The Riddle of Anti-Russianism
Empathy is a one-way street.
Concerns over Russian disinformation have grown in recent years and a sprawling counter-disinformation industry has popped up to combat it.
Where does this fear come from and how warranted is it?
The Enemy as Mirror
In any ideology, of equal importance to its own principles and raison d'être is its understanding of the opposition and what motivates them.
This understanding is largely informal, but there could be one or more books about it.
Sometimes there is even a professional class tasked with researching the opposition and making material about it available to other believers.
In whatever form, an ideology’s understanding of its enemies constitutes its “Enemyology”.
During the Cold War we had “Kremlinology”, which incidentally matches the “enemy + ology” composition, except it substitutes the name of the specific enemy it’s countering.
Today, there is an ascending “Disinfology” concerned with the propagation and characteristics of disinformation.
The fuel behind such academized Enemyologies is their indulgence of the human tendency to use the enemy as a mirror.
I am not referring to Freudian projection, I don’t mean that we call the enemy a liar because we ourself are liars and know it deep down.
No, I mean we imagine the enemy as an inversion of the values most important to us and our core skills as the most effective way to fight back.
This is why most disinfologists are caffè latte enjoying journalists and bloggers waging war from their laptops, instead of army reservists or intelligence officers.
The “fake news” panic has more to do with positioning one’s own side as truthful and organic than it has to do with defense policy.
How Effective is Propaganda?
You might think the reason I am not worried about Russian propaganda is that I don’t believe it exists, but that’s incorrect.
While there are a lot of false claims out there, I can see how Russia would want to influence public opinion about their foreign policy.
My argument is that Russia doesn’t have the prerequisites to manufacture convincing propaganda for Western audiences.
Their main obstacle is the “empathy gap”.
A term of my own invention, referring to the asymmetry between two points of view in their ability empathize with each other.
In any conflict only one side can have an accurate theory of mind for the opposition. If you are wrong about external reality, you must necessarily also be wrong about the internal reality of those who are right.
Imagine a patriarchal society indoctrinating women to believe in their own inferiority.
The man writing the anti-woman propaganda would be limited by his own beliefs about women. If he believes women are dumb, his writings for women will reflect this and be written to explain the realities of the world to a dumb person, not trick a smart person into thinking they’re dumb.
In any patriarchal society there would probably be a class of “expert” on the nature of women and their behavior, a sort of social and psychological “gynecologist”.
However, if the patriarchal ideology overall is wrong it’s a given that its gynecology is also incorrect, e.g. its explanation for why women refuse to conform can’t match reality.
This is the same problem a Russian “Occidentalist” tasked with developing propaganda aimed at Westerners would face.
In order to deceive someone you must be able to look both inside and around them, your perspective must transcend theirs.
The Russian point of view does not transcend what is generally called “democracy” in the West. This is because Russia isn’t post-liberal, they are stuck somewhere between traditionalism and modernity with “Russian characteristics”.
Throwing pre-liberal objections to Liberalism at modern liberals doesn’t work, because they will likely know the accusation is false or reject the premise entirely.
The Riddle of Pro-Russianism
The disinfo scare is not inexplicable considering Russia has a similar fear of the United States.
Russia is perpetually paranoid about American interference and has passed multiple laws prohibiting the spreading of “disinformation”.
Censorship has increased since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, not long after the start of the war Roskomsvoboda, an open internet advocacy group, published an article to the effect that the impending crackdown threatened to send Russia back to the Samizdat1 age.
There is even a class of disinfologists in Russia as well and their theories are very similar to those in the West, which naturally makes them easy to take out of context as evidence of what the Russians are planning, instead of what they are fearing.
One thing that is surprising however, is how quickly the tables have turned in Western discourse.
It used to be that accusations about false news and secret influence from intelligence agencies were only leveled by conspiracy websites and the rest of the heterodox media against the mainstream.
And while those still make those allegations, they are frequently thrown right back at them by journalists from the orthodox press.
I am sure they enjoy their revenge.
Stay in touch by following me on Twitter, @disinfology.
Samizdat was a genre of self-published dissident newspapers in the Soviet Union.