Archetyping Bad Faith

There’s a key core module in the Disinfolklore analytical method which is what I call the Code of Positive Trolls. It has six elements. The second element is ethical discipline. The first element is generosity.

When a generous person—or when Mockers is telling a story, what I might call Infolklore, on Volya 4 Ukraine radio space on X Spaces or Spotify —this is ethically disciplined, in the sense that it’s true. They’re not misleading us. As we all know, those of us who listen to Mockers, she’s very careful about what she believes and what she lets be said. It’s ethically disciplined.

The standard is set by international law, ultimately, from my perspective. Territorial integrity is sacrosanct. Laws against discrimination on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, the Genocide Convention—one of the most agreed-to conventions in human culture—and a whole plethora of legal instruments which are the expressions of ethical standards. I use that standard, the second element of the Code of Positive Trolls, to distinguish between Infolklore and Disinfolklore.

On the fly, when you’re in your real life and dealing with people—you’re doing a deal, you’re talking about drones, you’re trying to get components, you’re a teacher in school with students firing stuff at you and you’re just trying to work out what’s going on—is this person in good faith?

The first element of the Code of Positive Trolls, which I find particularly useful, is generosity. If I’m picking up genuine real generosity in the other, then I know it’s probably not intentional misdirection. It’s probably Infolklore, not Disinfolklore. When you pick up a lack of generosity in, say, Donald or others, then you can brand it Disinfolklore.

Archetyping Bad Faith

That’s the span between trying to decide in your immediate life whether this is true or not. The definitional Disinfolklore is anything Donald says, anything MAGA says. Obviously, until you’ve archetyped them as bad, as not in good faith, you might be confused by little instances. Whereas now we know practically everything he says is bad, yet we still fall for the trolls.

I was watching someone today who always talks about the Ukraine war and the battlefield. They justifiably go off on one and complain about this thing I’ve just spoken about—I skipped over it because I didn’t need to hear them say it as well—where Donald talks about the week and the ceasefire and all that stuff. Then the next story they’re talking about is Donald and the Indian oil deal. We have to try and maintain our consistency between these two manifestations of Donald. If you’ve archetyped him as bad and in bad faith and a con man, then when I find myself falling for one of his trolls—tomorrow he may say, oh, I’m thinking about sending the Tomahawks to Ukraine—we just have to resist falling for this.

We know that everything he says basically is Disinfolklore. We don’t know that with other people in our lives, and we’ve all probably experienced situations where you gradually discover someone you relied on and liked and thought was actually in good faith is really spinning lies or tricking you. Then you realise that everything they’ve said is probably what I would call Disinfolklore, because it’s not ethically disciplined. It was untrue, it was falsities, it was manipulative—not manipulative in a positive way.

Infolklore Versus Disinfolklore: The Mockers Example

As Bill Terrier says on Volya4Ukraine Radio, the stories which Mockers is telling are manipulative—stories on multiple layers. The way she tells them, however, the way she frames them, transforms them into Infolklore. When she’s telling a tale of woe of some Ruschist mil-blogger who has published a story on Telegram to manipulate people in russia into sending him money, or like Girkin forever trying to persuade russia’s government to do a full mobilisation—that is definitive Disinfolklore, and these are the kinds of stories she’s telling.

We can talk about those stories in a conscious way that transforms them into Infolklore. We’re certainly manipulating each other by telling these stories, yet we’re not doing it with mean intent. We’re doing it out of generosity—a bit of light relief in the midst of the pain. We’re also raising money. I noted Wendy’s matching in An Accidental Ukrainian, which I very much appreciate.

Re-Archetyping and the Kennedy Center

We are moving towards an answer to a question posed by Scouts and indeed raised by Ioana about what is the truth. What James alluded to is that the truth, in inverted commas, is at risk of being defined by Donald and Donald’s attempts to re-archetype the Kennedy Center and indeed annihilate Kennedy, this hero of his youth that he wishes to destroy. It’s not enough to have RFK Jr. absolutely annihilate the Kennedys from the inside. I note all of the Kennedys’ letters and warnings to Congress not to allow their father, their uncle, their cousin, their brother to become health secretary.

I’m a little bit more optimistic, however. It was a Ukrainian on the series of Ukrainian TV stations that I just recently discovered—and I know Lexicon has as well—broadcasting in English or AI English. There was a Ukrainian academic at an American university I saw this week. He was very certain, and it lodged a nice germ in my mind about how temporary all of this is.

Of course, as James alluded to, it may not become temporary. This may be this attempt to re-archetype reality and turn the world upside down, to turn falsehood into truth for the usurper—the literal and metaphorical usurper Donald. January 6th, whatever happened in the 2016 and 2024 elections with russian help—the usurper is attempting to turn the world upside down.

The Reformation Parallel

I’ve alluded to this before. I studied in great detail the early transmission of ideas in the early German Reformation, 1518 to 1530, and the world turned upside down. Sebastian Brant’s late fifteenth-century book, The Ship of Fools, played a really big part in the re-archetyping of the Pope as Antichrist and the use of memes and cartoons to re-archetype the church in a certain way, done by the leaders, the oligarchs.

They succeeded in some ways, yet the Catholic Church is still around and there still is truth—there’s truth in all of our lives. I’m quite optimistic. At the moment we’re in the endgame.

I do note the Kennedy Center and what’s going on there. For those who don’t know: he inexplicably tried to fire the board almost immediately upon getting into office. They resisted. In the end, like a steamroller, he got rid of them. Then he attempted unlawfully to rename it the Trump Kennedy Center. He got all his patsies in there—basically the spouses of all his Epstein-connected cabinet members and lawyers and various people are on the board. He controls the board and performers. This Kennedy Center, as I understand it—correct me if I’m wrong, Wendy or James—was established by an Act of Congress to memorialise and commemorate JFK. That’s its sole purpose. It washed its face and made a surplus of something like $40 million last year. Already Donald has tanked it, as he’s tanked absolutely everything he’s ever been involved in.

I do believe underpinning all of this, along with RFK, and all his other motivations, is this idea of annihilating this golden boy of his youth that perhaps someone he hated in his life talked about. He just wants to annihilate all that is good. I don’t believe he’ll succeed. I don’t believe any of them will succeed at this in the end. The end is coming near.

6,000 Years of Indo-European Truth

Part of my confidence in that actually is my perspective from 6,000 years of Indo-European history and the triumph of right and truth. It’s in our language, it’s in our words, in almost every sentence. The repeated attempts, as memorialised in stories about the devil or the snake or whatever, in every culture going back literally for 6,000 years that we have records for—it’s embedded in our language. The word in Hindi and early Indi…

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