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Laetus in Praesens Alternative view of segmented documents via Kairos

1999 | Draft

Strategic Briefing for Satan

Based on professional insights from preemptive news and image management

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The Dialogue guideline links below transfer to specific participant roles in Towards a New Order of Meeting Participation
Note that the Oppose links below each transfer to the corresponding item in the Strategic Briefing for the Messiah
(which links back to here).


Briefing

  1. Promote new initiatives wherever possible, notably as a sign of progress and growth. Encourage production of more goods, concepts and people, or alternatively their incorporation or entrainment by such initiatives.

    Advantages: Distracts from any implications of irresponsibility on the part of "developers", researchers, or producers of large families -- or from any attention to longer-term impacts or wider consequences. Facilitates destabilization of healthy social and environmental processes that can, if necessary, be stigmatized as "outdated". Increases the possibility of undermining existing initiatives with a track record of long-term sustainability, whilst building premature dependency on new and unproven processes. Confuses the values of production and reproduction -- and obscures any understanding of their problematic consequences. Facilitates the marginalization of vulnerable initiatives in favour of the emergence of monolithic undertakings. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  2. Promote and appeal for peace and solidarity on the occasion of any conflict. Promote processes of reconciliation between factions with intractable differences. Stress the importance of disarmament, especially of the vulnerable. Advise patience, despite calls for urgent action from those in fear.

    Advantages: Appealing for peace is good positioning strategy for you. It ignores the vulnerability of those who feel a need to defend themselves and may be prevented from doing so. It ensures lack of vigilance of which others can take violent advantage, especially if the vulnerable have been disarmed and have been offered only token protection. The track record of widespread appeals for peace suggests that they tend to detract from realistic efforts to prevent conflict. The strategy inhibits any efforts to reframe the relationship in subtler ways that might offer the possibility of more viable, creative relationships not dependent on simplistic reconciliation and agreement. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  3. Promote widespread use of valued words and cultural symbols, especially for controversial purposes.

    Advantages: Indiscriminate use erodes the significance of the values with which they are associated. Reduces the legitimacy and credibility of the value originally associated with the word. Examples include: "dialogue", "peace", association of the Ode to Joy with soft drink advertising, etc  [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  4. Emphasize, whenever possible, issues of security and confidentiality as a justification for restrictive measures, especially with respect to access to information.

    Advantages: "National security" can be most effectively used to disguise initiatives, including widespread electronic surveillance, that would otherwise be widely questioned and condemned. Any criticism can be easily stigmatized as disloyalty, politically suspicious, or even dangerously subversive. Equivalent use can be made of "corporate security", purportedly in order to ensure healthy competitive advantage. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  5. Promote excellence, superiority and being "Number 1" as in the best interests of a healthy, vigorous society and a prime indication of achievement.

    Advantages: Marginalizes and disempowers the maximum number of people, organizations, cultures, or nations as "losers". For example: the Olympic Games as a highly efficient producer of losers; the stress on "market leadership" as a condition necessarily only available to the few. Reinforces belief in the need for the "best" in the case of: a lawyer (to achieve justice in the courts); a physician or therapist (to recover health); a scientist (to ascertain the truth); a teacher or school (for a quality education); a spiritual counsellor (for appropriate guidance); a musician (for worthwhile entertainment); etc. -- thereby ensuring that the majority, without hope of this privilege, experience a sense of extreme disadvantage. This approach inhibits the efforts amongst the many ordinary people to evolve new forms of organization not dependent on competition for leadership or excellence, especially if those they then rely on can be marginalized as "unqualified". [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  6. Encourage any form of specialized focus on isolated, obvious, soluble issues. Emphasize the need for hard evidence in support of insight into complex relationships.

    Advantages: Distracts attention away from the complexities of any systemic perspective, highlighting indicators that reinforce very partial perspectives, and making it easy to question subtler links as "unproven". This offers degrees of freedom to any exploitative initiative sufficiently flexible to maneuver across specialized boundaries.  [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  7. Promote tolerance, equality, and fairness, especially in its more tokenistic forms. Call emphatically for justice, by focusing on immediate causes and on retribution against obvious scapegoats.

    Advantages: Protects those who promote and benefit most from injustice and who are most capable of sustaining a pattern of injustice. Provides a highly efficient disguise for genuine intolerance and inequality. Efforts to question the token nature of such initiatives can easily be stigmatized as discriminatory and in need of corrective measures. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  8. Promote action on any polar extreme, especially action that can be labelled "positive".

    Advantages: Develops a fortress mentality opposed to the contrary pole with which no creative relationship is then necessarily possible -- thus increasing vulnerability to chaotic emergence of what it may represent. Ensures marginalization of efforts to handle and transcend simplistic polarization. Provides a perfect disguise for contrary initiatives of a more questionable nature - especially since any critical assessment can then easily be stigmatized as unproductively "negative" or "cynical".  [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  9. Encourage celebration, awards, and prizes, especially when these can be associated with token rather than real achievements.

    Advantages : Focuses hopes and creative energy unproductively, often over long preparatory periods. Diminishes expectations and builds up a sense of disaffection, hollowness and ineffectuality. Usefully transforms cultural symbols into meaningless tokens.  [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  10. Focus visibly, vigorously and pragmatically on immediate concrete responses to issues. Promote simplistic "wars" and "campaigns" in response to challenges calling for subtler responses.

    Advantages: Develops a firefighting sense of priorities insensitive to subtleties. Effectively obscures the medium-term opportunities of subsequently rolling-back, or diluting, any such remedial action once attention has shifted elsewhere. Any focus on the immediate creates and protects degrees of freedom for exploitative longer-term initiatives. Encourages antiquated military strategies in response to complex challenges requiring the equivalent of postmodern guerrilla strategies for success. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  11. Promote benevolent universal plans, declarations and manifestos to which all are encouraged to subscribe.

    Advantages: Especially where reference to potential learnings from previous initiatives can be discouraged as irrelevant, the track record of such momentarily absorbing initiatives indicates that they are essentially forgettable. History is then condemned to repeat itself. Such initiatives distract from the lack of effective action on their purported focus of concern. They encourage apathy by creating an impression of effective action. Failure to support such simplistic initiatives can easily be stigmatized as opposing their success.  [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

  12. Promote sensitivity to youth, health and beauty in all its most obvious forms.

    Advantages: Creates anxiety and uncertainty at all ages, but especially amongst those who acquire power with age. Encourages complacency and arrogance amongst those who benefit temporarily from such attributes and erodes their ability to develop creative relationships with those who do not. Develops tension and disrespect between the generations and the differently endowed. [Oppose] [Dialogue guideline]

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The art for you is to do as little possible, dividing in order to rule those anxious to act to further their own selfish interests.

These strategies will create viable, and essentially undetectable, contexts from which you and your minions can act freely and with most effect. Each strategy benefits from weaknesses in particular types of people who will be your allies in denying your strategic intentions.

It is essential that you support every step to undermine any effort to recognize the double nature of these strategies - and especially how their complementarity provides you with a prime advantage. In their confusion about this vital distinction, people will do your work for you.

Consistent with your expressed requirement, these strategies will enable many people to experience the pain of your presence, although they will never be able to articulate their understanding with sufficient credibility to counteract them.

The challenge is always to position you so that, in despair at the ineffectiveness of their actions, people will perceive you to be their saviour

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