Col. John Boyd (US Air Force) was the originator of the OODA Loop Theory. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Boyd initially crafted the theory in terms of military strategy but eventually extended it from there to a whole host of other domains, including learning theory and business management. In this piece I want to explore Boyd’s OODA Loop in relation to the deep state/cryptocracy as a form of psychological warfare. The upshot of this analysis will be to offer some views as to how to become aware of and liberate oneself from the rampant disinformation, propaganda, and social engineering prevalent in our day.
This piece follows in a thread from a few others on the site I’ve written—namely this one exploring the attention-economy as a form of mind control & mental manipulation, as well as this one social media as a trauma-based zone of interaction.
First I’ll summarize Boyd’s OODA Loop and then use it to see the way in which the cryptocracy (“hidden hand” or "deep state") intentionally creates dissonance in our minds. It will be, by nature, a very introductory version of Boyd’s lucid theory. For readers interested in the application of Boyd’s thinking to contemporary issues of networked political tribes I highly recommend the work of John Robb (Global Guerrillas).
The OODA Loop, as mentioned, is an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.
The OODA Loop is a means of processing information intelligently and rapidly, thereby making better decisions. Boyd was especially clued in to the rapidly changing nature of technological acceleration. Boyd’s theory emphasizes decentralization and autonomous agents acting in flexible and agile ways. He believed that such groups could (and often did) “outsmart” large top-down models of command and control (like the US military for instance).
An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby ‘get inside’ the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage. Boyd developed the concept to explain how to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to be kept in continuous operation during combat. He also indicated that the phase of the battle has an important bearing on the ideal allocation of one's energies. (emphasis mine)
I’m going to come back to the point about “getting inside the enemy’s head” and scrambling their cognitive and emotional processing as that is the crucial to the dynamic of psychological operations. But before going there an additional key element to understand is that for Boyd the Observe and Orient phases were actually the most important.
Of the Orient phase specifically Boyd said:
“The second O, orientation—as the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences—is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act.”
Genetic heritage, cultural tradition and previous experiences are different ways of saying one’s worldview. A person’s worldview shapes what they experience as well as how they understand and conceptualize that experience. If an occulted power were to engineer a warped worldview for the masses such that there was large scale distortion in said collective worldview then that would open a perfect opportunity to filter people’s expectations and cognitive processing in such a way as to keep relevant information opaque (again much more on that shortly).
According to Boyd, the ability to cleanly relate to the environment and receive and filter (intelligently) relevant information is an art or skill that can be honed. If however the orient phase is faulty the entire loop can become fundamentally warped and lead to illusory cycles of faux-knowledge.
For Boyd the loop is an ongoing series of cycles that feed information back into the system. Every decision and action leads to a changed environment (an intervention) which then brings up a new need for updated observation. One’s orientation (worldview) should be constantly reassessed in light of new information, which then in turn influences the values and motivations behind future decisions which are then reflected in changed action. And so on and so forth.
In warfare terms, any military force that is able to more accurately assess the operational environment and respond flexibly and coherently with greater speed and precision will affect new outcomes on the battlefield which will disrupt the enemy’s information processing (their OODA loop) which will in turn lead them to paralysis, emotional reactivity, and poor decision making.
If the digital landscape (especially social media) is seen as a “battlefield of the mind” then the relevance of Boyd’s genius insights becomes immediately apparent and highly relevant. Cyberwarfare, digital “insurgencies”, and the like are all seeking to attack the enemy’s mental processing capacity rendering traditional command and control structures obsolete. (Again, for those interested in deep explorations of that topic see the work of John Robb, the John Boyd of our day).
As previously mentioned this is but the briefest of surveys of Boyd’s monumental achievement. This piece digs much further into the ins and outs of the theory for those so inclined. We’ve covered enough here however to give us a good foundation with which to apply the OODA Loop to the topic of the parapolitical, deep state, and hidden hand.
In other words, if we look at each of Boyd’s four phases I argue that we can see precise means whereby the hidden hand/cryptocracy creates distortion (intentionally) leading to poor decision making. The results of which are keeping opaque the nature of economic, social, and geopolitical reality. To break the power of such a spell requires a person to undertake their own OODA Loop in order that they may more cleanly understand reality.
That path, as I’ve argued elsewhere, can be a difficult one psychologically and is a kind of death and rebirth initiatory process. It’s also a process of learning to sift between genuinely sound research concerning conspiracies versus disinformation or false conspiracist thinking or what I call conspiracy hypotheses vs. conspiracy theories proper. (See also Ezekiel73's piece on the subject.)
Or more bluntly: Either deploy the OODA Loop for yourself or have it deployed on you.
The link between OODA Loop theory and conspiracy thinking comes through the notion of psychological operations (“psy ops”), a favorite term in studies of the para-political. The term psychological operations is a translation from the German, which literally translates into English as “worldview warfare.” I actually prefer the literal translation there—warfare on your/our worldview. Warfare then of course brings Boyd’s work directly to the fore because, as we covered, Boyd was originally a military strategist; his theory was born from his experience as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.
The cryptocractic elites, in other words, engage in warfare on your very worldview. The reason that is so problematic is that for Boyd the Orientation phase—where our worldview resides—is the single most important piece of the entire OODA Loop.
The warfare waged on the collective mental landscape attacks individuals at each of the four moments of the OODA Loop.
Observe
The cryptocracy keeps opaque relevant information and data. There are “missing trillions” that have gone into an occulted, black hole of global finance. Statistics are fudged. As the Reece Committee showed foundations create official cover for all kinds of shady dealings to go on: think Rockefeller Foundation, Trump Foundation, Clinton Foundation to name just a few. The Federal Reserve, Central Banks the world over including The Vatican Bank and The Bank of International Settlements are all private entities whose influence is vast and essentially untouchable.
CERN couldn’t be legally challenged because its charter essentially makes it a sovereign entity. The Panama Papers revealed that elites hide their money in off shore bank accounts.
As I’ve explored elsewhere on the site, after WWII major elements of the Nazi regime were welcome into the very heart of the West (particularly the Anglo-sphere) at critical points of scientific and technological research, financial power, and intelligence gathering leading to deep ties of said institutions with organized crime, terrorism, money laundering, and the drug trade. The full extent of MK-Ultra (heavily influenced by the Nazis) and its vast experimentation on civilians will never be fully known (as detailed by Ezekiel73 in his excellent piece on the subject.)
As Richard Dolan has pointed out, major aspects of the UFO file/secret space program exist now in private companies in the aerospace industry. As such they aren’t subject to things like FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests as they are non-governmental entities.
What about the heavy Wall Street and London financial firms involvement in the funding and exporting of the Bolsheviks to Russia as well as the Nazi Party in Germany? What about the same Wall Street East Coast blue blood types trying to a pull a coup d’etat against FDR? (Another one that’s down the memory hole for most people.)
The mainstream media does not discuss these issues. They simply are occulted. How is someone to Observe wisely when so much of the crucial information that is affecting one’s environment is hidden?
These are just some very preliminary examples. I could list literally hundreds of occulted pieces of key data. What one observes is what is socially approved to be observed—things like the latest celebrity scandal or faux-outrage. Boyd’s theory speaks of low-information environments like a fog of war where information is sketchy or the situation is in rapid flux, but bringing in the deep state takes that to an entire other level.
Orient
As Boyd himself stated, orientation is the most crucial of the four elements that make up the OODA Loop. Psychological warfare aims directly at attacking our orientation to reality, to leave us “dis-oriented.” Disorientation is a hallmark of trauma by the way.
William Engdahl’s important concept of “full spectrum dominance” is particularly relevant here. The so-called Grand or Master Plan is actually a series of interlocking plans or operations, applied across a multiplicity of life domains. It’s how hidden hands can be financing and manipulating social protest movements to their own ends. It’s how GMOs and food policy relate to energy monopolies which relate in turn to hidden systems of finance, which are intertwined with the black markets in weapons, drugs, and sex trafficking.
Full spectrum dominance is the need to apply a technocratic dream (nightmare actually) across all existing domains of human life. It’s why, for instance, the Rockefeller family was so keen on fomenting religious reform movements or why the deep state has been so tied to the human potential movement and various mystical, esoteric, and cultish sects. Religion needs to be controlled and made conducive to this larger agenda, so too must food and energy and media. See Joseph Farrell and Gary Lawrence’s book Rotten to The (Common) Core which details the intersection between standardized testing, pushes towards privatized online education models*, big data, and the surveillance state.
The family, religious communities, schooling, (plus media) these are the areas where a person’s worldview is most deeply formed. Control those domains and control the very minds themselves.
Consider the worldview of scientistic materialism. It is a fundamental orientation (a kind of meta-orientation) that dominates our world. As I covered in a previous piece exploring Giordano Bruno, scientistic materialism was a conspiracy to remove the understanding of magical and psychic capacities from the common person and make it the special preserve of an elite, who were then able to weaponize such psi phenomenon in order to cast their spell of illusion on the populace. When we know for instance that the SS as well as the CIA and the Soviets were involved in massive projects to study the effects of weaponizing paranormal phenomenon we know that there’s one official publicly sanctioned worldview (scientific materialism) but behind the scenes there is clearly another.
It is impossible to orient properly unless one sheds this false worldview that has been conditioned into them since they were in the womb. Otherwise one can only simple orient to the collective consensus “normal” reality.
Whenever there are major anomalous experiences the cryptocracy loves to create insane cover stories which serve a dual function. One to seek to re-normalize a non-ordinary experience. The second to perform a certain kind of mental magic whereby they show their power in the ability to make the most absurd claims and simply get away with them, thereby leaving many feeling powerless and cynical.
Here’s an example of what I mean…(I mentioned this one when Ezekiel73 and I were interviewed on the Integral Stage podcast.)
Squeaky Fromm, a member of the Manson family, who had not been charged in the Tate-LaBianca murders, sought to assassinate then US President Gerald Ford. She fired on him in a crowd and missed. Fromm was “talked down” after her failed attempt by an enigmatic individual in strange colored clothing who used a soothing voice and essentially hypnotized her on the spot (true story!).
How does one orient to such a story? For one, most people wouldn’t as who was taught that one in school? Secondly it requires an incredible amount of research and reading to be able to grasp all the threads that intersected in that experience.
In that one encounter we have:
The Manson Family
MK-Ultra-style assassins & hypnotic mind control
The JKF Assassination (Ford was on the Warren Commission)
The Rockefeller Family (Ford’s Vice President was Nelson Rockefeller who would’ve become president had the assassination attempt succeeded)
Watergate (Ford became President upon Nixon resigning from Watergate)
A person has to know deep details about each and every one of those events—not their public versions but their occulted versions—in order to be able to cogently comprehend everything going on in that one encounter. Reality, as they say, is stranger than fiction.
The official explanation for JFK’s assassination is a lone nut gunman firing off a magic bullet. That lone nut gunman was then murdered in public by Jack Ruby who had deep ties to organized crime. The official explanation for Oswald’s murder? Ruby claimed he didn’t want Jackie Kennedy to have to go through the pain of a public trial. Seriously, that was the official explanation.
Well that was Ruby’s story anyway until he decided later he wanted to actually talk about what really went down but then, as it so happens, came down with a very unexpected and aggressive form of cancer that killed him off before he could testify. That plus Jolly West, one of the chief psychiatrists of MK-Ultra fame, went to see Ruby in prison for “counseling” and then Ruby upon meeting with West proceeded to have a full on psychotic breakdown (which just so happened to be West’s area of research—whether one could break another person’s mind). Oops.
Silly Rabbit Trix are for the hidden hand.
Plus, we don’t have anywhere near the time or space to get into The Nine and their super creepy intersections with JFK’s murder.
Since I mentioned Manson how about the official explanation for those murders (aka The Helter Skelter Theory). Turns out that too was a cover story. Oops again.
Again these are just a very few specific examples. The number that could be cited here would be legion.
Since there’s so much hidden data (observe), then the basis of the orientation phase is faulty and limited information.
The CIA has funded incredible amounts of money not only into weaponizing the high strange/paranormal but also into more mundane domains like anthropology, sociology, psychology, as well as communication and media studies. The godfather of advertising (Edward Bernays) was an intelligence officer. He basically applied militarized propaganda techniques (along with his great uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious) in order to create commercial advertisements that would seek to “force” people into a series of unconscious and controlled desires. Remember that Joseph Goebbels said that everything he ever learned about propaganda he learned by studying advertisements from Madison Avenue.
The CIA sought to weaponize anthropology so that it could participate in social engineering (aka “culture creation”). The deep state has long studied mass human psychology in order that it may control it and shape it to its (deep state) ends. That longer game includes, as Dave McGowan’s meticulous research showed, the CIA’s involvement in the counterculture music scene of 60s California (also—note the Charles Manson connection again here, given his close ties to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys). McGowan also revealed the deep intelligence participation in the creation of the serial killer phenomenon (which again leads back to Manson).
Culture creation is a process to fundamentally (dis)orient a mass population’s Orientation phase of the OODA Loop. As Boyd said, that is the most important phase. Control that one and everything else falls into place.
Remember that for Boyd winning in warfare meant running one’s OODA Loop faster and more cogently, thereby gaining access to the “inner mind” of the opponent and allowing one to directly run interference on the opponent’s OODA Loop.
The cryptocracy sees the larger populace as the enemy. Consequently they are waging “worldview warfare” (psychological operations) towards their own technocratic goals.
The conspiracy path is largely one of coming into contact with occulted information (observe). Also one must come to “dis-spell” this foreign worldview implanted by the elite in the mind, upon which the “implanters” psychically feed, something David Icke of all strange people has been pointing out for years (as covered elsewhere on the site).
The path is a challenging one. Simply opening to conspiracy thinking is insufficient. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, even the red pill movement itself is a psyop.
Along those same lines, intelligence agencies spread disinformation and had double agents within Ufology, seeking to warp the study of UFOs to its own preferred narrative ends. Now that even the US government admits UFOs are real then the real game comes to the fore—how to interpret and frame the reality of the UFO phenomenon?
First one must have a clear orientation so that one has access to otherwise conventionally hidden data and then (just as importantly) is the capacity to interpret that data in a cohesive and discerning manner. It’s no good, for example, to be open to anomalous data but then have it translated into flat-eartherism or some other junk pseudo-conspiracy.
Decide + Act
All of the above shows how by the time most individuals come to the decision phase they have already been incepted. A kind of machinery has been placed into their brains—like a bizarro transhumanist vision—that, in a way, is then deciding and then acting based on those decisions.
The cryptocracy creates a seemingly open and combative democratic political fight between liberal and conservative parties. Everyone is meant to be on one side or other other. You’re supposed to look down or even hate anyone on the “other side”, think of them as stupid or even brainwashed. Meanwhile they think the same way towards their opponents.
Unfortunately dig a bit deeper and both political sides however are deeply intertwined to the nature of the military-industrial-intelligence-organized crime-banking complex. They might argue over this or that tax rate, have arguments about this or that social issue creating just enough actual difference to make it appear to the untrained eye as if there’s some ultimately and existentially meaningful difference between the two sides. The name for this process is a controlled dialectic. The elite are playing a higher game while the masses think this sham of a public game is where the real action is at (hint: it’s not!).
In that case, for such a person, the decision phase is all about whether to identify with liberal or conservative groupthink. That very decision itself shows that previous stages in the OODA Loop have already been warped (Observe + Orient). Whatever action is chosen by this person is an ultimately controlled decision—to vote for their preferred party, to only follow cable news and social media that reinforce their worldview, and so on. Those are faux decisions. The real rub (and dastardly genius of the thing) is the appearance of free choice and meaningful decisions when, in truth, the entire enterprise is engineered.
The only liberating decisions and actions that are truly available are choices about how best to extricate oneself from this machinery of domination. Examples might include growing your own food, learning to regulate your own emotions and healing from trauma, building genuine resilient community, creating art that shines through with transcendental beauty, paying off debt, educating yourself on the true natter of the power system, deploying means to protect your digital data and personal identity as much as possible, etc.
The rest of the supposed decisions and actions on the board are within the matrix of occulted control. Hard to admit but it’s sadly true.
Following Boyd’s theory something very interesting happens as one begins to make decisions and actions within an actual sphere of sovereign influence and choice. Those decisions and actions shift one’s observation and orientation to what is life-giving (The True, The Good, The Beautiful, and The One). Those observations and orientation take place within a closer connection to the ontological goodness at the heart of reality and bring a more hopeful worldview which then in a positively reinforcing manner brings clearer and wiser decisions and actions, leading us to orient and observe more and more to what is real and true and good. The nature of the transhumanist elitist nightmare, by contrast, is utterly plastic, fake, and, as Baudrillard said, like simulacra.
So Boyd’s theory works in both directions. It’s most definitely deployed by the cryptocracy as a means of creating cognitive and emotional dissonance in the general populace as a means to truamatize, isolate, and thereby more easily control. But the same pedagogy that Boyd outlines can be liberating and is the very (meta)process that is necessary to begin to free ourselves from the shackles of systemic and psychic control.
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* Think particularly in response to the pandemic with the profusion of online classes.