US national
security by linking it to international terrorism and weapons of mass destruc-
tion did not only appeal to conservatives but even caused liberals to endorse
more conservative policies.64
Hence, ideology as a belief system mediates our ability to process information
objectively. Though liberals and conservatives are equally prone to use ideology-­
based heuristics to process information, there seems to be a correlation between
general “closed-mindedness” and conservative beliefs—“closed-mindedness”
26 Ch apter 1

here referring to the unwillingness to listen to new ideas or opinions. As Jost

highlights, the willingness to accept information that challenges one’s own per-
ception, albeit constrained on both sides of the ideological divide, appears to
be lower among conservatives, who show a stronger tendency of path depen-
dency, rule following, and norm attainment.65 The conservative preference for
the maintenance of order and the status quo seems to undermine intellectual
flexibility and ambiguity—making the conservative mind-­set slightly more vul-
nerable to polarization.
The clash of the “open-­minded” versus the “closed-­minded,” however, re-
veals that neither side can break away from cognitive constraints. The relative
“open-­mindedness” of liberals is often bounded by a liberal argument carried
ad absurdum when attempting to censor anyone with what liberals perceive to
be “less progressive” views. Illiberal liberalism that paradoxically prescribes a
liberal belief system as a prerequisite for living in a liberal society undermines
the core tenets of liberalism.66 Taking the example of French president Macron’s
2020 comments that Islam is in need of reform to subscribe to liberal values
highlights how illiberal liberalism tries to impose ostensibly “progressive” ideas
of secularism on a minority.67
Campbell and Manning look at what they call “victimhood culture” that
enables liberals, under the pretext of protecting vulnerable groups, to constrain
academic freedom and the freedom of speech. Both argue that this “victim-
hood culture” is not so much about fighting injustices such as prejudice, b­ igotry,
and harassment but more about elevating one’s own moral worth over that of
alleged offenders. The threshold for what constitutes “offensive” has thereby
been lowered to a level that increasingly limits independent thought and objec-
tive analysis of facts.68 The resulting moral polarization between proponents
and opponents of this “victimhood culture” has aggravated the culture wars
between liberalism and conservatism as one side’s overvictimization of vulner-
able groups has triggered a reactionary pushback, particularly among conser-
vatives who tend to view these liberal debates as coming from a vantage point
of privilege. The antiestablishment narratives of the “right” are founded on a
rejection of a “victimhood culture” that seems to thrive on political correctness
imposed by what is often described by conservatives as “the elite.” Political cor-
rectness has become a hollow phantom to describe liberal mainstream beliefs
that no longer resonate with a growing class of socioeconomically disenfran-
chised and politically alienated voters.69 Whether Donald Trump in the United
States, Nigel Farage in Britain, or Marine Le Pen in France, conservative pop-
ulists have used legitimate socioeconomic and sociopolitical grievances of vot-
ers to compound a widespread societal belief of victimhood—a belief that can
unleash immense mobilizing power, as the following chapters show.70 The “left,”
or “liberals,” are being presented as the “elites” responsible for the grievances
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 27

suffered by the losers of globalization—a project that is presented as liberal in

itself and opposed to conservative core beliefs.
Victimhood on both sides of the ideological divide thereby functions as a
cognitive barrier to “rationality” and “objectivity.” Built around chosen traumas,
victimhood lies at the heart of what Mishra describes as the age of anger, where
the postmodern underdog with his aggravated sense of victimhood demands
redemption.71 Narratives of victimhood have thus been central to the develop-
ment of conspiracy theories that present “alternative facts” to the facts pre-
sented by the omnipotent “elites” of academia, media, and government.72 The
insurgency against the “liberal” establishment led by self-­victimized underdogs
embracing conservative beliefs has given rise to a new “regime of truth” that
favors emotions and ideological beliefs over facts.

The Emotional Dimension

Apart from societal beliefs, hot cognition—that is, cognition colored by emo-
tions—is another important barrier for rational decision-­making and infor-
mation processing. We are drawn not only to information that confirms our
existing ideological predispositions but also to information that speaks to our
emotional state. Similar to societal beliefs, emotions constrain our rationality
and make us favor information that speaks to certain, mostly negative, emotions
as well as prompt our activism. To return to the earlier philosophical debate
on “pure reason,” to think that reason is superior to (or exists in absence of )
the emotional state appears to be deceiving. As David Hume famously stated,
“reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend
to any other office than to serve and obey them.”73 Freud also saw cognition
and emotions as two inseparable sides of the same coin. In his theory of the
“heart” and “mind,” the primary mode of information processing is primitively
emotion-­based, while only the secondary process is based on rational analysis.74
Both Hume’s statement and Freud’s theory highlight the role of emotion in blur-
ring our rationality,75 particularly in the context of what has been described as
the age of anger,76 or the posttruth era,77 where emotions and beliefs appear to
be just as influential in shaping truth as facts and reason.78
Mishra defines the age of anger as driven by “ressentiments as the defin-
ing feature of a world where . . . the modern promise of equality collides with
massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership.”79 The
self-­victimized underdog, or Wutbürger, as Germans have coined the bourgeois
conservative who revolts against the establishment,80 is driven by anger over
perceived helplessness, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement in a quest
for “dignity.”81 His revolt is directed against the status quo as both the scape-
goat and scarecrow of a liberal world order that, at least in the West, no longer
28 Ch apter 1

delivers as inclusively to the public as it once did. The consequence of this per-
ception of helplessness, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement are collec-
tive emotions of fear and anger that not only dominate discourse on the fringes
but have given way to an entirely new ontological outlook on the world: one
where the “masses” are being robbed of their voice, their socioeconomic status,
their political say, and ultimately their dignity.
Apart from anger, fear is a powerful emotion that is being exploited in
mostly conservative populist discourse. Though anger mobilizes people to act,
fear paralyzes in a first instance but creates audiences susceptible to hawk-
ish policy decisions. Thereby, fear can function as an immensely powerful
driver of mobilization. Securitization plays an important role in policymaking
as well—namely, the process of framing risks as security threats mediated by
the sociopsychological predispositions of those taking the lead in the securi-
tization effort.82 Looking at the Trump administration’s approach to Iran, for
example, it becomes clear how important fearmongering was in mobilizing
conservative circles in Washington to embrace the narrative that Iran was
an existential threat. The United States’ “maximum pressure” strategy vis-­à-­
vis Tehran between 2017 and 2020 was the result of policy mobilization that
almost entirely revolved around fear as a collective emotion within an ideolog-
ical and emotional echo chamber. Years of framing Iran as an existential threat
to US interests ripened a fear-­based consensus that Iran could be engaged only
through hard power.
But what are emotions? As two sides of the same coin, cognition and emo-
tion often work complementarily as emotions shape information processing,
prompting us to favor one piece of information over the next.83 As neurological
phenomena, emotions have as much a social and psychological as a physiolog-
ical component. They are subjective feelings that are accompanied by physi-
ological, cognitive, and behavioral responses alike.84 Thereby, “emotions serve
as mediators and as data for processes of judgment, evaluation, and decision-­
making, which may then lead to particular behaviors.”85 And it is here, at the
point of translating cognition into action or behavior, where emotions play a
significant role in mediating our cognition, activating or deactivating us to take
action. Thus, although psychological and physiological in nature, emotions have
a strong social component as well, as emotional stimuli are a product of social-
ization.86 From an early age, we learn what triggers to look for to feel a particular
emotion and how to express this emotion in accordance with social norms. The
institutionalization of certain cues and triggers for specific emotions takes place
through social discourse, as they are learned behaviors.87 Thus, emotions are
not mere biological reflexes but are also powerful socialized stimuli that can
be triggered to be induced by extreme behavioral changes. For the information
warrior, pathos (i.e., the emotional appeal of narratives) has become a crucial
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 29

element of achieving a change in attitude, decision-­making, and behavior in the

target audience, as the next chapters show.
The predominant collective emotions in political cognition in the “posttruth
era” appear to be negative, revolving around fear and anger—with hope and
joy taking a back seat.88 At the interface of cognition and behavior, emotions
such as fear and anger not only determine what information we tend to engage
with but, more important, determine how we react to certain input outside the
information space in the physical world. As Edmund Burke famously said, “No
passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as
fear.”89 Fear arises from the perception of danger or threat posed to oneself or
the ingroup, which triggers paralysis rather than activism.90 At the core of this
emotion lies a sentiment of uncertainty that has the potential to destroy hope
and optimism and consolidate a pessimistic state of mind based on suspicion
and mistrust. Though fear can be experienced as an individual, it has, like other
emotions, a socially constructed dimension that can render it a collective emo-
tion experienced by an entire group.91
Therefore, fear can be induced or exacerbated through the manipulation of
cognitive frames as the case of securitization shows: framing the world through
a lens of uncertainty and potential insecurity creates susceptible audiences that
are willing to embrace hawkish and often violent responses to these securitized
threats.92 The post-­9/11 securitization of Islamic terrorism has created a deeply
ingrained fear, particularly (but not exclusively) among conservatives in the
United States that continues to impair their sociopsychological ability to assess
Islam and Islamism as separate from terrorism.93 When in a state of fear, we
tend to look for information that provides us with a degree of certainty amid a
state of uncertainty, as the COVID-­19 crisis has demonstrated. That is to say,
when confronted with a complex threat environment, we seem to be looking for
information that reduces complexity and provides us with clear answers, even
if they might not be rationally available. So a collective state of fear breeds con-
spiracy theories and simplistic narratives to provide a black-­and-­white answer
to complex problems, as the case of “global terrorism” and the coronavirus pan-
demic exemplifies.94
Anger is a more aggressive emotion that has the power to mobilize informa-
tion and individuals. As a remnant of a more uncivilized past, anger is the result
of a deep frustration in response to a perceived misdeed that creates a mental
state of arousal that makes us both more alert and mobilizes us to take action.95
The state of heightened arousal makes anger-­infused information more viral. In
other words, information that is spun emotionally travels faster because we tend
to be drawn to it more than more sober, less emotionally charged stories—the
Yellow Press being a case in point. Anger thus functions as an emotional con-
tagion that creates deeper social integration between individuals sharing this
30 Ch apter 1

anger, thereby reducing dissonance.96 Collective anger has the power to unite
individuals around information that confirms their emotional state of mind.
Outrage and annoyance over a particular issue can thereby help to compound
echo chambers in which individuals with similar emotional biases are drawn to
the same stories and information pieces. At the same time, objective content
without an emotional hook might find it harder to penetrate readership—a phe-
nomenon that is discussed further in the next chapter in the context of social
media. Research clearly shows that on social media platforms, content appears
to be shared more readily when emotionally infused with anger.97 Also, political
activism appears to be most effective in the information space when inciting
anger in the readership. “Objective reason” might thereby be a rather unat-
tractive sell for journalists, politicians, and social media influencers.

CONCLUSION

The American sociologist and politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously
said that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”—a
statement that seems to neatly differentiate with the subjective opinion and the
supposedly objective fact.98 This chapter intended to highlight that this neat dis-
tinction is easier said than done, considering how cognitive and emotional con-
straints blur our ability to see reality in an unmediated manner. Though “truth”
appears to be a social construct that is only ever as true as others perceive it to
be, constructivist relativism should not distract from the premise that “fact”
needs to be established and firmly based on a philosophical and scientific tradi-
tion that dates back centuries.
In this context, Hannah Arendt asserts that being alone and withdrawn
from the social context might be the best way for us to approach “truth”:
“Outstanding among the existential modes of truth-­telling are the solitude of
the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality
of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-­finder, the wit-
ness, and the reporter.”99
However, as social animals, we do not exist withdrawn from the social con-
text that gives meaning to our observations and beliefs. Unlike the scientific
consensus that follows clearly established norms and practices in the establish-
ment and codification of facts, “alternative facts” cannot be simply replicated
in an arbitrary process of social media echo-­chambering. Nonetheless, it is the
insurgency against the authority of science and other gatekeepers of “truth” that
in the age of anger led many people to spin facts into more palatable narratives,
often throwing overboard scientific traditions developed over centuries. Though
the consensus on “truth” is constantly challenged by emotionally charged opin-
ions, it remains to be seen to what extent those who disrupt the information
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 31

space by challenging the consensus can build a new consensus. As Moscovici

argues, “the greater the extent to which a representation of this world is shared
with other people, the more this world which is of our making, ‘in here,’ seems
to be autonomous, existing on its own, ‘out there.’ ”100
That is to say that through social discourse, we seem to shape the tools that we
use to perceive and describe the “real” world around us.101 The definition of these
tools and concepts that we apply to make sense of reality is a process that relies
on a social consensus—a consensus that traditionally did not seem to be hard to
attain. Our gullible nature to trust others to tell the truth by default, dubbed the
truth bias, appears to predispose us to falling in line with a consensus, even if
this consensus is just a perceived one.102 Research has shown that even when the
majority of a group’s members privately rejects a particular norm, they might go
along with it when they incorrectly assume that the ingroup accepts that norm.
Pluralistic ignorance draws on our need to reduce dissonance and exist in har-
mony with our norms and values and those of the ingroup.103
Hence, the process that underlies our social integration is shaped exten-
sively by our perception of the world and shared predispositions of how the
world works. Social discourse helps build communities around commonly
accepted narratives that do not often rest on pure fact or reason. They are more
likely drenched in myths and emotion in an effort to mobilize people.104 The
idea of the nation itself as a homogeneous community rests on narratives of
what constitutes “Britishness,” “Americanness,” or “Frenchness.” In the context
of nationalism as the celebration of the nation, Aristotle’s conceptualization of
the pathos seems to resonate more than logos. As Aristotle asserts, we as social
storytellers have difficulty conveying messages and meaning without any emo-
tional resonance. Particularly in the complex world of the twenty-­first century,
we might develop an increased appetite for stories that can help us deconstruct
complexity and reduce it to more accessible storylines.105 Our “truth” is there-
fore not only diluted through cognitive biases and ideological and emotional
predispositions but also through social deconstruction and reconstruction via
coherent storylines. Narratives that frame the COVID-­19 pandemic as a hoax
invented by pharmaceutical companies and other “elites” have gone viral amid
widespread lockdowns and the public fear of the unknown—it provided sim-
plistic, comforting storylines that were more palatable than the uncertainties
communicated by the sciences, policymakers, and the media. As it has been
throughout human history, we tend to transport information most effectively
via narratives—namely, storylines that wrap factuality in emotion; situate
events in an ideologically curated setting; connect past, present, and future; and
grant us a metaphysical place of belonging—in short, narratives provide a lens
through which we can make sense of the world. Narratives, then, offer the meta-
heuristic for us to perceive and convey our “truth.”106
32 Ch apter 1

The next chapter focuses on the aspect of dissemination that constitutes the
infrastructural vulnerability in our information space that in many ways exploits
and deepens our sociopsychological vulnerabilities. The new information space
of the twenty-­first century, which is dominated by social media, brings out the
worst in us as cognitive misers, with devastating consequences for veracity and
factuality in social discourse.

NOTES
1. BBC Three, “Do You Have a Gender Bias?”
2. Griffin, First Look, 22.
3. Nietzsche, “Truth and Lies,” 77–78.
4. Postman, “Information Environment,” 239.
5. Plato, Republic, 242.
6. Ferguson, “Plato’s Simile,” 25.
7. Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 333.
8. Griffin, First Look, 36.
9. Winter, “Truth or Fiction,” 144.
10. Unkelbach and Rom, “Referential Theory,” 111.
11. Lamore, “Descartes and Skepticism,” 26.
12. Descartes, Discourse, 61.
13. Bacon, Novum Organum, 12–13.
14. Garret, Hume, 174.
15. Bendassolli, “Theory Building,” 3.
16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ideas, 244.
17. Hegel, Phenomenology, 55.
18. Baldwin, “John Locke’s Contributions,” 179.
19. Peters and Besley, “Royal Society,” 227–32.
20. Shapin, Social History, 42ff.
21. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 207.
22. Merton, “Note.”
23. Merton, “Normative Structure,” 270–78.
24. Milliken, “Study of Discourse,” 229.
25. Burge, Origins, 15.
26. Van Inwagen, “It Is Wrong Everywhere.”
27. Brand, “Hot Cognition,” 5–15.
28. Keltner and Robinson, “Extremism,” 101–5.
29. Fazio, “Knowledge Does Not Protect,” 999.
30. Simon, “Motivational and Emotional Controls.”
31. Fiske and Taylor, Social Cognition, 12.
32. Kahneman and Tversky, Judgment under Uncertainty.
33. Baumeister and Bushman, Social Psychology, 164.
34. Statistics show that in the United Kingdom, only 12.8 percent of all consultant sur-
geons were female in 2018. See www​.rcseng​.ac​.uk​/careers​-­­in​-­­surgery​/women​-­­in​
-­­surgery​/statistics/.
35. Ward, “Psychological Barriers,” 276.
36. Ward.
 The Sociopsychology of Truth 33

37. Plous, Psychology of Judgment, 233.

38. Festinger, Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
39. Dweck and Ehrlinger, “Implicit Theories,” 320.
40. Eidelson and Eidelson, “Dangerous Ideas,” 182.
41. Ward, “Psychological Barriers,” 268.
42. Ward, 271.
43. Gayer et al., “Overcoming Psychological Barriers,” 973.
44. Eidelson and Eidelson, “Dangerous Ideas,” 183.
45. Ellul, Propaganda, 360.
46. See Bar-­Tal, “Sociopsychological Foundations.”
47. Moscovici, “Notes,” 212.
48. Stroud, “Goal,” 155.
49. Denzau and North, “Shared Mental Models,” 4.
50. Jost, “End,” 652.
51. Bell, End of Ideology.
52. Jost, Federico, and Napier, “Political Ideology,” 326.
53. Jost, Federico, and Napier, 311.
54. Erikson, Luttbeg, and Tedin, American Public Opinion, 75.
55. McClosky and Zaller, American Ethos, 189.
56. Fukuyama, Identity, 83.
57. Jost, Federico, and Napier, “Political Ideology,” 320.
58. Tetlock and Levi, “Attribution Bias,” 68–88.
59. Jost, “End,” 658.
60. Eysenck, Psychology, chap. 1.
61. Jost, “End,” 661.
62. Akrap, “Germany’s Response.”
63. Cohen et al., “American Roulette,” 177.
64. Castells, Communication Power, 167–69.
65. Jost, “End,” 662.
66. Orgad, Cultural Defense, 136.
67. Krieg, “Macron’s ‘Crusade.’ ”
68. Campbell and Manning, Rise of Victimhood Culture, 1–27.
69. Weigel, “Political Correctness.”
70. Waldman, “How Trump and Republicans Wield the Politics of Victimhood.”
71. Mishra, Age of Anger, 406.
72. Singer and Brooking, Like War, 161.
73. Ainslie and Butler, Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise, 252.
74. Moscovici, “Notes,” 231.
75. See Lerner et al., “Emotion.”
76. Mishra, Age of Anger.
77. Wharton, “Remarks,” 7.
78. Oxford Dictionary, “Post Truth.”
79. Mishra, Age of Anger, 31.
80. Kurbjuweit, “Der Wutbürger.”
81. Fukuyama, “Against Identity Politics.”
82. Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security, 25.
83. Castells, Communication Power, 146.
84. Averill, “Emotions,” 385ff.
34 Ch apter 1

85. Bar-­Tal, “Why Does Fear Override Hope?” 602.

86. Averill, “Studies,” 1146.
87. Lewis and Saarni, “Culture and Emotions,” 3ff.
88. Fan et al., “Anger Is More Influential.”
89. Burke, Philosophical Inquiry, 54.
90. Libicki, “Convergence,” 52.
91. Bar-­Tal, “Why Does Fear Override Hope?” 603.
92. Exoo, Pen, 41.
93. Lewandowsky et al., “Misinformation,” 490.
94. Bessi et al., “Trend of Narratives,” 2.
95. Averill, “Studies,” 1149–50.
96. Berger and Milkman, “What Makes Online Content Viral?” 2.
97. Paul and Matthews, “Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood,’ ” 6.
98. Moynihan, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2.
99. Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” 311.
100. Moscovici, “Notes,” 232.
101. See Bumer, Symbolic Interactionism.
102. McCornack and Parks, “Deception Detection.”
103. Lewandowsky et al., “Misinformation,” 490.
104. See Milliken, “Study of Discourse.”
105. Lamb-Sinclair, “When Narrative Matters More Than Fact.”
106. Singer and Brooking, Like War, 156.
 TWO

Challenging the
Gatekeepers of Truth

The idea of the media as society’s gatekeeper filtering and editing informa-
tion is rooted in mid–twentieth century communications theory and defines
a “process of culling and crafting countless bits of information into the limited
number of messages that reach people each day. . . . This process determines
not only which information is selected, but also what the content and nature of
messages, such as news, will be.”1
In so doing, the media is at the heart of the modern public sphere, shaping
and transmitting popular opinion and discourse. By acting as the actual filter
and deciding what information enters public discourse and how, the media is
a key instrument in constructing the civil-­societal consensus.2 As a constituent
body of civil society, the media has assumed what Edmund Burke is said to have
referred to as the fourth estate, or fourth power of governance: “Burke said there
were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there
sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.”3
The media is no longer just the transmitter of messages between individuals
within society; it has become the intermediary between the ruler and the ruled
that allows the public to aggregate a common public position that can be used
to speak truth to power.
Another important pillar of civil society is academia—namely, researchers,
analysts, and experts—whose scientific judgment on what is and what is not
factual have long determined the metrics for “objective truth” in public dis-
course. Working hand in hand with the media, academia has often functioned
as an auxiliary gatekeeper, not necessarily for information but for “truth.” The
debate on climate change would not have been possible without pundits and
experts weighing in and providing legitimacy and credibility to the various
arguments made in public discourse. Of most concern are those experts who
choose to distort the conversation by providing academically questionable

35
36 Ch apter 2

accounts to refute the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-­made

climate change is real.4
This is the context in which this chapter examines the infrastructural
domain—namely, the infrastructure of the information space—including where
and how information is collected, processed, and, most importantly, dissemi-
nated. Thereby, we intend to unpack the evolution of the information ecosystem
from early modernity into the twenty-­first century to show the extent to which
new technological innovations in the information space change the dynamics
of how we process information, often exacerbating existing sociopsychological
biases.
As such, the infrastructural domain is the predestined target for the opera-
tions of information warriors. Because it is here, at the heart of civil society,
that weaponized narratives can not just alter public discourse but also under-
mine the sociopolitical consensus and potentially alter the sociopolitical status
quo. In particular, disruptive narratives artificially injected and promoted in
the media environment can undermine the ability of societies to reach a public
consensus, leading to a polarization in the civil-­societal arena that can spill into
the physical domain. Although human cognition is the flag to be captured on
the battlefield of information warfare, it is the vulnerabilities of the information
space, particularly in liberal societies, that provide the information warrior with
subtle access to the human mind. It is here where weaponized narratives cater-
ing to existing cognitive dispositions in society can be most effective in shaping
societal reality.
This chapter commences by outlining the liberal idea of the public sphere
and the role media takes in becoming an agent of societal consensus and “truth.”
It is important here to understand how mass media traditionally framed reality
in order to produce “news.” We continue by looking at academia as a gatekeeper
for “truth,” showing how instrumental the judgments and opinions of experts
are in building narratives that are sustainable. Finally, the chapter shows how
social media has disrupted discourses by challenging traditional gatekeepers.
But instead of contributing to an increased degree of veracity in public dis-
course, it has increased polarization, making it harder to find a consensus on
what is actually true.

THE MEDIA: BUILDING AND

SHAPING THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Any serious inquiry into the role of the media in shaping societal discourse,
consciousness, and public opinion needs to commence with a look at the con-
cept of the public sphere. The need for a public space where individuals and
groups can discuss matters of collective interest appears to date back to ancient
 Ch allenging the Gatek eepers of Truth 37

Greece. The Greeks conceived of a distinction between oikos, the private space
of the household, and polis, the public space of the community.5 The citizen of
the Greek polis had access to the agora, the market and assembly place, where
matters of public concern would be discussed and debated. On a small scale,
the agora presents an early form of a public sphere that not only offered a space
withdrawn from the private sphere of the household but also, more importantly,
a political space where citizens actively partook in policy formation. Aspects of
the agora were replicated in the forum of the Roman Republic but were almost
impossible to find in the rigid estate system of the Middle Ages—typified by
feudalism with its serfdom, its lack of private property, and the absence of a
truly private space.
For Jürgen Habermas—who famously coined the term of Öffentlichkeit, or
public sphere—the truly modern sense of a public space emerges with the rise of
bourgeois society in urban centers in the seventeenth century. Their accumula-
tion of wealth provided for a new kind of societal power outside the feudal estates
of clergy, nobility, and peasantry.6 For the urban merchant society to thrive, it
required relative freedom to maneuver, following the rules of the market, not
the state. Simultaneously, the bourgeoisie started to organize in coffee houses,
salons de thé, and societies to discuss mutual interests and form a lobby that
could engage in dialogue with the ruling authority—initially, in a mere attempt to
negotiate better terms for doing business. Over time, Habermas explains, these
initiatives created a public space and consciousness among the educated urban
middle class, providing an arena for public and, more importantly, sociopolitical
discourse. Yet this public space was still constrained in terms of reach and acces-
sibility because discourse was still mostly oral and face-­to-­face. Hence, in the
context of the public sphere, the emergence of newspapers in the 1600s, coupled
with the public need and ambition to organize collectively beyond the confines
of the authority of state and estates, created something that was more powerful
than the written word alone: civil society. Though the origin of the written word
might have been in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC and had been pro-
vided with new communication power through Gutenberg’s printing press in
the fifteenth century AD, it arguably could realize its full political power only
in the context of a bourgeois public sphere—a space Habermas defines as

a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion

can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public
sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals
assemble to form a public body. . . . Citizens behave like a public body when
they confer in an unrestricted fashion—that is with the guarantee to assem-
bly and association and the freedom to express and publish their opinions—
about matters of general interest.7
38 Ch apter 2

Consequently, according to Habermas, the public sphere now being de-

tached from the physical space of the agora rests on two premises: unrestricted
access and inclusive political dialogue between its members. In the creation
of this public sphere, the evolution of print media was important to push the
boundaries of civil society beyond the physical realm of the coffee house or
the bourgeois societies, to create a more encompassing and more inclusive pub-
lic dialogue.
In the words of Rousseau, the public sphere allowed for the formation of
the volonté générale as a community’s general will. Thereby, Rousseau defines
the volonté générale as a public consensus to which all individual wills are sub-
servient and that as a common denominator should be representative of the
plurality of all individual wills.8 Nonetheless, although the notion of civil society
being able to produce an inclusive public consensus might be overly idealistic, it
is within the public sphere that societal beliefs are constructed by merging and
consolidating individual beliefs into truth as a social phenomenon.9
It is at this stage that the rising print media provided the communication
infrastructure to help civil society consolidate an aggregate public consensus
that we would today classify as public opinion. This is expressed in bourgeois
writing, in the then-­still-­infant medium of the newspaper, and was an essential
ingredient of a political dialogue with the authority of the state. It allowed for the
first time those in power to be held to account within the public forum of civil
society.10 It is because of civil society’s check on power that the development of
the public sphere is often erroneously linked with democratization. Although
the natural opponent to authoritarian rule, civil-­societal activism assisted by the
press existed as an extraparliamentary means to exercise leverage over a largely
autocratic ruling elite. For centuries, infant civil society in Europe existed in
political systems that were undemocratic but were consequently exposed to a
process of liberalization. Thus, civil society can exist without democracy, but
democracy cannot exist without civil society. The reason is that the ability of
citizens to speak truth to power enables the process of political liberalization,
which might eventually set a society on the course of democratization.11 So even
in autocratic states that leave space for civil society, such as the tribal monar-
chies of Qatar or Kuwait, citizen activism can prompt ruling elites to at least
listen to what the public has to say.12
In its capacity to convey “truth to power,” the media is supposed to provide
the communication infrastructure for individuals to convey matters of public
concern to other members of society as well as to the authorities of the state. In
so doing, the media becomes an instrument to interrogate those in power by set-
ting the agenda for public interests, concerns, and grievances.13 Whether those
in power decide to respond to these concerns often depends on the nature of the
sociopolitical system that is tied to the public sphere. Nonetheless, the media’s
 Ch allenging the Gatek eepers of Truth 39

role as the fourth estate, in the words of Burke, relies on its ability to assume
the fourth power of governance, solely by scrutinizing the other three branches,
especially the executive. Though only an informal institution, the media as an
extended arm of civil society ideally operates independently from those in power,
siding with the public by holding authorities to account. In Habermas’s norma-
tive approach to the public sphere, the media ought to be critical and investigate
means to exercise “objective” scrutiny over those in power.14
For the media to live up to its civil-­societal duty, however, it is essential that
it gains the trust of the public as being truthful and objective. As Day argues,
journalists “strive to keep their personal preferences and opinions outs of news
stories, to achieve balance in coverage, and to rely on credible and responsible
news sources [and to be] concerned with facts and impartiality in the presenta-
tion of these facts.”15
Most important, from a liberal point of view, the media should function as
an arbiter of truth that independently holds the middle ground of the public’s
volonté générale.16 Only when the media is able to capture public opinion inclu-
sively and without ruling elites can it provide reliable and transparent infor-
mation that the public trusts. The accuracy and the veracity of the information
being disseminated by the media becomes an essential part of its arbiter role as
“without truth, there is no way to speak truth to power. Truth underlies dissent.
Without truth, there is no way to dissent by appealing to facts that undermine
the authority of a leader. Truth underlies trust. Without trust, our institutions
cannot function; their authority merely will rest on power.”17
Where the traditional media seems to fail today in the eyes of many on the
fringes of public consensus is in representing the general will inclusively. Within
the increasing number of social media–curated echo chambers, public trust
in the conventional media’s ability to speak “truth” to power is eroding. The
widespread use of the political buzzword “fake news” in reference to the media
is indicative of the intellectual and ideological differences between the media
mainstream and polarized peripheries of public opinion that move increasingly
into the center of the bourgeois discourse. Even more, the media in the rhet-
oric of conservative populists has been stigmatized as a tool of manipulation
by a macro-­elitist bogeyman that helps propagate a liberal worldview.18 The
pejorative Lügenpresse, or “lying press,” dates back to nationalist, anti-­Semitic
pamphlets in mid-­nineteenth-­century Germany and was picked up by the Nazi
propagandist Joseph Goebbels in the 1930s to justify his clamp-­down on the
free press as an expression of contempt vis-­à-­vis an “elitist” government-­media
complex.19 This leads us to ask to what extent the public sphere has actually ever
been inclusive and representative of societal reality.
Although Habermas’s normative conceptual account of the public sphere
prescribes inclusiveness and unrestricted access in order for the public sphere
Other documents randomly have
different content
for some time. It was stretched on a framework of sticks and
smeared over with a thick red pigment, which dressing she was
engaged in renewing. (“Voyage of the ‘Fly,’” Vol. I., 1847, p. 246)”
(p. 138).
“Macgillivray (“Voyage of the ‘Rattlesnake,’” Vol. II., 1852, p. 48)
also refers to a mummy of a child in Darnley Island. Sketches of the
two Miriam mummies in the Brisbane Museum will be found on Plate
94 of Edge Partington and Heape’s Ethnographical Album of the
Pacific Islands, third series. [Compare also Plate 2, Figure 4, in
Brockett’s “Voyage to Torres Straits,” Sydney, 1836]” (p. 137).
“On about the tenth day after death, when the hands and feet
have become partially dried, the relatives, using a bamboo knife,
remove the skin of the palms and soles, together with the nails, and
then cut out the tongue, which is put into a bamboo clamp so that it
may be kept straight while drying. These were presented to the
widow, who henceforth wore them” (p. 138).
A great deal of further information in regard to this practice is
given by Haddon and Myers in their important monograph. Among
other things they call attention once more to the custom of
preserving the skull in the Torres Straits Islands where
mummification is practised. The use of masks and ceremonial
dances to assist the performers so as the more realistically to play
the part of the deceased is welcome confirmation of the conclusion
drawn from geographical distribution that such practices were
intimately related to mummification and form part of the ritual
genetically linked to it.
Dr. Hamlyn-Harris, the Director of the Queensland Museum, gives
an account (27) of the two mummies from the Torres Straits, which
are now in Brisbane; and he adds further interesting information
which he obtained from Mr. J. S. Bruce, of Murray Island, who was
also one of Dr. Haddon’s informants. During my recent visit to
Australia Dr. Hamlyn-Harris very kindly gave me every facility for
examining these two mummies (as well as the Australian mummies
in the Queensland Museum); and I also examined another specimen
in the Macleay Museum of the University of Sydney. I am preparing a
full report on all of these interesting specimens.
From the Torres Straits the practice of mummification spread to
Australia, as Flower (19), Frazer (22), Howitt (see Hertz, 33), Roth
(71) and Hamlyn-Harris (28), among others, have described. Roth
says “Desiccation is a form of disposal of the dead practised only in
the case of very distinguished men. After being disembowelled and
dried by fire the corpse is tied up and carried about for months.”
(71, p. 393). The mummy was painted with red ochre (Fraser, 22).
In Roth’s photographs, as well as in the mummies which I have
had the opportunity of examining, the embalming-incision was made
in the characteristically Egyptian situation in the left flank. In one of
the mummies in the Brisbane Museum (see 28, plate 6) the head is
severely damaged. Examination of the specimen indicates that
incisions had been deliberately made. Perhaps it was an attempt to
remove the brain, which ended in destruction of the cranium.
A curious feature of Australian embalming is that the body was
always flexed, and not extended as in the Torres Straits. At first I
was inclined to believe that this may be due to the influence of the
Early Egyptian (Second Dynasty) procedure (89), but a fuller
consideration of the evidence leads me to the conclusion that the
adoption of the flexed position is due to syncretism with local burial
customs, which were being observed when the bringers of the
“heliolithic” culture reached Australia. It is probable that the
boomerang came from Egypt, viâ East Africa, India (12) and
Indonesia at the same time.
Several curious burial customs which may be regarded as
degradations of the practice of mummification occur in Australia, but
the consideration of these I must defer for the present.
In the discussion on Flower’s memoir (19), Hyde Clarke justly
emphasized “the importance of the demonstrations in reference to
their bearings on the connection of the Australian populations with
those of the main continents, and in the influence exerted in
Australasia at a former time by a more highly cultivated race. This,
to his mind, was the explanation of the relations of the higher
culture, whether with regard to language, marriage and kindred,
weapon names, or modes of culture, such as the mummies now
described, the modes of incision, and form of burial. He did not
consider these institutions, as some great authorities did, indigenous
in Australia” (19, p. 394).
Corroborative evidence is now accumulating (70), which will
definitely establish the reality of the influence thus adumbrated by
Clarke 37 years ago.
Frazer (22, p. 80) says the burial (in Australia) on a raised stage
reminds him of the “towers of silence,” and adds:—“This novelty of a
raised stage can scarcely be a thing which our blacks have invented
for themselves since they came to Australia; and if it is a custom
which some portion of their ancestors brought with them into this
country, I would argue from it that these ancestors were once in
contact with, or rather formed part of, a race which had beliefs
similar to those of the Persians; such beliefs are not readily adopted
by strangers; they belong to a race.” Frazer proceeds to contrast this
practice with the other Australian custom of desiccation, which, he
says, “corresponds to the Egyptian practice of mummification” (p.
81): but, as Hertz (33 et supra) has pointed out, they were inspired
by the same fundamental idea, however much the present
practitioners of the two methods may fail to realize this in their
beliefs and traditions. The interesting suggestion emerges from
these considerations that the peculiar Persian burial customs may be
essentially a degraded and profoundly modified form of the ancient
Egyptian funerary rites.
In his “Polynesian Researches” William Ellis (15) gives an
interesting, though unfortunately too brief, account of the Tahitian
practice of embalming. Among the poor and middle classes
“methods of preservation were too expensive” to be used, but the
body was “placed upon a sort of bier covered with the best native
cloth” while awaiting burial (p. 399).
 “The bodies of the dead, among the chiefs, were, however, in
general preserved above ground: a temporary house or shed was
erected for them, and they were placed on a kind of bier ...
sometimes the moisture of the body was removed by pressing the
different parts, drying it in the sun, and anointing it with fragrant
oils. At other times, the intestines, brains, etcetera were removed:
all moisture was extracted from the body, which was fixed in a
sitting position during the day, and exposed to the sun, and, when
placed horizontally at night was frequently turned over, that it might
not remain long on the same side. The inside was then filled with
cloth saturated with perfumed oils, which were also injected into
other parts of the body, and carefully rubbed over the outside every
day” (pp. 400 and 401).
“It was then clothed, and fixed in a sitting posture; a small altar
was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food and flowers, were
daily presented by the relatives, or the priests appointed to attend
the body. In this state it was preserved several months, and when it
decayed, the skull was carefully kept by the family, while the other
bones etc. were buried within the precincts of the family temple” (p.
401).
Ellis makes the significant comment:—“It is singular that the
practice of preserving the bodies of their dead by the process of
embalming, which has been thought to indicate a high degree of
civilization, and which was carried to such perfection by one of the
most celebrated nations of antiquity, some thousand years ago,
should be found to prevail among this people.” The whole of the
circumstances attending the practice of this custom, and the curious
ritual and the behaviour of the mourners, as described by Ellis, no
less than the details of the process, in fact afford the most positive
evidence of its derivation from Egypt.
Ellis says “it is also practiced by other distant nations of the
Pacific, and on some of the coasts washed by its waters.” “In some
of the islands they dried the bodies, and, wrapping them in
numerous folds of cloth, suspended them from the roofs of their
dwelling-houses” (p. 406).
Ellis notes the remarkable points of identity between the Tahitian
account of the deluge and not only the Hebrew but also those of the
Mexicans and Peruvians and many other peoples (p. 394).
In Glaumont’s summary (24, p. 517) five modes of burial are
described as being practised in New Caledonia. The first is burial in
the flexed position; 2nd, extended burial in caves; 3rd, exposure of
the body in trees or on the mountains; 4th, mummification; 5th, the
body erect or reposing in a dug-out canoe. With regard to the
method of embalming, this is practised only in the case of a chief.
The body of a chief soon after death was covered with pricks into
which were introduced the juices of certain plants with the object of
preventing decomposition of the tissues. Afterwards the body was
suitably dried or smoked, then it was dressed in its best clothes, its
face painted red and black, and then the body was preserved
indefinitely. A hole was made at the top of the hut, and by means of
this they haul up the mummy. After it has been exposed in this way
for a certain time, the body was withdrawn from the hole into the
house, which was then carefully shut up and became taboo with all
that it contained. Analogous customs are found in New Zealand and
elsewhere in Oceania. A singularly strange custom is now in use in
the New Hebrides and in the Solomon Islands. The father and son,
for example, or the husband and wife, having just died, they smoke
the head alone as in New Zealand, but they make (with bamboo
covered with cloth) a mannikin, having roughly the human form;
then they tattoo the whole of the surface; fastened upon each
shoulder—and this is the strange part of it—is a piece of bamboo, to
one of which they attach the father’s head and the other that of his
son. [The account is not altogether intelligible here.] The heads are
painted white and black. With reference to the placing of the body in
a canoe, this is reserved for chiefs only. When a chief dies,
messengers go in all directions, repeating “The sun is set.” This
expression springs from the idea that the chief is a god, the supreme
Sun-god.
 These procedures afford a remarkably complete series of links
with the “heliolithic” cult as practised elsewhere in the west and
east. The account of the curious attachment of the heads to the
shoulders of the dummy figure throw some light upon the custom
(to which I have referred elsewhere in this communication) in
Mallicolo (61, p. 138) and in America of representing human faces
on the shoulders of such models. It is a remarkable fact that in
certain of the Mallicolo figures the phallus is fixed to the girdle in a
very curious manner, exactly analogous to that recently described
and figured by Blackman from an Egyptian tomb of the Middle
Kingdom at Meir.
Embalming was a method rarely employed in New Zealand.
“After the extraction of the softer parts, oil or salt was rubbed into
the flesh, and the body was dried in the sun or over a fire; then the
mummy was wrapped in cloth and hidden away.”
“In some parts of New Zealand the skeletons of mummified bodies
are found in the crouching or sitting posture” (Macmillan Brown, 7,
p. 70).
In Schmidt’s Jahrbücher der gesammten Medicin, 1890, Bd. 226,
p. 175, there is an abstract of an article on Samoa by P. Burzen in
which, among other things, the three Egyptian operations of
circumcision, massage and mummification are described as being
practiced.
The embalming is done by women. After removing the viscera,
which are buried or burnt, the eviscerated corpse is then soaked for
two months in coconut oil, mixed with vegetable juices. When the
body is fully treated and no more fluid escapes from it, the hair
which had previously been cut off, is stuck on again with a resinous
paste. The body cavity is packed with cloth soaked in vegetable oil
and resinous materials: then the mummy is wrapped up with
bandages, the head and hands being left exposed.
 The body so prepared is put in a special place where it is
preserved indefinitely.
“In Pitcairn Island 1,400 miles due west of Easter Island carved
stone pillars or images of a somewhat similar character to those of
Easter Island” are found (Enoch, 16, p. 274).
“Another 1,400 miles to the north-west takes us to Tahiti. The
natives of Tahiti buried their chiefs in temples; their embalmed
bodies, after being exposed, were interred in a couching position.
Mention is made of a pyramidal stone structure, on which were the
actual altars, which stood at the farther end of one of the squares.”
“There are many close analogies between the sacrificial practices
and those of Mexico” (p. 275).
In their extensive migrations the carriers of the “heliolithic” culture
took with them the custom of circumcision, and introduced it into
most of the regions where their influence spread. In some of the
areas affected by the “heliolithic” leaven the more primitive
operation of “incision” is found. This consists not of removing the
prepuce, but merely slitting up its dorsal aspect (69, p. 432). It was
the method employed in Egypt in pre-dynastic times, when it was
the custom to hide the phallus in a leather sheath suspended from a
rope tied round the body. The practice of “incision” and the use of
the pudendal sheath persists in some parts of Africa until the present
day (see Journ. Roy. Anthropol. Instit. 1913, p. 120).
Rivers claims that “the practice of incision arose in Oceania as a
modification of circumcision” (69, p. 436): but I think the possibility
of it having been introduced from the west along with or before the
practice of circumcision needs to be considered.
Another remarkable practice which probably formed part of the
equipment of the heliolithic wanderers was massage. It was
employed by the Egyptians as early as the Sixth Dynasty, as we
know from the representations of the operations in a Sakkara
mastaba (Capart, 11). Piorry (57) has given an account of the wide
range of the practice of massage, from Egypt to India, China and
Tahiti, and the high state of efficiency attained in its use in ancient
times in India and China. The Chinese manuscript Kong-Fau
contained detailed accounts of the operation. Piorry remarks, “it is
clear that for us its development did not originate from the practices
described in the books of Cong-tzée or the compilation of Susrata.”
From Rivers’ interesting account of massage in Melanesia (67) it is
evident that the method must have an origin common to it and the
modern European practice, and that it could not have arisen
amongst a barbarous people like the Melanesians, who have the
most extraordinary conceptions as to why and how it serves a
therapeutic purpose. Although we have no evidence to prove that
massage spread along with the heliolithic culture, the fact that it has
a similar geographical distribution, and certainly was extensively
practised in Egypt long before the great migration began, suggests
that it may represent another Egyptian element of that remarkable
culture-complex.
In his masterly analysis of the cultures of Oceania (69) Rivers has
given a useful summary of the evidence relating to the practice of
preserving the body, and has drawn certain inferences from these
and other burial practices, which I propose to examine. “In some
cases, as in Tikopia, interment takes place either in the house or
within a structure representing a house, while in Tonga and Samoa
the bodies of chiefs are interred in vaults built of stone. Often the
body is buried in a canoe or in a hollowed log of wood, which
represents a canoe” (69, p. 269). From the evidence to which
reference has been made in the course of the present memoir it is
unnecessary to insist at any length on the importance and obvious
significance of these facts. But I question the inference Rivers draws
(p. 270) from the burial in boats. He says “the practice can be
regarded as a result of the fact of migration, and does not show that
the use of a canoe was the practice of the immigrants in their
original home.” The practice is so widespread, however, and in Egypt
and elsewhere had such a deep-rooted significance that it is difficult
to believe this custom was not brought by the immigrants with them.
I am willing to admit that the special circumstances of the people of
Oceania naturally emphasized what may be called the “boat-
element” in the funerary ritual; but the association of the use of
boats with burial is so curious and constant a feature of the
“heliolithic” culture where-ever it manifests itself (vide supra) as
hardly to have arisen independently in different parts of the area of
distribution.
“A second mode of treatment is preservation of the body, either in
the house or on a stage often covered with a roof. Some kind of
mummification is usually practised in these cases, by continual
rubbing with oil, drying by means of a fire, and puncture of the body
to hasten the disappearance of the products of decomposition.”
“In some parts of Samoa there is a definite process of embalming
in which the viscera are removed and buried. A body thus treated
lies on a platform resting upon a double canoe, and in many other
places a canoe is used as a receptacle for the body while it is
undergoing the process of mummification” (p. 269). This association
of the use of a canoe with a method of preservation obviously
Egyptian in origin naturally provokes comparison with the use of
boats in the Egyptian funeral ceremonies. An instance is the boat
found in the tomb of Amenophis II. (81). The platform is probably a
type of bed found elsewhere in the region under consideration (see,
for instance, Roth’s account of the Queensland sleeping-platform)
and represents the bier found so often elsewhere (vide supra). This
is in no way inconsistent with Rivers’ view that “exposure of the
dead on platforms is only a survival of preservation in a house” (p.
273).
Earlier in this memoir I have explained why the Egyptians came to
attach special importance to the head, and how the less cultured
people of Africa, when faced with the difficulties of preserving the
body, saved the skull (or in some cases the jaw). When it is recalled
how widespread this custom is in other parts of the “heliolithic area,”
and how deep-rooted were the ideas which prompted so curious a
procedure, Rivers’ independent inference in regard to this matter is
fully confirmed. “Many practices become intelligible as elements of a
single culture if we suppose that a people imbued with the necessity
for the preservation of the body after death acquired ... the further
idea that the skull is the representative of the body as a whole; if
they came to believe that the purpose for which they had hitherto
preserved the body could be fulfilled as well if the head only were
kept” (p. 273). This is unquestionably true: but I dissent from Rivers’
qualification that this modification happened “perhaps in the course
of their wanderings towards Oceania,” because it has already been
seen that it had occurred before the wanderers set out from the East
African coast. There is, of course, the possibility that Africa may
have been influenced by a cultural reflux from Indonesia, such as
has been demonstrated in the case of Madagascar; but there are
reasons for believing that the facts under consideration cannot be
explained in this way.
In thus venturing upon criticisms of Rivers’ great monograph I
should like especially to emphasize the fact that these comments do
not refer in any way to his attack on the “orthodox” ethnological
position. On the contrary, the views that I am setting forth in this
communication represent a further extension of Rivers’ own attitude
that the Oceanic cultures have been derived mainly from contacts
with other peoples. A series of practices which he has hesitated to
recognise as having been introduced, but inclined to regard as local
developments, I hold to be part of the immigrant culture. The use of
boats for burial, the custom of regarding the head as an efficient
representative of the whole body and the practice of “incision” as
well as circumcision (69, p. 432) are examples of customs, which he
regards as local developments in the Pacific: but all three are equally
distinctive of Ancient Egypt and occur at widely separated localities
along the great “heliolithic” track. The linking-up of sun-worship with
all the other elements of the “heliolithic cult” also compels me to
question his limitation of such worship to certain regions only in
Oceania (69, p. 549); even though I fully admit that the data used
by Rivers are not sufficient to justify any further inference than he
has drawn from them.
 My aim is then, not an attempt to weaken Rivers’ general attitude,
but enormously to strengthen it, by demonstrating that each culture-
complex was brought into the Pacific in an even more complete form
than he had postulated. Nor does my criticism affect his hypothesis
of a series of cultural waves into Oceania. Here, again, I am
prepared to go not only the whole way with him, but even further,
and to seek for additional cultural influences which he has not yet
defined.
Most modern writers who refer in any way to the preserved bodies
which have been found in vast numbers in Peru and in other parts of
America assume that these bodies have been preserved not by
embalming or any other artificial method or mode of treatment, but
simply as the result of desiccation by the unaided forces of nature.
Although in the great majority of cases there are no obvious signs of
any artificial means having been employed to preserve the bodies,
yet a not inconsiderable number of examples have come to light to
demonstrate the reality of the practice of mummification in America
(3; 37; 58; 63; and 106). Yarrow’s classical monograph (106)
established the reality of the practice of embalming in America quite
conclusively. Moreover the fact that practically every item of the
multitude of curiously distinctive practices found widespread in other
parts of the world, in the most intimate association with methods of
embalming certainly inspired by Egypt, puts it beyond all reasonable
doubt that the variety of American practices for preserving the body
is also to be attributed to the same source.
In his book on the “History of the Conquest of Peru,” Prescott
makes the following statement:—“When an Inca died (or, to use his
own language, was called home to the mansion of his father, the
Sun) his obsequies were celebrated with great pomp and solemnity.
The bowels were taken from the body and deposited in the Temple
of Tampu, about five leagues from the capital. A quantity of his plate
and jewels was buried with him, and a number of his attendants and
favourite concubines, amounting sometimes, it is said, to a
thousand, were immolated on his tomb....
 “The body of the deceased Inca was skilfully embalmed and
removed to the great Temple of the Sun at Cuzco. There the
Peruvian sovereign on entering the awful sanctuary might behold the
effigies of his royal ancestors, ranged in opposite files—the men on
the right and their queens on the left of the great luminary which
blazed in refulgent gold on the walls of the temple. The bodies,
clothed in princely attire which they had been accustomed to wear,
were placed on chairs of gold, and sat with their heads inclined
downwards, their hands placidly crossed over their bosoms, their
countenances exhibiting their natural dusky hue—less liable to
change than the fresher colouring of a European complexion—and
their hair of raven black, or silvered over with age, according to the
period at which they died. It seemed like a company of solemn
worshippers fixed in devotion, so true were the forms and
lineaments to life. The Peruvians were as successful as the Egyptians
in the miserable attempt to perpetuate the existence of the body
beyond the limits assigned to it by nature. [Note—Ondegardo, Rel.
Prim., M.S.—Garcilasso, Com. Real., parte i., lib. v., cap. xxix. The
Peruvians secreted their mummies of their sovereigns after the
Conquest, that they might not be profaned by the insults of the
Spaniards. Ondegardo, when corregidor of Cuzco, discovered five of
them, three males and two females. The former were the bodies of
Viracocha, of the great Tupac, Inca Yupanqui, and of his son,
Huayna Cupac. Garcilasso saw them in 1650. They were dressed in
their regal robes, with no insignia but the llautu on their heads. They
were in a sitting position, and, to use his own expression, ‘perfect as
life, without so much as a hair of an eyebrow wanting.’ As they were
carried through the streets, decently shrouded with a mantle, the
Indians threw themselves on their knees, in sign of reverence, with
many tears and groans, and were still more touched as they beheld
some of the Spaniards themselves doffing their caps in token of
respect to departed royalty. (Ibid. ubi supra.) The bodies were
subsequently removed to Lima; and Father Acosta, who saw them
there some twenty years later, speaks of them as still in perfect
preservation]” (58, pp. 19 and 20).
 Later on in the same work Prescott, relying again on the
somewhat, questionable authority of Garcilasso’s works, makes a
statement which in some respects may seem to be at variance with
what I have just quoted:—
“It was this belief in the resurrection of the body which led them
to preserve the body with so much solicitude—by a simple process,
however, that unlike the elaborate embalming of the Egyptians,
consisted in exposing it to the action of the cold, exceedingly dry
and highly rarified atmosphere of the mountains. [Note.—Such
indeed seems to be the opinion of Garcilasso, though some writers
speak of resinous and other applications for embalming the body.
The appearance of the royal mummies found at Cuzco, as reported
both by Ondegardo and Garcilasso, makes it probable that no
foreign substance was employed for their preservation.] As they
believed that the occupations in the future world would have great
resemblance to those of the present, they buried with the deceased
noble some of his apparel, his utensils, and frequently his treasures;
and completed the gloomy ceremony by sacrificing his wives and
favourite domestics to bear him company and do him service in the
happy regions beyond the clouds. Vast mounds of an irregular or
more frequently oblong shape, penetrated by galleries running at
right angles to each other were raised over the dead, whose dried
bodies or mummies have been found in considerable numbers,
sometimes erect, but more often in the sitting posture common to
the Indian tribes of both continents” (p. 54).
In the light of the information concerning the practices in other
parts of the world, which I have collected in the present memoir,
there can be no doubt of the substantial accuracy of these reports,
and that they refer to real embalming and not to mere natural
desiccation.
Hrdlička has adduced positive evidence of the adoption of
embalming procedures (37).
In his report, “Culture of the Ancient Pueblos of the Upper Gila
River Region, New Mexico and Arizona,” Walter Hough (36)
publishes excellent photographs of two mummies of babies, but he
gives no information as to the method of preservation.
There are four Peruvian mummies in the Anatomical Museum in
the University of Manchester, three of which are adults, and one of
them a baby. In only one of them is there any positive evidence of
artificial measures having been adopted for the preservation of the
body, and in this case the condition of the mummy was a most
amazing one. The body was clad in woollen garments in the usual
way, and was wearing a woollen peaked cap, the apex of which was
furnished with a bunch of feathers. The body was placed in a sitting
position, and a large wound extending across the trunk had been
covered with cloth strongly impregnated with resinous material. The
legs were sharply flexed upon the body and the arms were bound up
in front. But to my intense amazement I found the shoulder blades
on the front of the chest, and on examination found that the thorax
was turned back to front. As the head was already separate there
was nothing to show what position it originally occupied; and it
seemed impossible to explain how it had been possible to twist the
vertebral column in the lumbar region as to bring the thorax back to
front. In order to solve this mystery I removed the resin-
impregnated cloth, which was firmly fixed to the abdominal wound,
and found that the body had been cut right across the abdomen and
packed with wool after the viscera had been removed. Then the
abdomen and thorax had been stuck together by means of the
broad strip of cloth with resinous paste as an adhesive. But for some
reason which is not very apparent, or probably through mere
carelessness, the thorax had been placed the wrong way round, and
it had become necessary, in order to restore some semblance of life-
like appearance to the monstrosity, forcibly to twist the arms at the
shoulder joints in order to get them into the position above
described. [Since this was written I have learned that in certain
American tribes it is the custom to dress the corpse with a coat
turned back to front. This seems to suggest that the curious
procedure just described may have been dictated by the same
underlying idea, whatever it may be.] In the cranium of this case the
remains of the desiccated brain were still present, and although
there was a quantity of brownish powder along with it, the evidence
was not sufficiently definite to say whether or not any foreign
material had been introduced into the cranial cavity. In the case of
the other three bodies, as I have already mentioned, there was no
evidence, apart from the excellent state of preservation, to suggest
what measures had been taken to hinder the process of
decomposition.
In his account of the obsequies of the Aztec kings, Bancroft (3,
Vol. II., p. 603) tells us that “the body was washed with aromatic
water, extracted chiefly from trefoil, and occasionally a process of
embalming was resorted to. The bowels were taken out and
replaced by aromatic substances.” “The art was an ancient one,
however, dating from the Toltecs as usual, yet generally known and
practised throughout the whole country” (p. 604). He then proceeds
to describe “a curious mode of preserving bodies used by the lord of
Chalco,” which consisted of desiccation; and adds a singularly
interesting reference to libations, not only curiously reminiscent of
the ancient Egyptian practice, but also described in language which
might be regarded as a paraphrase of the Pyramid text expounded
by Blackman (5). “Water was then poured upon its [the mummy’s]
head with these words: ‘this is the water which thou usedst in this
world’—Brasseur de Bourbourg uses the expression ‘C’est cette eau
que tu as reçue en venant au monde’” (Bancroft, 3, Vol. II., p. 604).
It is altogether inconceivable that such a curious practice,
embodying so remarkable an idea, could by chance have been
invented independently in Egypt and in America. This can be no
mere coincidence, but proof of the most definite kind of the
derivation of these Toltec and Aztec ideas from Egypt.
Bancroft further describes (3, p. 604 et seq.) a whole series of
other ritual observances, many of which find close parallels in the
scenes depicted in the royal Egyptian tombs of the New Empire.
I have already referred to Tylor’s case (102) of the adoption in
toto by the Aztecs of the Japanese Buddhist’s story of the soul’s
wanderings in the spirit-land. In the case recorded by Bancroft
almost the same story is reproduced, but with the characteristic
Egyptian additions relating to parts of the way guarded by a gigantic
snake and an alligator respectively [in the Egyptian ritual it is of
course the Crocodile; see Budge, “The Egyptian Heaven and Hell,”
Vol. 1, p. 159]. This is a most remarkable example of syncretism
between the Egyptian ritual of the New Empire with Buddhist
practices on the distant shores of America.
As the connecting link between the Old and New World, it may be
noted that in Oceania “everywhere is the belief that the soul after
death must undertake a journey, beset with various perils, to the
abode of departed spirits, which is usually represented as lying
towards the west” (61, p. 138).
Reutter (63) gives a summary of information relating to the
practice of embalming in the New World and particularly amongst
the Incas. The custom of preserving the body was not general in
every case, for amongst certain peoples only the bodies of kings and
chiefs were embalmed. The Indian tribes of Virginia, of North
Carolina, the Congarees of South Carolina, the Indians of the North-
West Coast, of Central America and those of Florida practised this
custom as well as the Incas. In Florida the body was dried before a
big fire, then it was clothed in rich materials and afterwards it was
placed in a special niche in a cave where the relatives and friends
used to come on special days and converse with the deceased.
According to Beverley (1722) the tribes of Virginia practised
embalming in the following way:—The skin was incised from the
head to the feet and the viscera as well as the soft parts of the body
were removed. To prevent the skin from drying up and becoming
brittle oil and other fatty materials were applied to it. In Kentucky
when the body had been dried and filled with fine sand it was
wrapped in skins or in matting and buried either in a cave or in a
hut. In Colombia the inhabitants of Darien used to remove the
viscera and fill the body cavity with resin, afterwards they smoked
the body and preserved it in their houses reposing either in a
hammock or in a wooden coffin. The Muiscas, the Aleutians, the
inhabitants of Yucatan and Chiapa also embalmed the bodies of their
kings, of their chiefs, and of their priests by methods similar to those
just described, with modifications varying from tribe to tribe. Reutter
acknowledges as the source of most of his information the memoirs
of Bauwenns, entitled “Inhumation et Cremation,” and Parcelly,
“Étude Historique et Critique des Embaumements”; but most of it
has clearly been obtained from Yarrow’s great monograph (106).
Alone amongst the people of the New World who practised
embalming the Incas employed it not only for their kings, chiefs and
priests, but also for the population in general. These people were
not confined to Peru, but dwelt also in Bolivia, in Equador, as well as
in a part of Chili and of the Argentine. Mummified bodies were
placed in monuments called Chullpas. According to De Morcoy these
Chullpas were constructed of unbaked brick and were sometimes
built in the form of a truncated pyramid, twenty to thirty feet high, in
other cases simple mausolea of a simple monolith. The burial
chamber inside them was square and as many as a dozen mummies
might be buried in a single one. The bodies were sharply flexed and
were placed in a sitting position. An interesting and curious fact
about these mummies, or at any rate those from Upper Peru, was
that all of them presented on the forehead or on the occiput a circle
composed of small holes through the wall of the cranium, which had
probably been used for evacuating the brain and for the introduction
of preservative substances.
Yarrow (106) refers to the fact that the Indians of the North-West
coast and the Aleutian Islands also embalm their dead. This, like the
practice of tattooing (Buckland, 10), serves to map out the possible
alternative northern route taken by the spread of culture from Asia
to America (vide supra the account of Aino embalming; also Map
II.).
In his account of the Araucanos of Southern Chile (Journ. Roy.
Anthr. Inst., Vol. 39, 1909, p. 364) Latcham describes how, when a
person of importance dies of disease, these people believe that
some one must have poisoned him. They “open the side of the
deceased” and extract the gall-bladder, so as to obtain from the bile
contained in it some clue as to the guilty person. “The corpse is then
hung in a wicker frame and under it a fire is kept smouldering till
such time as the perpetrator be found and punished.”
This confused jumble of practices suggestive of a blending of the
influences of Egyptian embalming and Babylonian hepatoscopy is
also obviously linked to the customs of Oceania and Indonesia.
Scattered in certain protected localities along the whole extent of
the great “heliolithic” track the ancient Egyptian [also Chaldean and
Indian] practice of burial in large urns or jars occurs. In America also
it is found; but, according to Yarrow, it is restricted to certain people
of New Mexico and California, although similar urns have been found
in Nicaragua.
After the coming of the first great “heliolithic” wave, Asiatic
civilization did not cease to influence America.
There are innumerable signs of the later effects of both Western
and Eastern Asiatic developments. For instance, there is the coming
of the practice of cremation. The fact that such burial customs are
spread sporadically in the islands of the Pacific suggests that the
custom may have been carried to America by the same route as the
main stream of the “heliolithic” cult; but against this is the evidence
that cremation was practised especially on the Pacific slope of the
Rocky Mountains, and in Mexico rather than in Peru. It seems more
probable that the main stream of the later wave of culture, of which
cremation is the most distinctive practice, took the northern route
skirting the eastern Asiatic littoral and then following the line of the
Aleutian Islands.
In the account of the method of mummification adopted by the
Virginian Indians (supra) it was seen that the whole skin was
removed and afterwards fitted on to the skeleton again. Great care
and skill had to be used to prevent the skin shrinking. Apparently the
difficulties of this procedure led certain Indian tribes to give up the
attempt to prevent the skin shrinking. Thus the Jivaro Indians of
Ecuador, as well as certain tribes in the western Amazon area, make
a practice of preserving the head only, and, after removing the skull,
allowing the softer tissues to shrink to a size not much bigger than a
cricket ball (44; 52, p. 252, and 61, p. 288).
According to Page (52), who has described one of the two Jivaro
specimens now in the Manchester Museum, desiccation by heat was
the method of preservation. He adds, “‘Momea’ and ‘Chancha’ are
the names commonly given to such specimens by the natives.”
Surely the former must be a Spanish importation!
A comparison of this variety in the methods of preserving the body
in America with the series of similar practices which I have been
following from the African shore, makes it abundantly plain that
there can be no doubt as to the source of the American inspiration
to do such extraordinary things. The remarkable burial ritual and all
the associated procedures afford strong corroborative evidence.
But the proof of the influence of the civilizations of the Old World
on pre-Columbian America does not depend upon the evidence of
one set of practices, however complex, bizarre and distinctive they
may be.
The positive demonstration that I have endeavoured to build up in
this communication depends upon the fact that the whole of the
complex structure of the “heliolithic” culture, which was slowly built
up in Egypt during the course of the thirty centuries before 900 b.c.,
spread to the east, acquiring on its way accretions from the
civilizations of the Mediterranean, Western Asia, Eastern Africa,
India, Eastern Asia and Indonesia and Oceania, until it reached
America. Like a potent ferment it gradually began to leaven the vast
and widespread aboriginal culture of the Americas.
The rude megalithic architecture of America bears obvious
evidences of the same inspiration which prompted that of the Old
World; and so far as the more sumptuous edifices are concerned the
primary stimulus of Egyptian ideas, profoundly modified by
Babylonian, and to a less extent Indian and Eastern Asiatic,
influences is indubitable. Comparison of the truncated pyramids of
America, of the Pacific, Eastern Asia and Indonesia with those of
ancient Chaldea, affords quite definite corroboration of these views.
It would be idle to pretend that so complex a design and so strange
a symbolism as the combination of the sun’s disc with the serpent
and the greatly expanded wings of a hawk, carved upon the lintel of
the door of a temple of the sun, could possibly have developed
independently in Ancient Egypt and in Mexico (see especially
Bancroft, 3, Vol. IV., p. 351).
But it is not merely the designs of the buildings and their
association with the practice of mummification (and later, in Mexico,
with cremation), but the nature of the cult of the temples and all the
traditions associated with them that add further corroboration. Thus,
for example, Wake (103, p. 383), describing the geographical
distribution of serpent-worship (the intimate bond of which with sun-
worship and in fact the whole “heliolithic” cult was forged in Egypt,
as I have already explained), writes:—“Quetzalcoatl, the divine
benefactor of the Mexicans, was an incarnation of the serpent-sun
Tonacatlcoatl, who thus became the great father, as the female
serpent Cihuacoatl was the great mother, of the human race.” “The
solar character of the serpent-god appears to be placed beyond all
doubt.... The kings and priests of ancient peoples claimed this divine
origin, and ‘children of the sun’ was the title of the members of the
sacred caste. When the actual ancestral character of the deity is
hidden he is regarded as ‘the father of his people’ and their divine
benefactor. He is the introducer of agriculture, the inventor of arts
and sciences, and the civilizer of mankind.”
Writing of the Maya empire, Bancroft (3, Vol. V., p. 233) says:
—“The Plumed Serpent, known in different tongues as Quetzalcoatl,
Gucumatz, and Cukulcan, was the being who traditionally founded
the new order of things.”
Even the most trivial features of the “heliolithic” culture-complex
make their appearance in America. Thus, for example, Harrison tells
us that:—
 “The artificial enlargement of the lobe [of the ear] appears
originally to have been adopted in India for the purpose of receiving
a solar disc” (29, p. 193).
“The early Spanish historian mentioned that an elaborate religious
ceremony took place in the temple of the Sun at Cuzco, on the
occasion of boring the ears of the young Peruvian nobles” (p. 196).
“The practice of enlarging the ear lobes was connected with Sun-
worship” (p. 198).
So also in the case of circumcision, tattooing, and almost every
one of the curious customs I have enumerated in the foregoing
account. Then, again, all the characteristic stories of the creation,
the deluge, the petrifaction of human beings and of spirits dwelling
in rocks, and of the origin of the chosen people from an incestuous
union make their appearance in Mexico, Peru and elsewhere.
The peculiar Swastika symbol, associated with the “heliolithic” cult
by pure chance in the place of its origin, which the people of Timor,
in Indonesia, regard as the ancient emblem of fire, the Son of the
Sun, also appears in America.
Even so bizarre a practice as the artificial deformation of the head
(48, pp. 515 to 519), which seems to have originated in Armenia,
became added to the repertoire of the fantastic collection of tricks of
the “heliolithic” wanderers, and was adopted sporadically by
numerous isolated groups of people along the great migration route.
For some reason this strange idea “caught on” in America to a
greater extent than elsewhere and spread far and wide throughout
the greater part of the continent.
Many other curious customs might be cited as straws that indicate
clearly which way the stream of culture has flowed. For instance
Keane (42, p. 264) states that “like the Burmese the Nicobarese
place a piece of money in the mouth of a corpse before burial to
help it in the other world”; and Hutchinson (38, p. 448) supplies the
link across the Pacific:—“Men, women and children [in ancient Peru]
had frequently a bit of copper between the teeth, like the obolus
which the pagan Romans used to place in the mouth to pay ferry to
the boatman Charon for passage across the Styx.”
This reference to Charon reminds us also of the widespread
custom, apparently originating in Egypt and spread far and wide,
right out into the Pacific and America, of the association of a boat
with the funerary ritual, to ferry the mummy to the west.
Certain distinctive aspects of phallism in America might also be
mentioned as evidence of the influence of Old World practices.
In the appendix (part 1) to his “Conquest of Mexico,” Prescott
(59) summarises fully and fairly the large and highly suggestive
mass of evidence available at the time when he wrote in favour of
the view that the pre-Columbian civilization of Mexico and Peru had
been inspired from Asia. In view of the apparent conclusiveness of
his statement of the evidence it becomes a matter of some interest
and importance to enquire into the reasons which, in the face of the
apparently overwhelming testimony of the facts he has summarised,
restrained him from adopting the obvious conclusion to which his
whole argument points.
Referring to the numerous islands of the Pacific as one means of
access of population to America, Prescott quotes Cook’s voyages to
illustrate how easily the Polynesians travelled from island to island
hundreds of miles apart, and adds, “it would be strange if these
wandering barks should not sometimes have been intercepted by the
great continent, which stretches across the globe, in unbroken
continuity, almost from pole to pole.
“Whence did the refinement of these more polished races [of
America] come? Was it only a higher development of the same
Indian character, which we see, in the more northern latitudes,
defying every attempt at permanent civilization? Was it engrafted on
a race of higher order in the scale originally, but self-instructed,
working its way upward by its own powers? Was it, in short, an
indigenous civilization? or was it borrowed, in some degree, from the
nations of the Eastern world? If indigenous, how are we to explain
the singular coincidence with the East in institutions and opinions? If
Oriental, how shall we account for the great dissimilarity in
language, and for the ignorance of some of the most simple and
useful arts, which, once known, it would seem scarcely possible
should have been forgotten? This is the riddle of the Sphinx, which
no Œdipus has yet had the ingenuity to solve.”
In the light of the facts brought together in the present memoir, it
requires no Œdipus to answer the riddle. For the only two objections
which Prescott raises in opposition to the great mass of evidence he
cites in favour of the derivation of American civilization from the Old
World can easily be disposed of. Rivers has completely disposed of
one by his demonstration of the fact that people—moreover those
on the direct route across the Pacific to America—do actually “forget
simple and useful arts” (65). The other objection is equally easily
disposed of, when it is remembered that it requires only a few
people of higher culture to leaven a large mass of lower culture with
the elements of a higher civilization (see also on this point, Rivers,
68). Moreover, if language is made a test, the affinities of the
various American tribes one with the other would have to be denied.
Thus, the language difficulty cuts both ways. But when we have
disposed of his objections, the whole of his admirable summary then
becomes valid as an argument in favour of the derivation of
American culture from Asia across the Pacific.
Since then it has become the fashion on the part of most
ethnologists either contemptuously to put aside the probability or
even the possibility of the derivation of American civilization from the
Old World (characteristic examples of this attitude will be found in
Fewkes’ address, 18, and Keane’s text-book, 41). On the other side
the discussion has been seriously compromised from time to time by
a wholly uncritical and often recklessly inexact use of the evidence in
support of the reality of the contact, which has to some extent
prejudiced the serious discussion of the problem. Perhaps the least
objectionable of such unfortunate attempts are Macmillan Brown’s
(7) and Enoch’s books (16). The former has been led astray by
grotesque errors in chronology and the failure to realize that useful
arts can be lost. Enoch, on the other hand, has collected a large
series of interesting but incompatible statements, and has made no
serious attempt to sift or assimilate them.
But from time to time serious students, proceeding with the
caution befitting the discussion of so difficult a problem, have
definitely expressed their adherence to the view that elements of
culture did spread across, or around, the Pacific from Asia to
America (8; 9; 10; 15; 20; 21; 29; 30; 38; 48; 49; 50; 51; 60;
73; 102; 103 and 105). Among modern demonstrations I would
especially call attention to the evidence collected by Dall (73, p.
395), Cyrus Thomas (73, p. 396), Tylor (102) and Zelia Nuttall (49
and 50), and of the older literature the remarkable statement of Ellis
(15, p. 117). [In Mrs. Nuttall’s monograph (49) there is a great
deal, especially in the introductory part, to which serious objection
must be taken: but in spite of the strong bias in favour of
“psychological explanation” with which she started, eventually she
was compelled to admit the force of the evidence for the spread of
culture.]
For detailed statements concerning the discussions of this problem
in the past the reader is referred to Bancroft’s excellent summary
(3), which also supplies a wonderfully rich storehouse of facts and
traditions wholly corroborative of the conclusions at which I have
arrived in the present memoir.
I find it difficult to conceive how there could ever have been any
doubt about the matter on the part of anyone who knows his
“Bancroft.”
It will naturally be asked, if the case in proof of the actual
diffusion of culture from Asia to America is so overwhelmingly
convincing, on what grounds is assent refused? One school (of which
the most characteristic utterance that I know of is Fewkes’
presidential address, 18) refuses to discuss the evidence: with
pontifical solemnity it lays down the dogma of independent evolution
as an infallible principle which it is almost sacrilege to question. I can
best illustrate the methods of the other school of reactionaries by a
sample of its dialectic.
No single incident in the discussion of the origin of American
civilization has given rise to greater consternation in the ranks of the
“orthodox” ethnologists than Tylor’s statement (102):—
“The conception of weighing in a spiritual balance in the judgment
of the dead, which makes its earliest appearance in the Egyptian
religion, was traced thence into a series of variants, serving to draw
lines of intercourse through the Vedic and Zoroastrian religions,
extending from Eastern Buddhism to Western Christendom. The
associated doctrine of the Bridge of the Dead, which separates the
good, who pass over, from the wicked, who fall into the abyss,
appears first in ancient Persian religion, reaching in like manner to
the extremities of Asia and Europe. By these mythical beliefs
historical ties are practically constituted, connecting the great
religions of the world, and serving as lines along which their
interdependence is to be followed out. Evidence of the same kind
was brought forward in support of the theory, not sufficiently
recognised by writers on culture history, of the Asiatic influences
under which the pre-Columbian culture of America took shape. In
the religion of old Mexico four great scenes in the journey of the soul
in the land of the dead are mentioned by early Spanish writers after
the conquest, and are depicted in a group in the Aztec picture-
writing known as the Vatican Codex. The four scenes are, first, the
crossing of the river; second, the fearful passage of the soul
between the two mountains which clash together; third, the soul’s
climbing up the mountain set with sharp obsidian knives; fourth, the
dangers of the wind carrying such knives on its blast. The Mexican
pictures of these four scenes were compared with more or less
closely corresponding pictures representing scenes from the
Buddhist hells or purgatories as depicted on Japanese temple scrolls.
Here, first, the river of death is shown, where the souls wade across;
second, the souls have to pass between two huge iron mountains,
which are pushed together by two demons; third, the guilty souls
climb the mountain of knives, whose blades cut their hands and
feet; fourth, fierce blasts of wind drive against their lacerated forms,
the blades of knives flying through the air. It was argued that the
appearance of analogues so close and complex of Buddhist ideas in
Mexico constituted a correspondence of so high an order as to
preclude any explanation except direct transmission from one
religion to another. The writer, referring also to Humboldt’s argument
from the calendars and mythic catastrophes in Mexico and Asia, and
to the correspondence in Bronze Age work and in games in both
regions, expressed the opinion that on these cumulative proofs
anthropologists might well feel justified in treating the nations of
America as having reached their level of culture under Asiatic
influence.”
One might have imagined that such an instance, especially when
backed with the authority[18] of our greatest anthropologist, who
certainly has no bias in favour of the views I am promulgating,
would have carried conviction to the mind of anyone willing to be
convinced by precise evidence. But not to Mr. Keane! In
endeavouring to whittle down the significance of this crucial case, he
incidentally illustrates the lengths of unreason to which this school of
ethnologists will push their argument, when driven to formulate a
reductio ad absurdum without realizing the magnitude of the
absurdity their blind devotion to a catch-word impels them to
perpetrate.
In Keane’s “Ethnology” (41, pp. 217-219) the following passages
are found:—
“It is further to be noticed that religious ideas, like social usages,
are easily transmitted from tribe to tribe, from race to race. [Most of
my critics base their opposition on a denial of these very
assumptions!] Hence resemblances in this order, where they arise,
must rank very low as ethnical tests. If not the product of a common
cerebral structure, they can prove little beyond social contact in
remote or later times. A case in point is [Tylor’s statement, which I
have just quoted].
 “The parallelism is complete; but the range of thought is
extremely limited—nothing but mountains and knives, beside the
river of death common to Egyptians, Greeks, and all peoples
endowed with a little imagination.” “Hence Prof. E. B. Tylor, who calls
attention to the points of resemblance, builds far too much on them
when he adduces them as convincing evidence of pre-Columbian
culture in America taking shape under Asiatic influences. In the
same place he refers to Humboldt’s argument based on the similarity
of calendars and of mythical catastrophes. But the ‘mythical
catastrophes,’ floods and the like, have long been discounted, while
the Mexican calendar, despite the authority of Humboldt’s name,
presents no resemblance whatsoever to those of the ‘Tibetan and
Tartar tribes,’ or to any other of the Asiatic calendars with which it
has been compared. ‘There is absolutely no similarity between the
Tibetan calendar and the primitive form of the American,’ which,
‘was not intended as a year-count, but as a ritual and formulary,’ and
whose signs ‘had nothing to do with the signs of the zodiac, as had
all those of the Tibetan and Tartar calendars’ (D. G. Brinton, ‘On
various supposed Relations between the American and Asian races,’
from Memoirs of the International Congress of Anthropology,
Chicago, p. 148). Regarding all such analogies as may exist ‘between
the culture and customs of Mexico and those of China, Cambodia,
Assyria, Chaldæa, and Asia Minor,’ Dr. Brinton asks pertinently, ‘Are
we, therefore, to transport all these ancient peoples, or
representatives of them, into Mexico?’ (ib. p, 147). So Lefevre, who
regards as ‘quite chimerical’ the attempts made to trace such
resemblances to the Old World. ‘If there are coincidences, they are
fortuitous, or they result from evolution, which leads all the human
group through the same stages and by the same steps’ (‘Race and
Language,’ p. 185).
“Many far more inexplicable coincidencies than any of those here
referred to occur in different regions, where not even contact can be
suspected. Such is the strange custom of Couvade, which is found to
prevail among peoples so widely separated as the Basques and
Guiana Indians, who could never have either directly or indirectly in
any way influenced each other” (34).
It is surely unnecessary to comment at length upon this quibbling,
which is a fair sample of the kind of self-destructive criticism one
meets in ethnological discussions nowadays. Talking of the
“limitation of the range of thought” when out of the unlimited
possibilities for its unhampered activities the human mind hit upon
four episodes of such a fantastic nature, Keane taxes the credulity of
his readers altogether too much when he solemnly tries to persuade
them that such ideas are the most natural things in the world for
mankind to imagine!
Surely it would have been better tactics frankly to admit the
identity of origin, and then, following the example of Hough (35),
minimize its importance by indicating the variety of possible ways by
which Asiatic influence may have influenced America sporadically in
comparatively recent times.
But instead of this, Keane insisted upon pushing his refusal to
admit the most obvious inferences to the extreme limit and invoked
the practice of Couvade as the coup de grâce to the views he was
criticizing. But it was singularly unfortunate for his argument that he
selected Couvade. His dogmatic assertion that the two peoples he
selected are “so widely separated” that they could “never have
either directly or indirectly in any way influenced one another” is
entirely controverted by the fact that, although Couvade is, or was, a
widespread custom, all the places where it occurred are either within
the main route of the great “heliolithic culture-wave” or so near as
easily to be within its sphere of influence. Thus it is recorded among
the Basques,[19] in Africa, India, the Nicobar Islands, Borneo, China,
Peru, Mexico, Central California, Brazil and Guiana. Instead of being
a “knockout blow” to the view I am maintaining, the geographical
distribution of this singularly ludicrous practice is a very welcome
addition to the list of peculiar baggage which the “heliolithic”
traveller carried with him in his wanderings, and a striking
confirmation of the fact that in the spread from its centre of origin
this custom must have travelled along the same route as the other
practices we are examining.
After the artificialities of Keane and Fewkes, it is a satisfaction to
turn back to the writings of the old ethnologists who lived in the
days before the so-called “psychological” and “evolutionary
explanations” were invented, and were content to accept the
obvious interpretation of the known facts.
More than eighty years ago, Ellis (15, p. 117) with remarkable
insight explained the relationships of the Polynesians and their
wanderings, from Western Asia to America, with a lucidity and
definiteness which must excite the enthusiastic admiration of those
familiar with the fuller information now available. On p. 119 he cites
an interesting series of racial factors, usages and beliefs in
substantiation of the cultural link between the Pacific Islands and
America.
Quite apart from the mere evidence provided by the arts, customs
and beliefs in favour of the transmission of certain of the essential
elements of American civilization from the Old World, there is a
considerable amount of evidence of another kind, consisting no
doubt to a large extent of mere scraps. For instance, there are not
only the stories of Chinese and Japanese junks arriving on the
American shore and of American traditions of the coming of pale-
faced bearded men from the east,[20] but there is also a certain
amount of evidence from the physical characters of the population
themselves. It has been raised as an objection by many people that
if there had been any considerable emigration of Polynesians into
America they would have left a much more definite trace of their
coming in the physical characters of the people of America than is
supposed the case. But this argument does not necessarily carry
very much weight, for the number of such Polynesians who reached
America would have been a mere drop in the ocean of the vast
aboriginal population of the Americas. Moreover, there is a certain
amount of evidence of the presence of people with Polynesian traits
in certain parts of the Pacific littoral. Von Humboldt stated the
people of Mexico and Peru had much larger beards and moustaches
than the rest of the Indians. But there is a more striking instance in
substantiation of the reality of this mixture of Pacific people in
America which raises the possibility that a certain number of
Melanesians, whose physical characters, being more obtrusive by
contrast than those of the Polynesians, were more easily detected.
In Allen’s memoir (2, p. 47) the following statements are found:—
“Sir Arthur Helps tells us in his ‘History of Spanish Conquest in
America’ that the Spaniards, when they first visited Darien under
Vasco Nunez, found there a race of black men, whom they
(gratuitously as it seems to me) supposed to be descended from a
cargo of shipwrecked negroes; this race was living distinct from the
other races and at enmity with them,”
and on page 48,
“Perhaps other black tribes may be discovered upon a more
careful enquiry, and if the theory of Crawford be accepted, which
represents the inhabitants of Polynesia in Ante-historic times as
being a great semi-civilized nation who had made some progress in
agriculture and understood the use of gold and iron, were clothed
‘with a fabric made of the fibrous bark of plants which they wove in
the loom,’ and had several domesticated animals, a new and
unexpected light may possibly be thrown upon the origin of primitive
American culture. It is certain that massive ruins and remains of
pyramidal structures and terraced buildings closely analogous to
those of India, Java and Cambodia, as well as to those of Central
America, Mexico and Peru, exist in many islands of Polynesia, such
as the Ladrone Islands, Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island and the Sandwich
Islands, and the customs of the Polynesians are almost all of them
found to exist also amongst the American races.”
“Perhaps here, then, we have the ‘missing link’ between the Old
World civilizations and the mysterious civilizations of America.”