Down the Rabbit Hole

What is now referred to as “#choigate” in South Korea is like something quite literally out of a conspiracy thriller. Yes, it’s a scandal involving a shamanistic cult that not only controls a president of a major industrialized state but also may be somehow linked to some of the most traumatic events of that country’s history. The truth is stranger than fiction. This illustrates something of a recurring theme for me: the necessity of studying covert operations, political manipulation, deep states, conspiracies, trust groups, and the sub rosa mechanisms that figure highly into all of these things. I did my MA thesis at Georgetown on information warfare theory, so I am neither surprised by the recurrence of #choigate-like incidents in major industrialized polities nor by the way in which these do not fit into the picture of politics most of us have.

In the preface to the landmark study Cheating and Deception, J. Bowyer Bell and Barton Whaley joked that they could not find academic support for their research and struggled to find government buy-in as well. The work was too strange, particular, connected to social conflict, difficult to research, and multi/inter-disciplinary for academia. And it was not related to a big-ticket weapons program, so natch for the Pentagon either. Bell and Whaley had to go to the public instead, and wrote a general-interest book that focused on topics like card cheats and magicians as well as political, intelligence, and military operations. Perhaps Bell and Whaley might have also observed that when funding for research on this nexus of information manipulation and political heresthetics is available, is often from one of two sources:

• 3-letter agencies and other interested parties that want to improve their own practice of such techniques or better understand those of their rivals.
• Quacks that want proof of UFO chemtrails planted by CIA/Mossad/Frankfurt School lizard people from the 89th dimension of the 18th Philadelphia Experiment of Aquarius.

Neither contributes to generalized knowledge of the shadow world in which some of the most important aspects of modern politics are conducted. But without such knowledge, we will frequently be the ones who see our understanding of reality upended when it finally breaks the 10’clock news. Neither Bell or Whaley are still alive, and both are examples of different ways to go down the rabbit hole. Bell was an globetrotting academic, journalist and bohemian that was able to extract thick context from his often eclectic and intensive research on terrorism, insurgency, and civil war. Whaley, in contrast, was a more traditional academic researcher who applied scientific analysis to topics like the magician’s practices of illusion to strategic denial and deception in warfare. We lack people like Bell and Whaley today, especially given how much the topics they analyzed has changed as a result of informatization. We need more people – who are serious about improving public knowledge (as opposed to legitimating the beliefs of quacks) – to jump down the rabbit hole that Bell and Whaley did.