Dark Pragmatism and the Ethics of Cognitive Warfare
Western Cognitive Warfare
The West struggles with cognitive warfare, and it urgently needs to get better. Its defenses are weak. Its tactics are limited and outdated. It still hasn’t grown out of the belief that the end of the Cold War meant that Western liberal democracy had won, that the End of History has arrived, and that everyone else simply needs to catch up with it.
This article argues that these struggles stem from the unique constraints that the West faces in the domain of information warfare. Western countries operate from Enlightenment ideals of individual liberties and human rights. These values make Western societies places that many others aspire to move to and take part in. The freedom of information and thought that follows from them created the conditions for rapid scientific and technological progress that the rest of the world is now benefiting from. Such values are, therefore, worth fighting for. But they can also make the West vulnerable. An open society is open to hostile actors and messaging, and the commitment to freedom of expression prevents the West from shutting those actors down. Humanitarian commitments prevent the West from sowing the same division and harm that their adversaries sow in their populations. It is playing under Queensberry Rules while its adversaries get to fight dirty.
Ethics and Cognitive Warfare
The problem, then, is to work out how the West can fight back effectively while remaining something worth fighting for. This is a current topic of concern for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose most recent cognitive warfare concept identifies the tension between operating within an ethical framework while gaining advantage over adversaries who operate without those ethical constraints. A small number of ethical frameworks (RAND, Skerker, Henschke) have been proposed in order to address this tension, largely arguing for adherence to classic Western Kantian imperative norms of autonomy and dignity.
This article argues that a more fundamental philosophical rethink is warranted. Western Enlightenment values include a commitment to the pursuit of truth. The way the secular West understands truth is through a metaphysically realist framework. Truth is out there; any statement about the world can be determined to be valid by finding corresponding facts to back it up. Accordingly, fact-checking comes first when faced with problem information: if the Russian claim that the CIA created AIDS can be debunked by waving the right facts at people, they will update their beliefs and peacefully move on.
In reality, however, merely offering up the truth for all to see is not sufficient. Human beings are not, in fact, wholly truth-optimizing creatures. There are all sorts of other motivations that determine how people work out whether information is valid: whether it validates their emotions of righteous anger, whether it boosts their social status, whether it advances their political aims, for example.
Western adversaries understand this. They take advantage of an open information environment containing many different highly emotive stories appealing to many different groups within society, and boost them, amplifying social and political division in the process. This poses a profound problem for truth and meaning from the Western naïve realist perspective; truth is either there, identifiable, or it isn’t. Multiple competing claims to truth are mutually contradictory: they break this system.
The only way to philosophically cope with all these truths is a recourse to relativism, in which everything is true from its own perspective – but this also means that there are no shared truths. The identity politics that have torn through the Western political Left, in particular, break alliances through multiple competing truth claims backed up by a standpoint epistemology in which every individual is speaking their truth, and if others don’t share that individual’s background, they can’t critique it. The Western way of making sense of this is to see all of these different and apparently contradictory stories as the end of truth, leaving Western societies in a “post-truth” era in which there can be no truth and no shared grand metanarrative.
The Russian Narrative is Coherent
This situation is partly of the West’s own making and partly the work of decades of diligent undermining operations in the information environment by Russia. Given this vector of attack, it makes sense that Russia itself is mistaken in the West for a country whose pathological addiction to untruth has made it an agent of chaos, a chaos that supposedly started in Russia itself and spreads like a virus to everything it touches. But this is a profound strategic error. Russia does not lack shared truths; it is, instead, operating in the service of a powerful and highly coherent grand metanarrative steeped in an understanding of its history, its values, and its ambitions as a global power.
Russia’s Eurasian exceptionalism, neither European nor Asian, but spanning both civilizations; its dominant Great Power role at the center of this vast sphere of influence; its place as the defender of values that the relativistic West has trashed in a foolhardy pursuit of progress – all of these ideas shape Russian strategy, but also, critically, are shared in some form by many ordinary Russians.
From this footing, Russia fights what it believes to be a civilizational war of information. Yes, it employs unorthodox and aggressive tactics, but it does not engage in those methods solely with the intention of sowing chaos. Russia’s aim is to allow Russia’s interests and Russia’s story to prevail, and its approach to truth within this framework is better understood as a dark form of pragmatism.
Philosophical pragmatism is the view that information is true if it works and proves useful, given other information that is available to us, our values and our goals. Russia’s approach is pragmatic in this sense: truth is what works, and its informational warfare efforts are ruthlessly set on outcome-aligned contextually helpful truths. Sometimes, these may be wildly at odds with observable facts from a Western perspective. But the lies aren’t random; they’re strategic.
Russian truth claims, whether empirically provable or not, are instrumental to a set of shared objectives. Within this system, a statement that is coherent with the web of values, narratives, and goals that shapes the Russian mindset is a valid statement. If truth is determined by its coherence within this network of other ideas, those ideas can all hold different weightings according to their context. Russian greatness and the civilizational importance of the advancement of Russian interests are weighted very heavily in Russia’s information efforts. The impact of Russian active measures on target audiences and any collateral harm is barely weighted at all.
Dark Pragmatism
If Russia were a person, these would be considered to be Dark Triad traits. The Dark Triad is a set of personality traits comprising narcissism, Machiavellianism (or manipulation), and psychopathy. Russian greatness demands that Russia must do what it needs to do to reclaim its entitled sphere of influence, whatever the human consequences. These traits carry their own weight for Russian truths. The West might not like those traits or share those truths, but it is strategically better to work towards an understanding of their coherence for Russia. Russia is thinking about information warfare through a pragmatic lens, but it is a version weighted by Dark Triad traits that this article labels dark pragmatism.
Adopting pragmatism can offer a way for a more strategically flexible Western fightback, too. The founders of pragmatism never claimed that “what works” was evaluated in a moral vacuum. They argued that what works must be assessed against goals and values – the version of the world that is fought for.
The West can take its own pragmatic position in information warfare, but one informed by its own values of autonomy, human dignity, and freedom of information. Instead of being constrained by the idea that all that is needed is to point out untruths, the West can consider how best to craft narratives that resonate emotionally and have the political impact that is needed.
If dark pragmatism is weighted towards regime security, geopolitical dominance, and unconstrained by human dignity, autonomy, or consent, a Western humanist pragmatism could be weighted towards the security and flourishing of democratic societies, and constrained by commitment to human dignity, autonomy, and freedom of information.
A commitment to those values may be a constraint, but it can also become an asset if used effectively. People do, after all, want to be treated well and have freedoms and opportunities.
The West doesn’t need to give up on factual accuracy, either. Instead of naively presenting the facts because truth is inherently good, facts can be presented because societies built on a shared and accurate understanding of the world are more resilient, adaptive, and ultimately freer. A narrative that is coherent with Western values, and coherent with available evidence, is a valid narrative to share.
Instead of assuming that facts speak for themselves, the focus can be to tell stories that give those facts maximum emotional purchase and lead to behaviors that are in line with the West’s desired values. This would entail a pivot from purely highlighting the falsehoods of disinformation towards engaging in a robust and coherent response to messaging that seeks to undermine the value of the Western civilizational project.
Avoiding the DMMI trap
It would also offer a different way to understand and deal with propaganda and hostile messaging. The idea of DMMI (disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, and information) operates within a naïve realist framework. Disinformation is untrue information shared on purpose, misinformation is untrue information shared by people who don’t understand it is untrue, malinformation is information that may or may not be true that is shared with the intention of causing harm, and information is factual content shared in good faith without intent to mislead or cause harm.
Authorities focused on debunking dis- and misinformation often end up inadvertently sowing even more societal division. Events in recent years have demonstrated that good-faith accusations of disinformation can often be mistaken due to fast-changing facts on the ground or countered with equally good-faith counterclaims that the information in question is true. It was, for example, disinformation that COVID was leaked from a lab, until it wasn’t.
There is too much data in the world for us to be able to use all of it when making factual assessments. We are therefore always selectively deploying evidence to some degree – sometimes more accurately, sometimes less. Authorities are in this position too, operating from expert advice that is subject to its own inevitable biases.
Authorities may, therefore, genuinely believe a statement to be disinformation based on their preferred sources of information, while the internet allows the public access to alternative sources of information that offer a different perspective while also being factually backed up. In open societies, it can be risky for authorities to dismiss this information as untrue: it may look like lies or censorship, and can undermine the public’s trust in them, even without assistance from Russia.
Instead of getting caught up in this divisive true/false game, a better and more pragmatic strategy would be to focus on malinformation. Any information shared with the strategic objective of causing harm should be considered not for its veracity but for its capacity for harm. This can be done transparently: if foreign agents weaponize political differences between left and right, this can be highlighted as a threat to democratic norms in which multiple opinions can and should coexist in society’s shared best interests.
Malinformation can then be viewed in a pragmatic context: information that is wielded against the web of interests and values the West is operating from. The same item of information, such as Ukrainian or Taiwanese opinion polling, could be valid from a Western perspective and malinformation from an enemy perspective, or vice versa; it could be factually supported, or not; what matters is its effect on Western goals.
Malinformation may be true, but it is usually only a biased and cherry-picked fraction of the truth, disseminated to create harm. It is this harm that needs to be addressed.
Conclusion – A Way Forward
Every strategic decision involves trade-offs, and taking a more flexible approach will inevitably throw up problematic edge cases where maximum operational efficacy risks being at odds with informational transparency. For example, when does acceptable emotional engagement become manipulation?
Here, values need to be weighed between remaining ethically constrained while attaining operational goals. Emotional engagement might remain within the ethical constraints when: it’s paired with accurate information; it helps people act on values they already hold; it could be publicly defended if revealed; it doesn’t exploit vulnerable psychological states for ulterior purposes.
The information war is lost when the West is constrained by inflexible red lines, sets of permissions and limitations on its actions, premised on an inflexible view of reality in which truths are black and white and any variation from this worldview is held as a symptom of pathology.
A multitude of opinions and the freedoms to express them need to be contained within the Western informational sphere at home. The West also needs to be able to operate nimbly within the diversity of narratives that exist in the geopolitical world. Western adversaries’ pragmatism has served their ends well; now it is time for the West to embrace its own, better version of pragmatism, in order to defend a better world.
