We’re not in the world we all know anymore, we’re in your imagination. Anything is possible.

Imagine you are an autocrat, a despot, or a dictator of some sort. From your own experiences, you know the people around you are too uninformed and petty to make decisions of governance. Generally speaking, most people aren’t smart enough or respectable enough to make their own decisions. So, really, everything would be better if you just took some of their decisions into your own more capable hands—they’ll probably be happier living managed, peaceful, and profitable lives.

However, there is a country whose foundational values are anathema to what you know. This country—let’s call it “America” for short—has the world’s most powerful military and massive geopolitical influence. This state and its clichéd cries of freedom and democracy are a real threat to you—you’ve seen the destruction they rain on those who threaten their national interests, but you have no hope of waging a military war against such a power and winning. So what do you do? You have a strategy to defeat them, but it is going to take a long time. That’s okay.

You can be very patient.

So what is the plan? Well, the first step is to disrupt their citizen’s ability to think. You have to subvert their education system somehow—make them learn nonsense instead of logic and critical thinking. Give their computers bad code to run that keeps them running in circles, to make an analogy. But that’s not all, you’ll also want to find a way to reduce their investment in education in general. How can you do this? Well, America values money very highly, so you create some shell companies (these actually work and function as a normal company, but with an ulterior product), organizations, and NGOs.You use these entities to fund your operatives and certain locals (known colloquially as “useful idiots”) to push agendas that will get either one of your objectives met – whether it’s replacing solid curriculum with garbage nonsense that removes Americans’ ability to think logically from one side, or de-funding the whole educational system entirely from the other. Either way, it’s your win. You know that this is not something that will happen over night, but it’s okay. You can be patient. You don’t mind waiting decades, as long as this threat to you and your family’s way of being is removed.

Now that people aren’t so good at thinking anymore, it’s time to do what you can do to influence their media, to see if you can feed their citizens information that makes your way of doing things more appealing. Again using shell companies, organizations, and NGOs, but with a lot more individuals on the ground for this effort, you do your best to feed certain narratives to media organizations. You pay people to protest certain things because you know those things are highly inflammatory and will get lots of media coverage. You fund media companies who will accept your money, which makes it less likely for those media companies to publish negative news about your or your family’s interests, and perhaps will make them more sympathetic to using your country’s state media more often as sources for articles. This pleases you very particularly, to see your own propaganda being reported by news media who take themselves as legitimate journalists (something there are fewer and fewer of in your part of the world, you note with a smile).

Then you have the coup de grace. The third prong of your strategy: You do your best to distract and degenerate the minds of Americans. You introduce social media applications designed to show short clips that destroy attention spans, feed garbage data, and are highly dopamine-addictive. You fund movies, TV shows, and even games subtly designed to encourage degenerative behavior or in-fighting. Most people don’t mind too much, though. If anything, they seem to enjoy giving in to their base desires.

After many years of waging this attack, you see America on its knees—its citizens and politicians unknowingly engorged on your propaganda, few people with the ability to think and parse information, and, above all else, everyone distracted from what’s really been going on. You smile again, because the country that you used to fear and gave you cause to question yourself daily is now being run by people who have been fed your version of reality. Their wires crossed, the country no longer seeks to advance or even protect its values abroad. You are finally free to make your mark on the world now. They will remember your name in glory for thousands of years. Victory.

Let’s pause now.

How different would the world of this game be from our current one? If you understood this article, you now understand the game that is being played at one of the highest domains.

Let’s play again, but now, as a citizen of the world with an understanding of the game being played. How could you play your part differently to get a better outcome for you and your family? The first step to winning a game is to understand what the game is.

Let’s play a game.

Douglas Black is a Consultant, Federal IT Contractor, Writer, Editor, Music Producer, Lecturer, and proud Dad.