Chapter 5, Section II. The Abstract Illiteracy of the American Public
- john raymond
- Jul 12
- 4 min read
The modern American mind has been trained to think in images.
It sees tanks and assumes war. It sees a flag and assumes nationhood. It sees red hats or rainbow flags and assumes moral clarity.
But it does not see the invisible lines that connect influence operations, proxy militias, economic coercion, digital sabotage, and psychological manipulation. It cannot track systems. It cannot absorb paradox. It cannot hold abstraction.
And this, more than any military imbalance or diplomatic retreat, is why the United States is losing World War Three. We are not being outgunned. We are being out-thought.
This cognitive gap has been decades in the making. American media—especially television—has cultivated a culture addicted to narrative resolution. Heroes must be obvious, villains must twirl mustaches, and conflicts must end in catharsis.
This conditioning was reinforced by the Cold War, which we misremember as a clean moral contest rather than the murky, covert, and often ambiguous struggle it truly was.
The War on Terror then substituted ideology for geography—making enemies less a matter of foreign policy and more a matter of mood. “Terror” became something you felt, not something you mapped. Strategy collapsed into symbolism.
In such a culture, abstract warfare doesn’t register as warfare at all. Americans don’t recognize what modern adversaries are doing because the tactics are neither linear nor literal.
Russian memes, for example, are dismissed as jokes. Americans share them, laugh at them, and argue over them—but rarely ask who engineered them or to what end. The idea that a meme could be a weapon is too foreign to the American imagination, even as our elections, beliefs, and discourse are bent by them.
Likewise, cyberattacks on pipelines or ransomware campaigns on hospitals don’t provoke the national reaction that a bomb would. There's no smoke. No soldier. No villain in the frame.
So the public doesn’t see it as war—and without public pressure, neither does Congress.
Proxy warfare from Iran, hybrid sabotage from China, subversion from Russia—all of these require the capacity to think abstractly, to recognize intent without a press release. But Americans, trained for literalism, wait for someone to say “We declare war” before they believe conflict is real.
But by then, it’s too late.
This illiteracy is not just exploited by foreign adversaries. It is mirrored and magnified by their assets within.
Consider Donald Trump—not just as a politician, but as a strategic weapon. His behavior is contradictory by design. One day he praises Putin, the next he claims he’s tough on Russia.
Trump denies knowledge, then asserts secret insight. This inconsistency is not a glitch. It is the function. Trump operates in the same ambiguous space as Putin—he sows confusion, not clarity; emotion, not logic.
His strategy is the very playbook used by autocrats: flood the zone with noise, deflect with absurdity, and deny any consistent pattern that could be used to hold him accountable.
This is precisely why explaining Trump’s relationship to Russia has proven so difficult for the American press and political class. To make sense of it requires abstraction. It requires one to assemble a pattern from non-linear pieces: decades of financial dependence, bizarre acts of deference, repeated intelligence briefings ignored, loyalty to Russian narratives, the systematic undermining of NATO, and the near-sacrilegious reverence for Putin’s “strength.”
But the American media, bound by a broken model of neutrality and allergic to strategic ambiguity, refused to walk the public through that pattern. It was too complex, too abstract, too easy to caricature as a conspiracy.
Instead of explaining how modern compromise and influence work—through entanglements of money, ideology, kompromat, and shared enemies—mainstream journalists defaulted to a shallow binary: was he officially a spy, or not? And when no smoking gun emerged in a manila folder labeled “Agent Trump,” they backed away, afraid of looking unserious.
The failure was not investigative. It was conceptual.
The same can be said of liberal politicians and commentators, who—terrified of appearing unhinged—chose silence or euphemism over clarity.
Even as Trump consistently advanced Putin’s interests, many Democrats preferred to call him “erratic,” “populist,” or “anti-democratic,” as if these terms explained his alignment.
They feared the charge of conspiracy so much that they ignored the plain reality of collusion—not in the legal sense, but in the strategic one.
Trump and Putin need not have whispered in dark rooms. They only had to share goals, benefit from each other’s actions, and understand that ambiguity was the currency of control.
And so Trump’s behavior, though wildly destabilizing, remained conceptually unchallenged. The American public, offered no abstract framework, interpreted it through partisan noise or tuned it out entirely.
Without a coherent map, the signs meant nothing. We had confusion, but no coordinates.
This is the cost of abstract illiteracy: the inability to perceive war without uniforms, betrayal without documents, treason without confession.
And in the vacuum of public understanding, the enemy advances. Not with tanks. With tactics. With timing. With Trump.
The future of conflict is conceptual. It will not always look like war. It will look like chaos. Like mismanagement. Like coincidence.
But it will be by design.
Unless we train ourselves to see the abstract battlefield—unless we learn to connect the memes to the militias, the loans to the loyalties, the rhetoric to the roadmaps—we will remain blind, manipulable, and utterly unprepared.
We are not losing because we are weak. We are losing because we are still asking the wrong questions.
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