ONE of the key characters in Victor Pelevin's marvellous 2008 short story, "The Hall of the Singing Caryatids”, is described as a “political technologist”. The story concerns a bizarre scheme he has hatched to lure back to Russia an oligarch who owes his billions to the commercial exploitation of "military neuro-linguistic programming" techniques. Like much of Mr Pelevin's work, the story takes for granted that the reality we perceive is really a flimsy ideological hallucination cobbled together by various powerful actors interested in guiding our actions for reasons of their own. His work is more sophisticated than that of many latter-day Orwell imitators in that in his world different actors are simultaneously cobbling together incompatible hallucinations, and most of them are doing a hilariously inept job of it. I thought of Mr Pelevin's "military neuro-linguistic programming" while reading Keith Darden's New York Times op-ed yesterday, "The War on Truth in Ukraine." Like many independent Russian commentators, Mr Darden focuses on the surreal quality of the information environment in Ukraine, including Russia's use of mysterious insignia-less "green men" (pictured), its incitement of separatist uprisings (that look like a directed reality-TV version of Kiev's EuroMaidan), the (probably fake) threats against Jews, and other untraceable incidents of "provokatsiya". Mr Darden is careful to note that both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian actors are engaging in these information-manipulation efforts (though the Russians are obviously much better at it), forming at least two incompatible visions of reality in separate, polarised camps. "Doubt’s shadow has not left Ukraine," he writes. "Instead, the failure to agree on facts—to share a basic reality—has become the norm."

The elusiveness of truth is a symptom and an accelerant of Ukraine’s descent into uncertainty. Legitimate authority—governmental, factual, legal, moral—is unrelentingly being effaced...Thomas Hobbes wrote eloquently about life in the absence of political authority, but he couldn’t foresee the modern fracturing of facts and narratives that accompanies its collapse. Today, as authority in all its forms is degraded, life becomes not only “nasty, brutish and short”; it becomes so riddled with disinformation and lies that there is no clear path to settlement. And the void in trust invites armed action.

At about the point where Mr Darden begins to speak of the "failure to agree on facts" and the degradation of "legitimate authority", one begins to wonder just how separate what is happening in Ukraine is from political trends in the rest of the world. To put things another way: to me, the techniques of propaganda and ideological manipulation Vladimir Putin's government is employing in Ukraine feel new, adept, and cutting-edge; they seem to tell us something about where the world is heading. But how different is the fragmentation of reality in Ukraine from the much-commented polarisation of reality in America? For that matter, is this really anything new, or is it just the latest version of the types of propaganda that political actors have always used to split or unify target populations?

On the first question, it's interesting to compare a recent study by the Pew Foundation's internet research project that mapped American Twitter conversation networks around different kinds of topics. The researchers observed six distinct patterns of networking that developed around different issues. For example, when breaking news stories are politically neutral, they may develop into "fractured communities" of people conversing with each other, each around their own favourite information source; or they may turn into a hub-and-spoke model, with many communities all disseminating retweets from a central major-media source. For political topics, however, the result is often what the researchers called a "polarised crowd" model.

If a topic is political, it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape. They form two distinct discussion groups that mostly do not interact with each other. Frequently these are recognizably liberal or conservative groups. The participants within each separate group commonly mention very different collections of website URLs and use distinct hashtags and words. The split is clearly evident in many highly controversial discussions: people in clusters that we identified as liberal used URLs for mainstream news websites, while groups we identified as conservative used links to conservative news websites and commentary sources. At the center of each group are discussion leaders, prominent people who are widely replied to or mentioned in the discussion. In polarized discussions, each group links to a different set of influential people or organizations that can be found at the center of each conversation cluster.

As examples of this model, the study uses a hashtag, #My2k, launched by the White House as part of the budget dispute with Republican leaders in the winter of 2012-13, as well as discussions around the sequestration that took effect when no budget-cut agreement was reached. Essentially, two entirely different groups of people discussed these events on Twitter, one liberal, one conservative. No inter-group discussion took place, and each group formed its own separate vision of reality. If liberals and conservatives are unable even to agree on the broad outlines of what has happened in America over the past six years, this is one of the reasons.

Political actors are well aware of these dynamics. When a political actor does something that generates political controversy along group lines (like pick a fight over the budget, or call for a secession referendum in Crimea), they are tripping a reaction they know will distil the population into two opposing clans. Either they expect to split the country and end up with the larger half (as Patrick Buchanan hoped the GOP would in 1972 if Democrats could be lured into nominating a black man for vice president), or they hope to rally enthusiasm among their core supporters. Some of the techniques the Putin regime has deployed in Ukraine are startling, including the use of unmarked troops, the deployment of seamlessly up-to-date government-controlled sensationalist mass media, shameless lying, and the seeding of what amounts to an AstroTurf colour revolution in the Donbass. But the Russians are essentially aiming at the same annihilation of reality through political polarisation that has been more or less achieved in America via the party system. Though it bears noting that in America the political debate is free, robust and uncensored, while in Russia the airwaves are controlled by a blood-stained despot.

The other question, though, is just how new any of this is. Two elements certainly feel relatively new: the colonisation of the mass media by partisan ideological players with their own TV networks (Fox News, RT), and the political deployment of the internet and social media. There was a time when people hoped that the latter would frustrate partisan efforts at polarisation, by forging peer-to-peer connections resistant to political manipulation. Those hopes have proved naive. Social media amplify polarisation, and effective politicians, including Mr Putin as well as American political actors on both sides of the aisle, have learned how to take advantage of this. But it is not entirely clear that what is happening here is any more than a technical update on the kinds of propaganda efforts that adventurous, polarising politicians have been employing since the early 20th century.

Which brings me back to Mr Pelevin's "military neuro-linguistic programming". I love that phrase in part because it's a typically savage Russian spoof of the craze for "neuro-linguistic programming" that swept through management circles in the late 1990s. I had a friend at the time who quit a job at a major bank in order to try to get gigs as a consultant plugging the stuff. I frankly have no idea what "neuro-linguistic programming" is, but I always had a feeling that it was more or less what we used to call "human social interaction". And, at some level, you could translate the phrase "military neuro-linguistic programming" as simply "the nation-state". The "war on truth" in Ukraine, and the similar war on truth in American politics, feel scarily, shinily new. But it may be the same old ideological warfare we've been waging since the birth of the modern state, kitted out with new gear.