Cognitive Warfare
2026-02-26
A thread I've been weaving lately: the consequences of cognitive warfare have completely changed the way we interact with the world. To throw out a phrase like "cognitive warfare" is quite alarming and might come off as vague or conspiratorial in some kind of grand way, but the reality is much more mundane than that. I'm defining cognitive warfare as war waged with information: every news headline, social media post, and other platform for spreading information have distinct agendas to manipulate certain sets of people into certain patterns of thought and action. This isn't anything new. Propaganda has existed as long as media itself has existed, but due to the sheer volume of information being transferred today, the wars we fight are no longer won with sheer firepower.
They are won with information.
It's easy for most of us to think that we aren't participants in this war. Even if you do everything to avoid the news, social media, and television, you still have to contend with the fact that most around you do not and that you are subject to the things that influence them. For me, I try to avoid watching TV or watching the news, but my parents still heavily engage in it. Since I live with them, the influence of those programs rubs off on me, whether I want it to or not. I think it's important to clarify that even though avoiding propaganda is extremely difficult, it's not some kind of futile thing that should make us give up our sense of self-control and sanity.
Losing your self-control and sanity is what the enemy wants.
Defining that "enemy" is part of the war itself. On a more spiritual level, one could identify that enemy as Satan or demons. That's already tough territory to inhabit, but more literally, that enemy can be identified as a nation-state whose interests are not directly tied to your own nation's interests. For me as an American, any non-American nation-state can fit this bill. It could be the Russians, the Chinese, or whoever else. If you're Russian or Chinese, the enemy could be America or Western Europe.
There was this anime that came out back in the 80s called Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Basically, it's Japanese Star Trek. The show centers around intergalactic navies in some distant future. Many of the plots in that show revolve around diplomatic relations between different factions. One of the characters, Yang Wen-li, was an officer for a military force of a democratic state, the Free Planets Alliance. He summed it up perfectly:
"There are few wars between good and evil; most are between one good and another good."
Still, this doesn't change the fact that the wars are still being fought. With that, it's more important than ever to maintain strength and resilience. As regular citizens, we don't have much say in what news outlets or social media throw at us, but we do have a say in how we respond to it. Most of that media is designed for engagement, usually through rage baiting or an attempt to incite some kind of viscerally emotional response. The obvious thing to say would be to try to suppress whatever emotions a piece of media incites, but this usually leads to more negative responses further down the road. The more you accumulate that "emotional debt," the harder the crashout's going to be.
So what do we do instead? I try to take whatever emotions that might come up from an outrageous headline and direct them into something more productive. For me, I do what I can to exercise a sort of empathetic detachment. I can feel whatever is happening in the headline, but I also know that it's not right there in front of me either. I typically try to engage compassion by asking myself questions like "If I were seeing this person going through this experience in front of me, how would I try to comfort them?" Many of us feel the rampant anxieties perpetuated by most media, and the most important thing we can do is figure out more ways to be kinder to each other.
It's never as black and white as "us" versus "them." We're more alike than we give ourselves credit for.
Bitcoin address: bc1qtgqvj6qjxnaxkns20x5rcwnxvv3jqzhduvvxfc