Life in Postwar America After Our Stunning Defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016

In case you have not noticed, the United States of America has now gained the distinction of being the very first world power to be defeated by cyberwarfare. Our defeat in the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was so stunning and so complete that hardly any in our defeated nation even know that it has happened. In my posting Cyber Civil Defense, I warned that, since it was impossible for the government of the United States to fend off cyberattacks by foreign powers, that it was up to each individual citizen of the United States to stop believing in the stupid political memes to be found on the Internet. That is what we learned to do back in the 1950s when it was openly admitted by the United States government that we could not be protected from a nuclear attack by the Russian strategic bomber force. Instead, we were told to build private and public fallout shelters across the country. Unfortunately, nobody paid heed to my warnings and we now find ourselves living in a deeply divided and defeated post-cyberwar country that is politically paralyzed and incapable of even acting in its own best interest. How could this possibly have happened?

A Possible Explanation Based on Softwarephysics
The key finding of softwarephysics is that it is all about the interactions of self-replicating information. For more on that please see A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information. In this case, I contend that the dramatic defeat of the United States in the very first large-scale cyberwar resulted from a controlled manipulation of the interactions between political memes and domestic software by foreign and domestic powers that then went viral and ran amuck. Things are now so bad in postwar America, that I can already sense that my assertion has about 40% of the surviving Americans withdrawing to one tribal corner and the remainder withdrawing to another tribal corner in preparation for combat and that is the problem. So let's use some softwarephysics to see why. In softwarephysics, Homo sapiens is modeled as a hardware platform of carbon-based Intelligence 1.0 that primarily stores and replicates memes. So Homo sapiens is both a DNA survival machine and a meme survival machine that has a very dense and complex neural network that stores and replicates memes. In this view, Homo sapiens is an example of Deep Learning at its best and is far superior to anything that Intelligence 2.0 currently has running on silicon. This is a significantly different model than most people use on a daily basis. Most people simply do not consider themselves to be a part of the natural world. Instead, most people consider themselves to be a supernatural and immaterial spirit that is temporarily haunting a carbon-based body. In everyday life, this is a very useful delusion as I explained in The Ghost in the Machine the Grand Illusion of Consciousness but I do not think that it adequately explains our current predicament.

So let us all finally admit that we all have Minds that are infected with political memes just trying to self-replicate and that these political memes are just mindless forms of self-replicating information that do not necessarily have our best interests at heart, as outlined by Richard Brodie in Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (1996) and by Susan Blackmore in The Meme Machine (1999). These political memes are just trying to survive and self-replicate and have highjacked the greed, anger, hate and fear that DNA uses to ensure its own survival in the DNA survival machines known to us as Homo sapiens. In this view, these political memes are neither inherently "good" nor "bad" - they just are. Next, let us explore how the Russian FSB brilliantly used these facts to defeat the United States of America with cyberwarfare. Only a few Russians were lost in this cyberwar and perhaps there was not even a single American casualty through it all. What a spectacular victory! Contrast that to the 27 million Russians who died during the Great Patriotic War of World War II. Now how in the world could the Russian FSB manage to do this? Well, all they needed to do was to convert a good portion of Americans into unwitting Russian assets. Thanks to the bizarre electoral college process for electing a new president of the United States outlined in our Constitution, you do not even need to convert a majority of Americans into Russian assets. All you have to do is to convert more than 50% of those casting votes in certain key states into Russian assets. But how do you do that?

I just finished episode two Friends for the Moment of the new Netflix series Inside the Mossad. The Friends for the Moment episode covers how the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, recruits foreign assets and manages those assets with Mossad operators. Now I am quite sure that the techniques portrayed in this episode are the very same techniques that are used by all of the intelligence agencies throughout the world, like the American CIA, the British MI6 and the Russian FSB. And there is nothing wrong with that. I find that the use of espionage by nations is far better than the use of war to achieve political ends. Think of the countless lives that espionage has saved compared to the millions lost on the battlefields of World War I and World War II. In Friends for the Moment, it is explained that the ultimate objective of recruiting a foreign asset is to get the asset to provide information and to perform actions that betray his country. This is not an easy thing to do. An operator must be very patient as he very gently and very carefully leads the asset down a path that ultimately leads to treason. The operator does this by using the same techniques that conmen use to trick and seduce normally honest people into giving up their money while in pursuit of a shady deal that is too good to be true.

For example, suppose an operator needs some photographs of a secret foreign installation in a Middle Eastern country and needs a foreign asset to obtain them. One approach would be to befriend a film student in the target country. Then the operator tells the potential asset that he has contacts in Hollywood and that his Hollywood contacts need some Middle Eastern stock footage for an upcoming film. All the film student needs to do is to take some footage along any road in the desert of his choosing. When the stock footage comes back, the operator heaps praise upon the potential asset and explains to the potential asset that his Hollywood contacts would like to buy the footage for a very good price. Next, the operator tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts need some stock footage of a chemical plant or oil refinery - anything with lots of distillation towers and piping. When that footage is returned, it is again purchased for a very good price. Next, the operator then tells the asset that his Hollywood contacts really liked all the work that the asset has already performed, but that they are especially interested in some footage of a specific facility along a certain road and would like to contract the asset to provide that footage. This goes on and on as the asset unwittingly provides more and more sensitive footage. At some point, the "penny drops". This is when the asset finally realizes that he has been the victim of a con and finally comes to grips with the implications of the very serious things that he has been doing. By that time, it is too late for the asset. There is far too much incriminating evidence that the asset has committed traitorous acts for money. At this point, the operator can then request the asset to perform obviously traitorous acts because the operator now has a great deal of leverage over the asset. None of this has to be explicitly articulated. Both the operator and the asset now know what is going on even if they do not specifically lay it out in words.

For example, suppose you were a brash young real estate developer with a string of bankruptcies that prevented you from obtaining large loans for real estate deals from the major banks. A number of Russian FSB operators might approach you with the offer of investing in your real estate deals. Then, over a number of years, it might become apparent that these investments by Russian FSB operators might be deemed to be money laundering activities by the authorities. At some point, the "penny drops" without a spoken word needed between the Russian FSB operators and their newly recruited asset. Both parties now know what is truly going on and that it is too late for the asset to back out now.

The Power of Parasitic Political Memes
In SETS - The Search For Extraterrestrial Software I discussed the potential power of parasitic interstellar self-replicating information. In particular, I quoted a passage from Parasite Rex – Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures (2000) by Carl Zimmer which follows an earlier tale about how a certain fungus makes house flies die at the top of blades of grass so that they can drop spores onto other house flies.

“Another species of fluke can be found in the meadows of Europe and Asia, along with a few in North America and Australia. Known as Dicrocoelium dendriticum, or the lancet fluke, it makes cows and other grazers its host as an adult, and the cows spread their eggs in their manure. Hungry snails swallow the eggs, which hatch in their intestines. They drill through the wall of a snail’s gut and settle in the digestive gland. There the flukes produce a generation of cercariae, which make their way to the snail’s surface. The snail tries to defend itself from the parasites by blocking them off with walls of slime. The slime balls up around the cercariae, which the snail coughs up and leaves behind in the grass.

Next, along comes an ant. To an ant, a slimeball is positively delicious. Along with the slime, the ant may also swallow hundreds of lancet flukes as well. The parasites slide down into its gut, and they then wander for a while through its body, eventually moving to the cluster of nerves that control the ant’s mandibles. The parasites all travel together on this trip, but after visiting the nerves, they split up. Most of the lancet flukes head back to the abdomen, where they form cysts, but one or two stay behind in the ant’s head.

There they do some parasitic voodoo on their hosts. As evening approaches and the air cools, the ants find themselves drawn away from their fellow ants on the ground and upward to the top of a blade of grass. Like flies infected with a fungus, the ants clamp down on the tip of the grass. But the lancet fluke has a different goal than the fungus does. The fungus uses its host as a catapult to shower its spores on other insects. The lancet fluke can continue to live only if it can get inside its final host, a mammal. Clamped to the tip of a grass blade, the infected ant is likely to be devoured by a cow or some other grazer passing by. When the ant tumbles into the cow’s stomach, the flukes burst out and make their way to the cow’s liver, where the flukes will live as adults.

But the lancet fluke, like the fungus, is very aware of the passing of time. If the ant sits the whole night without being eaten and the sun rises, the fluke lets the ant loosen its grip on the grass. The ant scurries back down to the ground and spends the day acting like a regular insect again. If the host were to bake in the heat of the direct sun, the parasite would die with it. When evening comes again, it sends the ant back up a blade of grass for another try.”

Now just think of what the Russian FSB operators have been able to achieve by simply exploiting the already existing greed, anger, hate and fear of their American hosts by spreading parasitic political memes and using our very own social media software platforms to do it! They have us in a trade war with China, making friends with our former adversaries in North Korea and Russia, investigating the counterespionage wings of our CIA and FBI for wrongdoing, forsaking all of our traditional American values, at odds with Canada to the north and Mexico to the south and making enemies of our former NATO allies, all while we cozy up to every fascist Alt-Right regime on the planet. We are now also politically paralyzed and in no way capable of leading the free world as we once did. In fact, we cannot even manage our own affairs. And like an infected ant, we do not even know that the world order has drastically changed for at least a decade or more.

But do not blame the Russian FSB for our present situation. We did this to ourselves. We started to climb out onto this ledge all by ourselves about 60 years ago. The Russian FSB only had to give us a gentle nudge into political oblivion.

Postwar Recovery
Another thing that we learned back in the 1950s was that immediately following a major nuclear war, it was expected that it would take an extended period of time for the federal government of the United States to reconstitute itself and recover. The same would be true for the local and state governments, so it was important for individual citizens to help out with the postwar recovery process. Otherwise, the entire United States might descend into a number of tribal groups ruled by local warlords. I would like to suggest that postwar America has indeed descended into two tribal camps following the Great Cyberwar of 2016 and that it is now up to the survivors to recover what we once had. Now kids were taught civics back in the 1950s and so we knew about how the United States Constitution and the federal government were supposed to work. Since civics is hardly ever even mentioned these days, let's review some basic civics to help with our postwar recovery.

The United States Constitution was a product of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. These philosophical movements brought forth the heretical proposition that rational thought, combined with evidence-based reasoning, could reveal the absolute truth, and allow individuals to actually govern themselves, without the need for an authoritarian monarchy. This change in thinking led to the 18th-century Enlightenment and brought forth the United States of America as a self-governing political entity. But unfortunately, the United States of America has always been a very dangerous experiment in human nature to see if the masses could truly govern themselves, without succumbing to the passions of the mob. That is where the genius of the United States Constitution comes into play. The United States Constitution sets up a representative republic designed for an electorate that is only mildly paying attention to the events of the day but that can sometimes get riled up over certain issues. The representatives of this largely ill-informed electorate can also many times become scoundrels. On the face of it, it would appear that such a system could not possibly work. But it does work because the United States Constitution places many layers between the electorate and the governing bodies and has a large number of checks and balances to limit the powers of the political representatives.

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes published The Leviathan, in which he argued against the divine right of kings, but maintained the absolute supremacy of the monarchy. In The Leviathan, Hobbes argued that in “a state of nature" without government, life would be totally insecure. Under such conditions, people should willingly surrender their civil liberties to an absolute sovereign, who would protect them from all dangers. Hobbes argued that the sovereign's power was absolute - he made the law, he was the decider, and no other institution could limit the sovereign’s power. This was the position of the Loyalists or Tories during the American Revolutionary War, who comprised about 25% of the population. The Tories were 18th-century conservatives who wished to remain loyal to King George during the Revolution and fought on the side of King George to preserve his sovereignty over the colonies. On the other hand, about 25% of the population were 18th-century liberals like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams who were followers of the 18th-century Enlightenment that rejected the ideas of Hobbes and believed that people could live in a state of liberty and self-governance tempered by individual responsibility. Many of the Founding Fathers had a great distrust of the Powers That Be. These anti-Federalist Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had a great fear that Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist theories would result in the presidency becoming a new sovereignty in a Hobbesian sense, like the King George they had just freed themselves from. In response, they were instrumental in amending the newly minted Constitution of the United States (1787) with the Bill of Rights (1791) to limit the powers of the Powers That Be. Since political movements are meme-complexes and subject to change, it is interesting how the Jeffersonian 18th-century liberal concepts of a federal government, with very limited powers, evolved into 20th-century conservativism, while Hamiltonian 18th-century conservativism, which advocated a strong central government, evolved into 20th-century liberalism. Now it seems that 21st-century liberalism is returning to its 18th-century roots and so is 21st-century conservativism, in that 21st-century liberals seem to be more wary of the president of the United States trying to become a king with absolute powers than do 21st-century conservatives, who support an unrestrained president to achieve their political goals.

Conclusion
As we have seen, the Great Cyberwar of 2016 was devastating for the United States of America and it will take several decades for us to recover from it. The most important thing for us to remember is that we did this to ourselves, and we did this to ourselves because of parasitic political memes infecting the vast neural networks in our heads that we call our Minds. So we all need to go on a twelve-step program, similar to the ones used to deprogram cult members, to help bring back some political civility. The first step is to recognize that our current political worldviews probably contain many false memes. One way to remove false memes from your political worldview is to use the Scientific Method that I outlined in How To Think Like A Scientist. Galileo pointed out that the truth is not afraid of scrutiny, the more you pound on the truth, the more you confirm its validity. False memes do not stand up well to close scrutiny as I described in The Danger of Believing in Things. I contend that the only way to restore the United States of America is to go back to our foundations in the 18th-century Enlightenment and the 17th-century Scientific Revolution. At one time, these memes were so prevalent and were considered to be so American that no one even bothered to bring them up because they were so obvious. Perhaps that is when we started to lose our way as Americans.

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston