Is Cyber Influence The New Warfare?

Cyber influence is a subtle, almost imperceptible way of brainwashing and enculturation. Is it the new  warfare without recognizable dangerous weapons?

Scary question and thought isn’t it?  That you are being targeted and manipulated but don’t know it, and don’t feel it and may not even believe it is happening to you!

None of us are immune to this form of brainwashing, unless we are a hermit in a cave somewhere.

Social media profiling is an accomplished state of affairs and millions of individual personal data has been illicitly harvested by unscrupulous individuals.

Brainwashing is a strong term, but so are the incredible tools of the cyber influence societies these days.

You might think that you, as a opinionated adult, would not be vulnerable to being influenced!  I understand!

Let me first present how significant and powerful influence is throughout your entire life from the cradle to coffin, subtle of not.

We grow up first of all being influenced by our parents and their beliefs, passed along from previous generations  that form our general philosophy of life.

These viewpoints could be religious, political, cultural, racial and ethnic prejudices  and societal viewpoints.

I do not know a person, including myself who hasn’t been influenced and moulded by the these forces that were an inherent part of our upbringing.

In addition to the above, your sense of self or how you see yourself and how you relate to others and your world is also very influenced by them.

By the time we are around five, our dominant personality traits are in place, some  perhaps derived from inherited models, but moulded by familial influence.

Then comes school and our peers.  Our teachers have some influence too, but in our  early teens we generally give way to group dynamics.

We go along with this to survive and to fit in, feeling the need for group peer approval and acceptance.

Some of us become closet nonconformists, retreating to the safety and security of our inner selves kept just for us.

By the time we around 18, most of us have developed a protective persona that will buffer us as we set off into creating our professional and personal lives as adults.

I have spent my entire professional life helping others to interpret and understand why they feel the way they feel, do the things they do and believe in the things they believe.

Even before I got my credentials to be a therapist, I was the ever wondering and observing child of the people around me.

Some kids wonder about the mysteries of space and the universe but I was always more fascinated by the physiology and the psychological make up of human beings

Technological advances in communications and information sharing via the net I love!.  How wonderful it has been for me to have an international library instantaneously available to read at my fingertips.

However marvelous, I am now aware and very concerned about the potentiality of malicious misuse of data gathered not only from our internet searches, but also for psychological profiling.

We are now so very visible to the world because practically all of us have bared our souls on social media.

Because of social media, we have unknowingly created Neon like signs that blink day and night who we are, what we do, what we like and don’t like.

Most of us don’t have to be a rocket scientist psychologist or therapist to easily figure out someone’s personality by viewing their FB posts.

Human resources folks do it all the time now to determine if you are the appropriate candidate and so do we for various personal reasons.

Marketing experts have been inundating us for several years with publicity geared to our internet searches in hopes of making a sell, be it a vacation, articles or what not.

Misguided and Machiavellian individuals can and have harvested our social media profiles.  These psychographic profilers have used them to target us with influential information  that can either influence or sway our political tendencies.

Using the premise that “there is a sucker born every moment” voiced by P.T. Barnum, this  targeted influential “news” can easily be fabricated to be partially or totally false.

We love to have our convictions and beliefs reinforced even as adults!  We still like fitting in to our immediate society that surrounds us, rather than be alienated.

Creating doubt or fears by fabricated news can be used as propaganda that validates or reinforces our psychological tendencies and political persuasions, sometimes drawing us into destructive false beliefs.

Even if we have been taught that  certain ideologies, such as Nazism, Fascism or Marxism has not been beneficial to the human race or brought about widespread destruction and genocide, we are not immune to being tweaked to recreating these tendencies.

Why is this so easy with us?   Why are we so malleable and gullible?  How can we be so fooled and mislead?

How can we end up adopting thoughts and behaviors that at one time might seem foreign to us?

One of the most basic reasons is that we human beings can easily be victimized by immoral human beings.

We can easily have our culture inoculated with behavior and ideologies that become normalised when leaders and people in authority over us exert those behaviors or express those ideologies in convincing manners and ways.

Ever hear of the Stockholm syndrome?  That is basically when people who have become true victims of abuse,  or oppression can surprisingly be brainwashed into adopting their abusers ideologies. Strange but true.

You see, it can become a way of survival and escaping future oppression and abuse.  You become literally one of them and in doing so are rewarded for your transformation.

Well that can be stretched in various ways to include other ways of manipulating human beings to change their thoughts and behavior.

Cults do it all the time. Dictators are masters of it.  Terrorist organizations propagate violence through it.  Military leaders throughout history have used it.  Ever hear of the Milgram experiment, dealing with obedience over personal conscience?

That was when someone in authority was able to induce over 50 percent of people involved as participants in the study,  to delivery ever-increasing severe shocks to innocent other human beings, even though they heard their cries of pains.

Ever heard of crowd mentality, often called herd or mob mentality? Social psychology studies this phenomena to understand how large groups of people can become influenced and adopt similar ways of thinking and behaving.

Traders and financial investors see it influencing worldwide financial markets and can take advantage of it to their personal gain.

Crowd mentality inoculation occurs when  the individual loses his own personal integrity, his own personal responsibility and his own personal boundaries and ideas; and replaces it with that of the crowd.

Persuasive influential aspects of crowd mentality revolves around the need of human beings to affiliate, have a sense of belonging and be validated by others in the crowds.

We can’t blame adolescents for falling into this phenomenal peer pressure, because they are young and vulnerable without the developmental maturity we hope to achieve in adulthood.

But, you see, we being social creatures throughout our lives, some adults can be pulled into cultural crowd indoctrination by needing affiliation and validation as well.

Why do you think that business or personal social climbers, can be obsessed with accumulating as many FB, Twitter, Instagram, Snapshot, etc, “likes” , friends or followers as possible?

They see this as a key component in validating themselves with others. They can even  buy “likes” and followers from solicitors and then promote their “numbers” as a measure of success.

Mindsets can be influenced also by fears of being victimized.  You see, human beings will often prefer to blame others rather than look at their own shortcomings, character defects and maladaptive behavior.

It is much easier to blame others for our misfortunes and failures than want to pony up to our own responsibility.

Don’t get me wrong, there is and have been throughout history REAL victims who have endured oppression, submission, abuse, slavery and etc.

Victimization of the masses, whether real or imagined often leads to anger, rebellion, revolt and becomes a vicious circle creating more victims feeding a consequential revolving door of escalating prejudice, rebellion and violence.

Political leaders are very adapt in using their personas to convince others to think along their way, otherwise they would never get elected.

Targeted influential media and cyber propaganda can enhance the  ideologies and personas of these candidates to convincing proportions.

Sometimes we can buy into the philosophy of the emperor who wears no clothes, or even the wolf in  lamb’s clothing.

We are forewarned of the antichrist, who will be very convincing and persuasive, hiding his malevolent daggers underneath the cloak of his false persona.

I suspect as technological communication methods become more sophisticated, so will these technological advances attract increasingly criminal involvements as we have already witnessed.

Cambridge Analytica is a psychographic profiler society that sold  collected data and profile analysis  mined from social media that was used to  target and infiltrate various social medias settings with “news” to persuade or influence individuals for political purposes.

Besides political gain, this sort of powerful psychological invasion can be used to create division, feed destructive beliefs, and distort reality.

It can be far-reaching in its potentiality to cause cultural wars,  and increase international tensions through false propaganda.

Some countries have narcissistic leaders with fragile egos and with poor anger control that have access to nuclear warhead lancing buttons.

As any therapist knows, those type of individuals have enough inner psychological turmoil, and need to maintain their inner sense of superiority to set them off in retaliation to perceived threats whether real or imagined.

We don’t need social media bullying or battering to create even more dangerous tension between them, nor do we need social media targeted distortion towards the masses for personal or political gain.