The Present.

One thing I will say about today's wars and the war of the future. They will continue to be wars between empathic consciousness and sociopathic consciousness, and therefore wars about information.

Empathic consciousness, to the degree that it is empathic, will tend to be peaceful. "I feel your pain. So I will not inflict pain on you." But sociopathic consciousness will continue to be as warlike as it has always been. It will look for weakness and strike where it finds it.

But empathy is itself a weakness. It is unarmored, while sociopathic consciousness is completely armored. The only armor empathic consciousness can have is what it is not allowed to perceive. What it is not allowed to know will not wound it.

So therefore the wars of today and tomorrow will be primarily information wars.

Today, not only does news get reported in a 24 hours news cycle with live feeds and on-scene interviews with participants, but also with "file footage." Intermixed with live reporting is reporting on previous reporting. The global media consciousness has developed something like a global memory and a permanent record.

But it is still subject to the phenomenon Malcome Muggeridge observed: the very first reporting on an item tends to set the framework for how the participants are viewed and judged and therefore how they will be reported on later. But now with a 24 hours news cycle, Malcome Muggeridge's observation has been duly noted and there is now a new media job added to that of reporting: spin doctoring. The spin doctor's job is to influence the initial on-scene reporting so that it reflects the "story" the spin doctor wishes to see propagated. "Spin" the initial story the "right" way, and all else follows from that. The spin doctor is the new warrior in the information wars. Exhibit A is the saga of Jihad Unspun. A site that pro-ports to be an un-spinning of information that itself tries to spin information another way. (And a clumsy operation, too, unless the proprietor of that website is NOT in fact a CIA operative and the CIA has in fact played a double game in making her look like one to the jihadis).

So in the present and the future, information is going to be controlled, covered up, spun, or debated by media hand puppets in order to give empathic consciousness an even chance of winning. Our generation will be the one to know the least about what is actually going on in its wars even while swimming in the most immediate information about its wars.

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