The New War of Information

Some boys are ready for the Zombie Apocalypse.

Although I don’t have any kids this age yet, I have spent a fair amount of time with teenage boys and pre-teens in the scouting program, in cub scouts (now Activity Days), and as a guide. What has been striking to me is how much time and thought many boys spend in planning for natural disasters, wars, and of course the Zombie Apocalypse.

These kids know what weapons they want, and where they will go to hide. Many have already built some kind of fort or bunker somewhere just outside of town.

I don’t exactly remember this preparation from my own childhood, but we did have forts. And I haven’t observed girls exhibiting this behavior. I think that there might be something ingrained in boys to think this way — something in old evolution. It is an inherited trait to know you’re supposed to “stab ‘em with the pointy end.”

In history this “gift” of preparing for conflict has been put to use more than we wish. Here in America Gen-X was largely the first in American history to not have been personally exposed to war even though it has dominated human society for thousands of years.

Putin’s strange, 20th-century-style invasion with tanks and ground troops is almost a throwback to times that seem expired — it’s an old war in a new world.

In the new era, it looks like the new weaponry is information. Russia knows this as well as anybody — since they have been at the forefront of misinformation campaigns, propaganda and even major cyber attacks. There is a new battleground, and it’s online!

Unfortunately I am afraid that our young men’s evolutionary intuition about how to fight or flee, is rendered useless against this new war of information. Not only young men, but all people in general. In physical conflict we are hard-wired to know how to defend ourselves or to flee. But how do we defend ourselves from misinformation and propaganda?

You may disagree with what threats to prepare for in the new era. But when I zoom out and look at the real threats in the world, I believe the biggest threat is deception. After deception wins, the threat of tanks follows soon after.

The first defense against deception is to carry with you at least a 9mm’s-worth of skepticism, especially when reading the news. You have to carry. The media is sometimes purposefully, the biggest purveyors of lies, and at other times, just unwittingly so, because of the vast amount of information they broker. Governments and Big Tech also have this problem. 

And when governments get together with media or Big Tech, you have an even more dangerous threat. Right now we have the Russian government using TikTok influencers to push Putin’s narrative. And even though you might trust the United States government more than the Russian government, the White House is now using the same TikTok strategy as Russia! This should cause everyone to experience a surge of skepticism, which is the best catalyst to fire up your discernment.

In The Byway we use the word “narrative” a lot. In fact it appears in this issue several times. Narratives can be accurate, but they can also be intentionally misleading. We use the word “narrative” intentionally in hopes that it will spark a dose of skepticism in our readers. We are media too after all, and although we try to make our “narrative” accurate and not misleading, you can’t know that of yourself without discernment.

We must all learn to discern the truth — and if you don’t think it’s humanly possible to discern, you will have to rely on a spiritual gift to do so. Otherwise, you will be deceived.

– by AJ Martel

Feature image caption: Boys these days spend a lot of time preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse. The real threat, though, is today’s war of information.