Strive to maintain balance and hold to the middle way. Beware of manipulators, sending you astray. Not all is always as it seems. The growing army of white supremacists and of far right Muslims, activists for every cause.
A cyber war is in full swing, raging on virtual battlefields everywhere. The protagonists not always teenage keyboard warriors, hammering with rage. No, but professional sock-puppets funded by oligarchs and global superpowers, sometimes to favour commercial concerns, sometimes to play divide and conquer.
Glavset, the trolls from Olgino, dispatch weaponised words into Europe and the Americas from the heart of St. Petersburg. Not far from the picturesque village of Upavon in Wiltshire, Division 6 conducts its own cyber-warfare missions, pumping out digital propaganda aligned to Britain’s objectives. In every nation, multiple troll farms, sometimes state-sanctioned, sometimes independent, playing games to socially engineer unsuspecting populations.
How often have we been sent into a whirlwind of rage by a post on social media, which knocks us off course for weeks? Unbeknownst to us, we have been socially engineered by strategists working to weekly goals scrawled on a whiteboard in a computer lab. For sure, Cambridge Analytica was the tip of the iceberg.
Still yourself. Disconnect, if you have to. Hold firm to the way of the prophets, be unshaken by events. Dust off your telescope and cast your eyes to the heavens, taking the night sky as your guide: witnessing the vastness of the universe you will recall your purpose: not for naught was all of this created. Be not quick to anger. Do not react to everything you hear. Be wary of propaganda sown in your heart by intelligence agencies playing a long game for global domination.
Walk upright along the path, deaf to the great clamour around you. Take your living faith as a shield against the onslaught of the mischief-makers, whether tapping away at rows of terminals in a troll farm or the lone rebel for a cause. Take the middle way.
Last modified: 9 June 2020