How often do you hear this?  “What war? They didn’t say it on the TV, so it must be happening somewhere else.”

How come that the same individual who considers a house without burglar alarm “unsafe” will yawn while reading about his own country’s shrinking military potential and unsecured borders?

Writer and humorist Douglas Adams, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, mockingly defined “SEP [Somebody Else’s Problem] field” as relying on “people’s natural disposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.”

In warfare, perceptual blindness is no laughing matter, and it stems from a strategic, operational framework.

Cognitive tunneling

A person thrown down from the “self-actualization” top of Maslow’s pyramid of needs to the lowest steps, representing basic needs such as work, shelter, and safety, is to be more focused on his own difficult situation than at the political and social environment.  If the main goal of political warfare is to alter a “subject’s” opinions and actions, already the prelude of cognitive capture makes many people think inside the box.

Disinformation

Acts of deception are easier to swallow when washed down with a few drops of the truth.  Interestingly, such cocktails, spiked with hostile intent, used to be served exclusively to the enemy.  The situation gets alarming when citizens are receiving straight-up blatant lies and manipulation as a part of domestic menu.

Gradual loss of empathy

Empathy is a key operative of every nation’s immune system, because it’s allied with solidarity and emotional intelligence, capable of detecting the falsehood of propaganda.  There are several methods and stages involved in the process of “desensitization” and the subsequent crafting of entitled “me, me, me” generations.  In this type of organized coercion, the media’s role is to promote intellectual laziness, narcissism, and pseudo-ideologies absolving us of our lack of principles and feelings.

Perceptual blindness guarantees easily duped voters, unfazed by violation of rights because they are convinced that it can happen only to someone else.

In a treacherous dictatorship, psychological warfare could be defined as the planned use of propaganda and other actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, and behavior of citizens in such a way as to support the achievement of the enemy’s goals and the dictator’s whims.

Not only the warriors who live by their creed, but every patriot has to place the country first, never quit, and put new life into General MacArthur’s adage: “We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.”  What is left to say to those who still prefer to believe that it’s someone else’s war?  Wake up and smell the nukes.