PSA 002

Loyalty in the Age of Information

I ran across this article about the Wagner Group recruiting Joes. If this recruitment video isn’t true, it will be someday very soon, and there is no doubt in my mind that non-western PMCs recruit outside of their host nation. I don’t think anyone would disagree with this and even if they did it’s a hard point to argue after watching the Joes do it in Ukraine for almost a year now. When I think back to the Cold War days, the idea of fighting for the other side would have been unthinkable, the stuff of Soldier of Fortune magazine, or just something I might see in movies. What conflicts were there other than the ones in the news anyway?

In our current year, information floods us everywhere through our computers, our TVs, our phones, even our friends who become excellent human retrans stations for transmissible data. We drown in it. In the bathroom information constipates us as we stare at our phone screens, focused and squatting at the low-ready on porcelain.

From the article;

"But in reality, you saw criminal orders, the destruction of nations, the death of civilians, and all for the will of a bunch of families, who thought they were earthly gods — deciding who would live under their rule and who would be destroyed," the dramatic voice-over continues.

That reality just isn’t clear to me though. That’s not to say the claim is not true, nor is it to say that it is. Truth loses meaning as we reach a hyper-socialized, saturated information environment. Byung Chul Han writes in Infocracy (an excellent read, HIGHLY recommended to any connoisseurs of GI Joe warfare),

The new nihilism does not mean that lies are presented as truths or truths discredited as lies. Rather, the distinction between truth and lie is undermined. Paradoxically, someone who intentionally lies and contradicts truth thereby acknowledges the truth. It is possible to lie only if the distinction between truth and lie is still intact. A liar does not lose his relation to the truth. His faith in reality is not shaken. A liar is not a nihilist. He does not question the truth itself. The more determined the lie, the more validated the truth.

There is enough information available to all humans on the globe now that we can pick what we decide our own truth to be. In fact, we must. And there is such a saturation of information that it is possible to find your truth, correctly, on either side of the argument; the internet reduces all truth to rhetoric. People naturally gravitate towards something to believe in, and on that spectrum of belief, those who choose to fight in combat tend to be the firmest of believers. This is why armies emphasize virtue and build moral codes to set conditions for such.

When there is no more shared truth, you get to pick your side yourself. For armies like the Joes, supporting nations that are losing the heart of their people, opening up the ranks to those interested in the cause itself is the natural descent of the new model of loyalty. And boy will it look different. This puts a very different value on the motivations for war, and a re-emphasis on Sun Tzu’s constant factors of Moral Law and the data that Heaven manifests to influence it.

Understanding is half the battle (the other half is violence).