5GW in Disinformation, Etymology, and Network Centrality

Etyma and Logic

Etymology can often point at networks and connectivity that span not only different cultures but also different cultures in time.  I would revise Mark Safranski’s point to include the existence of complex networks within hunter-gatherer bands, since these bands no doubt formed complex interactions and social structures through the vehicle of language (among other things), but in any case, we can easily see how early languages have continued to shape human cognition and social networks even as early settlements, city-states, and empires formed and fell.  The ability to communicate with our brethren, within our tribe or culture, played an integral role — perhaps the prime integral role — in the formation of complex societies.  Because language is always dynamic, always evolving, it represents a fundamental “cross-domain domain” that may bind many peoples together not only within the present but also across the ages; and as such, language is a vector for resiliency as well as consilience. Perhaps, in fact, the type of resilience language promotes is consilient.

Language, as I’ve proposed before, always represents a logic, even if that logic is masked by time and subjective observation, subjective use.  For instance, folk etymology might change a word’s spelling because of what I’ll call “cross-domain association.”  Such association may be entirely phonetic but is more likely to include also the type of consilience we find in metaphors [see: “Mish-Mash” on PC].   E.g., the word “cesspool” would seem to originate from a combination of earlier forms leading to “cess” [perhaps akin to the Italian cesso, or “privy”] and “pool,” but in fact most likely descends from a Middle French word, souspirail, which is derived from Latin suspirare, or sub- + spirare, “to breathe” that made its way through French to the word for “air vent” or a pipe leading to what we would today call a cesspool.  But associations with cess and types of pools have altered the spelling — and, quite likely, modern associations — in English because of a nearness in meaning and sound.[1]

But other types of networking in language, across the ages, follow a much more linear path, usually as a result of scholarly work.  Scholars (including early theologians) have taken directly from Latin, German, French, etc., in creating terminology, and their terms may persist into the common culture.  In the case of Latin, the type of grammatical construction has proven very adaptable and flexible to new use, so that even if many modern-day English words are not themselves direct descendants of complete Latin words, many of their parts actually do descend directly from Latin and retain their basic meaning.  Interactions between cultures have also led to a popular adoption of terms which persist in meaning for later generations.  Some poets have utilized a process similar to a combination of both, scholarly domain-crossing and folk etymology; for instance, Shakespeare appears to have created hundreds if not thousands of words currently in use in Modern English, often by slightly altering words then in use, with a deep knowledge of present use and etymological history.

So while we ponder the way that new understandings of the centrality of networks in human society may serve to shape society, we should not assume that human society has never been shaped via conscious exploitation of network centrality.  I view the type of media exploitation used by 4GW forces as very basic, old, and rugged: certainly, not refined.  Alexander the Great and other classical military leaders have understood the significance of “sending messages” by massacring large numbers of enemies or betrayers and mutineers.

A Detour through Poetry

Poets and authors of religious texts, however, have always sought to refine the use of media to exploit the basic centrality of language in complex human societies.  Sometimes, poets may not have realized the full measure of their influence, and  Edwin Markham’s poem “The Man with the Hoe” might serve as an example; after being published in 1899 in the San Francisco Examiner, it was widely reprinted in newspapers across the world because of its revolutionary spirit of protest, netting its author more profit than almost any other single poem in history.  Other times, poetry was acknowledged for its power to influence large numbers of people, such as the poetry included in the Holy Bible or even modern-day attempts like that being conducted in Yemen to fight the influence of extremist Islam.  (In fact, the Arabic world has a long tradition of public poetry that is central to their culture.  Newspapers in the Middle East frequently publish poetry prominently, unlike newspapers in the West.)

Because language is central to complex human societies, its centrality and exact operation often go unacknowledged.  We are quite familiar with our own language; thus we often fail to notice its operation when we or others are using it, and the power that language has over us, a power closely related with the way logic is formed via language during communication, may also go unacknowledged.   Perhaps this is why Percy Shelley thought that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” — a fingertip feeling of much more:

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. [2]

Interestingly, the idea most often opposed to Shelly’s, in contemporary disputes over the role of poetry, was proposed by another poet, W.H. Auden, “In Memory of WB Yeats”:  For poetry makes nothing happen…

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: 
The parish of rich women, physical decay, 
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. 
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, 
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives 
In the valley of its making where executives 
Would never want to tamper, flows on south 
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, 
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, 
A way of happening, a mouth. 

A way of happening, a mouth that survives / In the valley of its making and flows everywhere.  Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that all language is “fossil poetry” because we borrow our logic from so many who have gone before. I.e., those original creators of words — neologisms, at the time — were the true poets, assigning sound and logic to what they had witnessed.  If we combine all three perspectives, we might wonder how the full body of any language may be a fossil poem, or a resilient network, which nonetheless expands through new neologisms and cross-pollination from other cultures — and thus operates in a consilient manner, not entirely fossilized.  In any case, Auden did not bother not writing poetry even if it “makes nothing happen.”  That is like saying, “Really, really folks, don’t look at me; I’m not doing anything!!”  An unacknowledged 5GWarrior?  (After all, his poem still has an influence today; I’m writing about it, aren’t I?)

A Detour in Logic

This post was inspired by my recent discovery of an entry on ‘disinformation’ in The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (1991 edition).   As further proof that the current theories of 5GW are indebted to the past, we might consider carefully what the entry says in very plain and direct English:

In a political cartoon published in the 1980s, a befuddled-looking man reads a sign that contains the words “U.S. Office of Disinformation” with an arrow pointing left. It is obvious to the reader that the man will certainly be lost if he follows the arrow; the reader can see what the man cannot, that the U.S. Office of Disinformation is really just around the corner to the right.

The man in the cartoon will not be severely affected by this encounter with disinformation. He may wander around until he stumbles upon the office he is seeking. In real life, of course, disinformation has much more severe repercussions, and it can be every bit as debilitating to public opinion as its cousin, propaganda.

Like propaganda, disinformation is associated with the covert system of public-opinion manipulation through the dispensing of selective information long believed to be practiced by the Soviet Union and its sophisticated intelligence network, known to us as the KGB. So strong is this association that the term disinformation is thought to be a literal translation of Russian dezinformatsiya, which means ‘misinformation.’ Dezinformatsiya is purported to have been the name of a department of the KGB formed in 1955, which oversaw the dispensing of propaganda to international media and government organizations.

The reported use by the Soviets of disinformation for purposes of international domination is worthy of our juiciest spy novels. According to one-time CIA director William Colby, the Soviet disinformation bureau would plant a fictitious story in a leftist publication. The story would circulate to a Communist journal, and eventually be printed by the Soviet news agency, which would subsequently attribute the information to undisclosed sources. In this way, a lie would circulate around the world in the guise of an officially documented news item.

Whether or not our word disinformation does indeed come from Russian dezinformatsiya is a matter open to speculation. As early as 1939, years before the Dezinformatsiya agency is reported to have been formed, the word disinformation appeared in a description of German intelligence activities prior to World War II: “The mood of national suspicion prevalent during the last decade in contemporary Europe is well-illustrated by Gen. Krivitsky’s account of the German ‘Disinformation Service’, engaged in manufacturing fake military plans for the express purpose of having them stolen by foreign governments.” The English word disinformation may even have developed independently of Russian dezinformatsiya out of our own mounting concern with the spread of propaganda and practices of misinformation that perhaps began in the years just before World War II. In that case, disinformation may have originated as a noun form of the verb disinform, which in turn is derived from the combination of dis- and inform, just as misinform is derived from the prefix mis- and the verb inform.

In this age of increased hostility between political factions at home and abroad, disinformation is becoming an increasingly popular word. No longer do we perceive the Soviets as having a monopoly on this form of deception. Increasingly, the word is being used in reference to alleged covert practices of U.S. government officials. Tad Szulc, writing in The Washingtonian magazine (March 1974) tells of a CIA agent in Thailand faking a letter from a guerrilla leader to the Bangkok government: “This is a classic example of the ‘disinformation’ technique, intended to embarrass the guerrilla leader…and thus weaken the subversive movement.”

Regardless of which side of the Iron Curtain the term hailed from, disinformation is a powerful manipulative tool in the constant battle for world domination. [1]

All of this is old news. New news, however, reaches more and more people than ever before, much more quickly than ever before. I’m particularly interested in this 1991 consideration — really, that 1974 Washingtonian consideration — of how 5GW might work to weaken a guerrilla fighter.

What seems clear:  We act according to the logic we have developed after observing the world around us, even if that logic is partial or incorrect; and, language and media in general have a profound effect on our logic.  While our very language may alter according to what we have seen and the “logic” of what we have seen, at the same time our language gives us a framework for forming new logic — a framework we might not even realize we are using, thus leading to reiterations of very old logic.

Logic, after all, has an intimate etymological connection to the Greek logos, or, word, speech.  “leg-. To collect; with derivatives meaning ‘to speak.’ ” [3]   That Indo-European root is interesting, considering how language may have served to help bind complex societies of disparate individuals.

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[1]   The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, 1991 ed.

[2] Percy Bysshe Shelly’s “Defense of Poetry” on the Internet Modern History Sourcebook

[3] The American Heritage Dictionary, electronic version