Double bind

After one information session, I asked my main Russian intelligence briefer about what we could do. She was young, a Russian-speaker, and philosophical about disinformation. She shrugged her shoulders. Not because she wasn’t concerned about it, but because the dark genius of disinformation is that it worked a little like double-bind theory. If you engaged disinformationists—which is what they wanted—they won; if you did not engage them, they won. They tapped into prejudice and ignorance and grievance. They weren’t so much creating resentment as aggravating it. Yes, facts mattered, but since they did not really engage with the world of facts, it didn’t have much of an effect. At the end of the day, she said, they didn’t acknowledge that empirical facts even existed. Their goal was to persuade everyone else of that, too.

Information Wars (2020) by former TIME editor and Obama administration Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel. Page 243