Data-Resistant Archetypes of a Potemkin State

Data-resistant archetypes of a Potemkin state. Useful idiots and well-meaning people that all of us know, and sometimes we may feel it after we’ve read one article, which, for instance, is talking about, oh, how Russia can keep going forever.

But those of us who look at the data, who parse it carefully and who understand what is in operation are these archetypes in the back of our minds, bogeymen, great men, small men, weak women, weak children, that these archetypes, which we can use these kinds of expressions to describe, are immanent in the stories and the Disinfolklore and the Counter Disinfolklore that we read.

Source: How Disinfolklore Communicates Archetypes into Our Inner Minds

Spectacle works because it implants archetypes that resist factual correction. The “Potemkin State” archetype — Russia as invincible, eternal, unconquerable — persists in the minds of well-meaning people even when data contradicts it. These bogeymen and great-men archetypes are not conscious beliefs but background assumptions, immanent in every story we consume, operating beneath the threshold of awareness.

← Previous: Manipulation Etymologised: Mani-pulate | Back to Spectacle | Next: Conference as TV Programme →