The Age of Deceit - Part 8

By Ron Matsen, President of Koinonia House

Worldwide War

Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.

Sun Tzu, The “Art of War”

Deception by diversion has always been a tactic used successfully by military commanders. From the Trojan Horse employed by the Greeks in the 13th Century BC to the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, tactical diversion has been a useful tool to gain an advantage on the battlefield. We can see an example of this type of deception in the Allied strategy for the invasion of Europe.

Deception by Diversion

As early as 1942, Adolf Hitler knew that a large-scale Allied invasion of France could turn the tide of the war in Europe. To ready for an invasion, Germany began construction on the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400- mile network of bunkers, pillboxes, mines, and landing obstacles up and down the French coastline. From the start, the top candidate for an Allied invasion was believed to be the French port city of Calais, only 20.7 miles across the English Channel from Dover.

The reason Germany chose to double-down Nazi defenses along the Calais coast was not only because of its proximity to England but because Hitler fell hook, line, and sinker for one of the most successful military deception schemes since the Trojan horse. Codenamed Operation Fortitude, the Allies used deception by diversion to convince German intelligence that the D-Day invasion would absolutely occur in Calais.

To give the appearance of a massive troop buildup in southeast England, the Allies created a largely phantom fighting force, the First U.S. Army Group, headed by George Patton, the American general whom the Nazis considered to be the enemy’s best commander and the logical man to lead a cross-channel invasion. They deceived Nazi aerial reconnaissance planes by fashioning dummy aircraft and an armada of decoy landing crafts, composed only of painted canvases pulled over steel frames, around the mouth of the River Thames. They even deployed inflatable Sherman tanks, which they moved to different locations under the cover of night and used rollers to simulate tire tracks left behind in their wake.

Thanks in large part to a brilliant Allied deception campaign of diverting attention away from the intended invasion site on the Normandy Beaches of France, the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, became precisely the turning point that the Germans most feared.

A Question of Perception

Our senses are the window for our soul. They feed information to our mind, which in turn determines our actions. Jesus taught, “The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness.”

Attention diversion is the key to illusion. Discerning the difference between helpful information and harmful illusions is key. It’s all about managing our perceptions. Attention is like mental money; be careful how you spend it.

Therefore, if an illusion fools our senses, then our perception will be poisoned, and our subsequent understanding will be flawed. Constant acceptance of an illusion as true information can lead us to be complacent where our mind is comfortable with the repeated and predictable patterns of the deception we now hold as truth.

In other words, we only notice a change when it occurs within the field of our narrow focus. We do not detect change where you don’t think a change should appear.

Just as the pickpocket relies on the victim being distracted, Satan also seeks to distract and destroy. We are all basically “single-processors” (one function at a time) which means that we will not notice a change in the peripheral areas outside our prime focus. As a result, we suffer from a kind of multiprocessing blindness, or as others call it, “change blindness.”

According to a 2005 study published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the term change blindness “refers to the surprising difficulty observers have in noticing large changes to visual scenes.”

This blindness leaves the victim vulnerable to illusion, misinformation, and outright deception.

Today, what are the major influences in the world that are constantly trying to gain influence over our hearts? What is the greatest source of input into people’s minds today? The answer is entertainment.

The Opioid of Entertainment

Entertainment has become the opiate of the masses. From the Colosseum in Rome to the cinemas around the world today, people seem to crave diversion from rather than connection to real life. I constantly see people with their faces looking down at their mobile world rather than looking up to engage the real world they hardly acknowledge.

According to Future Source, global entertainment spending is to grow to $439 Billion USD the end of 2021 with SVOD (Subscription Video on Demand) surging. One of the most popular programs on an SVOD service was “Game of Thrones.” During its 73 episodes from 2011 to 2019, it was awarded 59 Primetime Emmy Awards.

This is disturbing to me as Game of Thrones was heavily criticized for its depiction of women and sexual violence. Women are raped, forced into sexual slavery, or subjected to other gender-based violence. They rarely have a choice of who they marry, a situation all too common for women and girls in the real world.

Based on this terrible plotline, the series was incredibly popular. How can this happen in today’s world where on the one hand, society champions the cause of women and then on another are entertained by their horrible mistreatment?

Violence is a popular theme in entertainment. It is the sad fruit of objectification by characterization, villainization, and ultimately dehumanization. As a prime entertainment element, it promotes the devaluing of human life.

Another means of soft-selling violence is to present it as a benevolent act of a superhero. Of the top 30 highest-grossing films of all time (as of end of 2019), 18 are about either aliens or superhumans saving the earth through violence.

The quest for entertainment reaches beyond the domain of TV and Movies. This is where viewers become participants in their own adventure through the virtual world of gaming.

According to NewZoo.com, 2020 saw an annual rise in video game revenue to $178B USD involving 2.81B Players. That is more than 1/3 of the world’s population of 7.77B.

Statista.com reports the most popular games in USA are:

Call of Duty (War and Violence) 68M Players 36%

Grand Theft Auto (Action and Violence) 64M Players 34%

Fortnite (Action and Violence) 59M Players 31%

Super Smash Bros. (Fighting and Violence) 51M Players 27%

Pokemon GO (Augmented Reality Violence) 51M Players 27%

The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim (Action and Violence) 40M Players 21%

Halo (War and Violence) 40M Players 21%

Overwatch (War and Violence) 38M Players 20%

League of Legends (War and Violence) 32M Players 17%

Do you see a pattern here with all these “entertainment portals”? In all formats, violence (in one form or another) is a dominant feature.

Psychology Today reports: “According to the market-research group Nielsen, adults spend over 11 hours per day interacting with media. That’s up from 9 hours and 32 minutes just four years ago. Of those 11 hours, 4 hours and 46 minutes are spent watching TV.”

Psychology Today reports: “For kids ages 8-12, the same Common Sense Media survey report found that they spent 6 hours per day interacting with media. Kids ages 2-5 spend around 4 hours 35 minutes per day in front of a screen (e.g., watching TV, videos, gaming).”

Therefore, the average person devotes 20% of their 24-hour day to some form of video entertainment.

What starts as fascination becomes an obsession to the point of captivating our minds. So let me ask again, what is the greatest source of input into people’s minds today? By now, I believe you can see that the answer is entertainment.

Deception by Saturation (overwhelming input)

One of the most effective ways of neutralizing the detecting devices of the enemy is through sensor saturation. This covert countermeasure overwhelms the observer and blinds their defensive sensors.

“In the early hours of the Allied invasion of France, the RAF dropped around 500 dummy paratroopers far from the actual D-Day airborne landing zones as part of Operation Titanic. In addition, paper strips covered with aluminum were deployed along the French coast, which on German radar appeared to be a continuous blip that could be mistaken for an approaching fleet.”

The blinding and binding effect of the global data deluge is taking its toll every day. We are witnessing the result of overstimulated ostrichlike humans who have their heads buried in a world of harmful selfindulgence—a world where they are blind to the real threats surrounding them.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) reports, “Hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence on children and teenagers have found that children may:

• become “immune” or numb to the horror of violence,

• begin to accept violence as a way to solve problems,

• imitate the violence they observe on television; and

• identify with certain characters, victims and/or victimizers.

We have seen plenty of evidence that in a wartime scenario, keeping a clear head is paramount.

The Sensibility of a Soldier

The apostle Paul warned his young apprentice,

“3 You therefore must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. 4 No one engaged in warfare entangles himself with the affairs of this life, that he may please him who enlisted him as a soldier.”

2 Timothy 2:3-4

What is the answer to this troubling trend? Is there a survival guide for the soul under siege? Please do not get me wrong here. I am not advocating that we run and hide in a cave somewhere. The Bible gives us all the answers we need to safely transit the minefield of the modern media onslaught.

King Solomon warned,

19 The way of the wicked is like darkness; They do not know what makes them stumble. 20 My son, give attention to my words; Incline your ear to my sayings. 21 Do not let them depart from your eyes; Keep them in the midst of your heart; 22 For they are life to those who find them, And health to all their flesh. 23 Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it [spring] the issues of life. 24 Put away from you a deceitful mouth, And put perverse lips far from you. 25 Let your eyes look straight ahead, And your eyelids look right before you. 26 Ponder the path of your feet, And let all your ways be established. 27 Do not turn to the right or the left; Remove your foot from evil.

Proverbs 4:19-27

The apostle Paul offers this encouragement,

10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. 11 Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

Ephesians 6:10-13