VI. Indoctrination and the Disappearance of “Sides”
- john raymond
- Jul 3
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 3
In the age of asymmetric warfare, the traditional concept of warring "sides" begins to collapse. What replaces it is not clarity, but illusion—the illusion that there still are sides at all. This illusion is not accidental. It is manufactured, maintained, and weaponized through indoctrination.
Once upon a time, war was imagined as a clash of nations, their interests represented by flags and uniforms. But in the asymmetric age, those uniforms mask an internal fragmentation.
Actors at the top of national hierarchies now play games that often have little to do with the interests or desires of the populations they rule. In Russia, the oligarchs and FSB operatives are not fighting for the Russian people—they are fighting to preserve their grip on power and wealth.
In America, MAGA-aligned elites are not defenders of a shared republican ideal—they are defenders of their own narratives and media empires. And Trump, the worst liar of them all, works not just for himself but for Putin, and certainly not for the people or for the state.
To keep this fragmentation hidden, indoctrination becomes essential. In Nazi Germany, the average citizen did not decide to murder neighbors. They surrendered moral responsibility to the Party. The propaganda machine provided a simple framework: Us versus Them, purity versus pollution, loyalty versus betrayal.
Under this binary, complexity dies, and so does independent thought. The same dynamic thrives today in MAGA ideology. Truth is no longer discovered, it is delivered—by Trump, by Fox, by the influencers that serve as narrative shepherds for those unwilling or unable to parse the chaotic battlefield of modern politics.
This is indoctrination not as national unity, but as national obedience. It is not designed to help the public understand the war; it is designed to convince them there is no war at all—just a fight between good and evil where their side is always good, and the other is always evil.
These simplified moral binaries destroy our capacity to recognize asymmetric conflict, because they remove ambiguity, intention, and competing agency from the analysis.
And that is their power. Indoctrination doesn't just convince you what to think—it convinces you that you are thinking. It transforms citizens into believers, and then believers into foot soldiers, not for a country, but for a story. Indoctrination flattens a complex landscape into a moral fairytale, and in doing so, turns war into a kind of religious crusade, not a political or strategic negotiation.
The consequence is paralysis of reason. A public trained on indoctrination rather than inquiry cannot discern truth from weaponized narrative. They cannot evaluate asymmetric threats, because they do not recognize asymmetry. They are like the Russian soldiers in Ukraine, stuck fighting a conventional war that no longer exists.
Distrust metastasizes. Self-governance collapses. The state remains, but the people who were once capable of maintaining it for the people vanish into noise.
This is not a side effect of modern conflict. It is the goal of asymmetric actors. Not just to conquer, but to confuse. Not just to defeat, but to divide. To turn complexity into chaos, and chaos into compliance.
In the next section, we will conclude with a brief discussion on the lessons we didn't learn...
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