All the World’s a Stage

Guarding Your Mind in a Mind War

No doubt many of you are aware of the concept of the Overton Window.

While largely used as a means of describing the slow, steady normalization of taboos to the detriment of traditional societal viewpoints, values and ‘norms,’ the idea of a fixed breadth of ‘acceptable rhetoric’ on a sliding scale in terms of subject matter ‘extremes’ can be applied to everything from media to politics to kinetic wars.

In short, what is acceptable today may have been unacceptable yesterday, and could be unthinkable a year from now. While the Overton Window is most often used to signal a decidedly negative shift or decline in acceptable discourse, I would argue that this window can not only be pushed back in the direction from which it came, but the window itself—the stage—can be expanded.

And, if I have not worn out the welcome of this particular sociopolitical and even philosophical cypher, I believe that patriots in what I often refer to as the Sovereign Alliance are currently in the midst of deploying multiple windows regarding social, political and cultural rhetoric, setting them at fixed points along the Left-Right Paradigm that is the neat line the powers that would be have sought to divide us along before pushing those windows closer together in an attempt to distort and ultimately destroy the windows cultivated by our ideological and political enemies.

This is why ‘characters’ and players such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the rest of the American thought leaders who make up the implied ranks of the US-based Sovereign Alliance tend to deploy sensational, ‘extreme’ narratives and public stances. Each deployment represents a new window on the Overton Scale, and can thus disrupt the enemy’s careful guiding and cultivation of sociopolitical norms.

In essence, what these bombastic, clever, utterly magnetic personalities in positions of both real and imagined authority are doing is waging a psychological war against the Deep State collectivists while waging one FOR the Collective Mind of American Society.

In fact, while it could be argued that these ‘windows’ are the arguments deployed by cultural, political and ideological leaders—for better and worse—I would go one step further and contend that the figures themselves—the characters and all they represent—act as the very psychological cyphers or windows through which the observing public engages with and ultimately adopts modes of thinking on everything from the latest Media blitz to the latest Actual Events taking place on an increasingly escalating and accelerating world stage.

It is often said, after all, that all the world’s a stage, and if that truism retains meaning in the realm of the real, it stands to reason that, in order to engage a Collective Mind that has been guided, misguided and ultimately turned against itself, colorful, magnetic personalities—characters—must play an active role in doing so.

It is no secret that my ‘expertise’—really, my obsession—when it comes to engaging with and attempting to analyze the impossible puzzle that is modern, Fifth-Generation Information Warfare lies in the realm of the story—the narrative. I focus on the stories each and every player and all sides deploy on this Game Theory Game Board and attempt to trace them back to their origins, not in the realm of fact or fiction, but rather to gauge the intent on the part of the writer.

While I often chuckle when I engage with Narratives deployed by Donald Trump—a man whose Narrative mastery I wrote about in the most popular Burning Bright feature to date—I rarely do so purely for the comedic value or sometimes the sheer absurdity of these deployments, but rather because I often see the intent in terms of the direction Trump wishes to push his own specific Overton Window in, and what that spells on a positive note for us and on a far less positive note for [them.]

After all, whether you were a diehard Trump and MAGA believer from the beginning of the mogul’s political career or if you were a later convert—hell, even if you’ve somehow found your way to this piece while managing to still mock or belittle one of the great leaders of our time—the hold he has on the Collective Mind of American—and world—society is unique, to say the least. Even his—and our—most bitter enemies would admit it.

And I would argue that this magnetism—this control—over the public mind is rooted in a sobering, albeit sometimes-disconcerting observation of the human, and specifically the American psyche:

We are a culture largely built on the cult of personality.

From celebrities in film and TV to the political versions that mar our news feeds day and night—and have for decades—from the ‘journalists’ who have become Gonzo blue-check thought leaders in their own right to the Fortune 500 oligarchs, CEO’s and trend-setters they cover with more adoration than scrutiny, the American mind is guided by its obsession and fascination with the American myth.

The thing is, the same baseline observations of American—of human—psychology that the powers that would be have used to subvert and subjugate for generations can and has been turned back around as a piece of the larger Macro awakening strategy I refer to at Burning Bright as the Reverse Hegelian Dialectic.

And that has and is being done by appealing to the American’s desire for ‘leaders’ to guide them in a new direction.

While that term—leader—is usually used to signify a figure of poise, renown and clear direction, I would argue that many who are given or assigned the cultural title in recent years have intentions for and effects on the Collective Mind of society that vary as wildly as the winds of change.

The Collective Mind has long been guided not just by its obsession with stories, myths and narratives, but on its attachment to the central characters at the heart of those stories.

Donald Trump understands this better than most, which is why he chooses to engage with said Collective in the scintillating and alternating manner in which he does. Any time he chooses to deploy a given narrative, that narrative immediately seizes control of the American zeitgeist, and through that control, Trump is also able to elevate or relegate other characters in the play we’re watching through the use of everything from clever insults and turns of phrase to silly, albeit memorable nicknames and crude-seeming attacks.

And he is far from alone.

We recently explored the virtually inarguable prospect that Elon Musk is assisting Trump in engaging and focusing the Collective Mind onto various emerging—and long suspected—instances of corruption within both the Media Industrial Complex and the institutions it exists to protect utilizing a pincer technique that was undoubtedly long in the making, but the characters we engage with on a daily basis in this community—that our unawakened fellows engage with in a far less active manner—are not relegated to American patriots alone, nor patriots at all.

From international members of the Sovereign Alliance—from Vladimir Putin to Jair Bolsonaro—to the Deep State charlatans themselves—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the clown occupying the set used in place of the oval office with worrying frequency—characters are not always pure inventions, but reflections of the truth beneath.

The key to winning a Mind War—and that is what we are in, at the end of the day—lies in commanding the attention of that Mind and ultimately breaking through cognition to grab hold of the emotional core beneath—the heart within the mind.

The soul.

Humans, after all are archetypal creatures, inspired and terrorized by the very same. We are driven by stories because we have been made by stories. We pass stories down and we inherit them, not because they are convenient or because they offer a means of remembrance, but because they make up who we are, who we have been and who we could be.

And the characters that populate the story of humanity—the story the Collective engages with most strongly at any given moment in time—play a large role in guiding the emotional drive of the Collective Mind, which plays a large role in determining the eventual ends—the real and measurable ends—that Collective Mind actions through its directed will.

The enemy has long understood this, which is why they have paraded an endless procession of archetypal, ‘warring’ clowns before us. Shadows on the wall meant to distract, inspire, mollify and mortify in alternating patterns that have been mapped out long before the puppets begin dancing on the unseen strings of those writing their scripts.

Fifth-Generation Warfare is largely defined as enigmatic because—like stories themselves—it is characterized by the fusion of the ‘real’ with the ‘unreal,’ the ‘true’ with the ‘fictional.’

Far from seeing this as a threat or a detriment, or as grounds to disengage from such a complex war in the first place, I would beseech you to reframe the prospect that we exist—our minds, hearts and very souls exist—in a war of stories because we are fighting to determine the story that our nation, our world and that each of us and all of us will become and will tell as we move into the next chapter of our collective book, one we wish not to be built ON collectivism, but on expression, on freedom, on truth and on sovereignty.

Now, if the above entreaty got a bit lost in the weeds in the mix of enigma I attempt to harness like the serpent of mist and smoke it often resembles in my mind’s eye when I sit down to give form to it, take away the following directive when it comes time to apply your cognition, your mind and your directed will to the Mind War we are all an active part of in this community:

The next time you see an announcement, a narrative deployment, a media blitz or even a purported ‘Actual Event’ on the world stage, remember that it can be less important to separate the real from the unreal in a war such as this, and more important to suss out the effects the forming story is visiting upon the Collective Mind, and ruminate on why.

When you do, you may just come away with a clearer idea of which characters will play which roles in the next Act, and which story beats are likely to emerge.

Doing so may make you akin to the forward-thinking viewer nobody wants to watch a mind-twister of a movie with, but it will also make you far more ready to absorb, analyze and engage with the questions the story presents rather than merely reacting to the emotional triggers it has been designed to trip.

Learn how to ask the right questions, and you’ll be one step closer to catching the answers as they flit by like motes of ash on the wind.

All the world’s a stage, my friends.

Or perhaps a series of stages—of windows—that seek alternatively to reveal and to obfuscate, depending on the hands, the minds and the characters that guide them.

The sooner you recognize this, the sooner you’ll begin to let go of the characters on the stage, the ‘events’ on the page and the themes on offer, and the sooner you’ll be able to focus on the unseen hands directing from on high, and look beyond the invisible frames of the windows that are paraded before you and see the dizzying, exhilarating, kaleidoscopic brilliance of the whole picture.

This epiphany will not limit you; rather, it will reveal to you that it is not the characters, the plot or even the almighty writer who is ultimately in control of his story.

It is the audience. It is you.

The story only has what control you allow it to. And if you learn to engage with it as it unfolds, project where it might be going and adapt your mindset when it veers in unforeseen directions in the Micro while falling into pre-set patterns in an increasingly-encouraging Macro, then the prospect of watching a movie, a play or a story told in parts becomes far less daunting and psychologically sickening, and far more interesting.

And as always, it is always wise to keep in mind the ‘point’ of this war of stories in the first place, which is to light up the dark we fight against.

Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.

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