Welcome back to the Fourth Way Podcast. Quite a few years ago, I remember seeing this fascinating documentary. I don't know if it was planet Earth or whatever it was, but there was this part in it where an ant's brain got taken over by a fungus called cordyceps. Now the ant would start to act a little crazy. And when the other ants noticed that the ant was infected, they take him far away from the colony so that he couldn't infect other ants.

Within a short period of time, this little zombie ant would climb to some tall plant and latch on with its powerful mandibles. A time lapse video showed the ant's eyes glaze over, a little shoot popped out of its head, and then an explosion of spores that spread over the surrounding area. The invisible cordyceps fungus had not only zombified an ant, but it turned him into a vehicle of contagion. I remember thinking to myself, thank God there's no version of cordyceps for humans. I have an absolute fascination for learning.

So when I saw a free Audible book pop up from Scientific American on zombies, I thought back to my first exposure to real life zombification, and I had to listen to it. Of course, I loved it. But not only did I find the book interesting and educational, I think it's also applicable for our discussion on propaganda today. In one of the short articles from the book, the author talked about an observation she made doing a zombie 5 k. Now what in the world is a zombie 5 k?

Because I had no idea. But it really is exactly what it sounds like. You run a 5 k race while you have a bunch of zombie actors trying to catch you. They have to pull your flags, you know, like you're wearing flag football. And your goal is not only to finish the race, but to finish without having all of your flags pulled.

The author of this particular story made an interesting observation about her experience doing the zombie 5 k. She noticed that most of the zombies ended up congregating towards the edges of the course. I don't know if it's because, you know, many of the racers thought that going to the edge was safer, away from the scrum maybe, or if it's because they were funneled that way by the zombies. I I don't know the answer to that. But whatever the case, the author ended up going straight up the middle and noticed that she had a much easier time.

The zombies largely ignored her. Now this image sparked a revelation in me about propaganda. And to see what I saw, I want you to first imagine the 3 possible setups for a zombie 5 k. First, let's imagine that we had real mindless zombies. These zombies don't have a unified strategy, of course, unless they're the zombies from World War z.

But we'll go with the normal zombies for the first scenario. Or I suppose, maybe to be a little bit more realistic, you could imagine a 5 year old soccer match. They're essentially the same thing. Mindless zombies, 5 year old children. What you end up having is a large group of zombies or kids funneled towards some goal.

Fresh meat in the case of zombies or a ball in the case of kids. There's no team mentality as each individual goes to secure what's best for themselves, guts or glory. There's a second possibility. We could have zombies end up being like a professional soccer team. They could be the World War z zombies or maybe the I am legend zombies.

I think that might even be better because, you know, the World War z zombies are, are fast and stuff, but the the I am legend ones are intelligent. So each zombie could take a position, and if one zombie moved out of position in this zombie 5 k, her teammates could shift over to take her place, plugging the gap so that none could escape. There would be strategic plans and strategic movements, making any holes in the line rare and fleeting. These would be professional zombies. But then there's a third possibility for our zombie 5 k, which I think is what we end up seeing in the case of the author zombie 5 k.

No matter how hard a group of human actors tried, they couldn't be mindless zombies. They know that their goal is to catch runners, and they have the awareness that there are other zombies on their team. They're not in it for a pound of flesh for themselves, but rather to catch runners and create a challenging game. There's a group goal. So they're not like the 5 year old soccer group or the mindless zombies.

At the same time, the zombies are also not like the professional sports team. They don't have plans and plays that they've practiced or any ultra specific positions or agendas. They lack team cohesion and professional coordination that a sports team has. Okay. It's great talking about zombies and all, but what does this have to do with propaganda and the media?

Well, I want you to imagine that the news media are zombies. That shouldn't be too hard for many of you because everyone has at least one news outlet that they tend to view as nearly subhuman. But, seriously, let's pretend that we're doing a zombie 5 k here. The news media are the zombies, and they're trying to catch all of the lies that pass through our world. They're trying to filter out the losers from the winners so that only the strongest truths survive.

Most of us wouldn't view the mood, the media as a bunch of mindless zombies or 5 year old soccer kids. Though, there may be some news outlets that are kind of like that. You know, they'd be the ones that chase all the crazy stuff or even make stuff up. Whatever is popular at the moment and can sell. Pure profit and interest with no accountability.

But by and large, that's not our view on the media. I would argue that most of us actually view the media as quite the opposite. We think that they're more like the professional sports team with a huge caveat, of course. You think that your preferred news outlet of choice is like a professional sports team. Whether that's CNN or Fox, that's up to you, but you probably think that one outlet is a professional sports team.

And, really, I guess, you probably think that both are professional sports teams. You just view 1 as professionals who try to filter out the lies and give you the truth, while the other team are professionals at selling you lies. Regardless, we think that the media are like professionals. I, on the other hand, have been coming to the conclusion that the news media are neither 5 year old kids or professional athletes. As a whole, they're much like what we see in the zombie 5 k.

The news media are a group of intelligent individual outlets who all sort of function as one team. Fox may stand on the leftmost fringe and try to cherry pick some of the lies and overreaches of the left, and CNN may stand on the rightmost fringe and try to catch some of the lies and overreaches of the right. But there's a glaring hole that they both end up missing, and that's right smack dab in the middle. See, it's easy to catch the fringe lies. They're crazy and easy to trap.

The dummies on the other fringe might look over and laugh at the stupidity of one sideline, but they're simultaneously being trapped and eaten by zombies on their own sideline. It's in the middle where the zombies are the most blind. And before I get into some examples of this, I wanna lay out why I think there's a gap in the middle. If we go back to thinking about the zombie 5 k as presented by the author of the book that I read, and if we think of the zombies not in terms of mindless 5 year olds or a professional team, I think one answer presents itself very clearly. It's what psychologists call the bystander effect.

While some of the go to cases for the bystander effect have come into question, like the famous story of Kitty Genovese, it still seems like there is some notion of the bystander effect present in our world. Basically, the bystander effect is this idea that when there's a large group of people, there's a tendency for most people to assume that someone else will handle a problem that arises. If you see a broken down car on the side of the highway, you know, someone else will stop and help them. In a large group, surely someone else is gonna handle it. Right?

I think that's sort of what's going on in the zombie 5 k. If you're a zombie, you're probably focused on protecting the edges so that nobody can get around you. You don't want anybody to flank. Right? Simultaneously, you're thinking that if you're on the edge, then surely the rest of the zombies are going to fill in the middle, and someone's gonna catch anyone trying to run through the center.

Who'd be dumb enough to do that? But most of the zombies having the same individual idea of protecting the fringes and everyone passing the buck to the rest of the group for the middle because they're not a cohesive team, like a professional sports team, then the middle ends up being wide open. I'd argue that the same thing's happening in regard to the news media. Because propaganda, as you should well know by now, thrives on the creation of enemies, the polarization of groups, and the savior status of the propagandizers, well, the whole news media ends up casting their nets out on the edges because that's where the propaganda thrives. Everyone's trying to catch the insanity on the other fringe so that nobody notices the banality of evil which resides in the middle.

And there are a few exceptions, of course. And one of the few people who I think catches the middle pretty well is John Oliver. If you've ever watched the John Oliver show, it's one of the dumbest, most intelligent things you'll ever see. He presents a topic that sounds mundane and boring, and by the end, you realize that the mundane and boring actually has way more impact on injustice than the extreme tends to. It's that banality again, which Hannah Arendt famously highlighted.

The TV show Law and Order, Rent, or Water as presented by John Oliver, all sound far less interesting or pertinent than most of what you're gonna see presented through the major news media. Yet these issues, by the end of Oliver's show, you recognize are far more pertinent, touching more people more frequently than the big events that you tend to hear about. I just watched one of Oliver's videos recently on crime reporting in the media, and it highlights exactly what I'm trying to say in this episode. While the fringes of truth are being heavily patrolled by the news media, the everyday life stuff like crime and policing is being sold to you without question. Go check out Oliver's video linked in the show notes and see what I mean.

We are sold assumptions that the police are good. Our justice system is largely fair. Our democracy is representative. We have a voice. The United States is benevolent, and the list could go on.

Those everyday beliefs and assumptions we need to make it through each day, to feel like life has a purpose and we are safe and secure, those things are never questioned because they're the backbone of our belief structure. They compose the middle. And while we're focused on the periphery, the middle goes left gets left unchecked. Of course, laying this all out begs the question, why doesn't anyone see the gaping hole in the middle left uncovered by the news media? How can John Oliver, that twit, be one of the only sane persons to see the middle?

I'd probably add to Oliver people like Dave Chappelle and George Carlin too. They see the significance in the mundane. And it's funny how it's usually the comedians who see that stuff. Right? Anyway, I was wracking my brain for why we have such a problem seeing the lies which reside in the middle, and that's when I stumbled upon Grice's Cooperative Principle.

Now what exactly is Grice's Cooperative Principle? I still don't really know all that well, but I think I'd know enough to establish a point here. I'll also make sure to link at least 2 helpful videos in the show notes so that you can get a better grasp of Grice's Principle. Basically, Grice said that there are many times when we communicate with, without really commune communicating super clearly. Yet we all interpret this unclear communication clearly somehow.

That's because we all come to conversations with the assumption that all parties are being cooperative, unless, of course, you're in court or something like that where there's an antagonism present and clear. Basically, we usually assume that our interactions with others are gonna be cooperative ones. So Grice says that we have 4 main assumptions in communication. We assume that the person with whom we're talking is giving us a good quantity of information, quality information, relevant or relational information, and that the manner of information is appropriate. So we expect adequate, true information that relates to the question that we asked, which is given with brevity, but sufficiency.

The videos in the show notes provide you with plenty of examples of Grice's principles being violated and how this violation actually communicates something to us. So I recommend checking those out, but I'll give just a a few examples here. For instance, if you have a teenager and ask them, hey. What did you do today? And they respond with stuff.

They're communicating that they don't wanna talk with you due to the lack of quantity of information that they gave you and the lack of sufficiency in what they said. If you tell someone that they might just beat their cancer diagnosis and they respond with a falsehood, like, yeah, and pigs can fly, their blatant untruth is communicating something to you, namely that they disagree with your optimism. A story I actually used in a previous episode highlights my exploitation of crisis principle well, even though I had no idea what crisis principle was at that moment. When I was in 8th grade, my mom gave me $20 to buy lunch on a field trip that my class took to Philadelphia. Rather than buy food, I bought a butterfly knife in Chinatown.

When I got home, my mom asked me if I had any money left over. Rather than answer her question with yes or no, I answered with a non sequitur. I said, man, cheese steaks are expensive in Philadelphia. And because my mom asked a specific question and because she assumed Grice's principle of cooperation, she thought that the information I gave her was pertinent to her question. If I told her cheese steaks are expensive in Philadelphia, that must mean, 1, I purchased a cheese steak, and 2, because the cheesesteaks cost a lot of money, then I don't have any money left over.

She inferred that because she assumed I was cooperating with her as a teenager. Oh, man. Grisey, in theory, helped me to get away with using my parents' money to purchase a weapon as a miner. Now I know that we've been all over the place in this episode. Zombies, John Oliver, Gricean pragmatics, but we're gonna wrap it up right here.

See, the news media, the zombies, they're leaving a gaping epistemological hole in the middle. Whether that's intentional, conspiracy, or just how humans function in their tendencies, that's for you to decide. Yet it's these zombies that we're looking to for protection against untruth. When we begin to evaluate how the news media filters our truth, though, it's very disconcerting. And how exactly does the news media filter this truth and get information to us?

Well, they do it by answering questions. What should we be worried about? Who should we fear? Russia, China, migrant caravans, Republican insurrectionists, candy colored fentanyl? Yes to all of those.

We know that these are the things that we should be worried about because that's what the media talks about. They're the answers to the questions that the media poses on our behalf. And because, as Grice explained to us and my 8th grade mom exemplified for us, we assume that conversations are intended to be cooperative. And therefore, the information that the media is telling us must be relevant, sufficient, orderly, and true. On the other hand, we know that law and order, television propaganda, crime reporting, and rent aren't problems.

We experience those things in our everyday lives, living in the middle between the two fringes. That familiarity, mundanity, dare I say it again, banality calluses us to the significance which resides there. And we failed to awaken to the significance because we know these things are not important, as the only ones talking about it are people like John Oliver. That stuff is so mundane. How could it be important?

Let's move away from the mundane. Let's cover the fringes where we can see the seemingly clear cut evil, the seemingly apparent threat. Now this takes us back to the first episode that I did on the media, which emphasized that it's the silence which yells the loudest when it comes to how news media propaganda works. The silence is deafening. But, you know, that's the thing.

The news media really isn't silent. In fact, they produce a lot of noise. And, honestly, they give a lot of information, and they answer a lot of questions. So why is it so hard to recognize when they're missing the mark, when they're being silent? If you think back to my 8th grade deception of my mom, imagine that she had asked me if I had spent all the money that she gave me, and then I started talking about how fun the trip was and how I got to see the Liberty Bell, etcetera.

Just tried to distract her with irrelevant information. She might listen to me for a bit, but she'd eventually end up coming back to that question about the money. And this time, because of my attempted diversion, she'd probably be suspicious because I didn't even appear to cooperate with her. My information didn't at all seem relevant to the question that she was asking. Now there's a huge difference between the conversation that I had with my mom and the, quote, conversation that we have with media.

The difference with the news media is that not only are they the ones providing the information and answering the questions, they're also the ones asking the questions for us, which they in turn answer. Our Gricean radar has no reason to go off because they don't generally violate his principles. They do give sufficient, relevant, orderly, and often true information about the questions that they ask. It's only when you start to read, learn, and ask your own questions that you notice the deafening silence of a zombified news media that's gathered around the polarized fringes and leaving the middle wide open. When you start asking questions about the middle, that's when you notice the silence.

Thinking back to that documentary I referenced at the beginning of the episode about ants and zombie fungi, I believe it's a fitting illustration to end our discussion. At some point in our lives, most of us are infected with a Cortezeps spore, and our minds start to flicker and fade. We eventually make our way mindlessly outside of the camp and climb our way to some high platform where we latch on, become fully brain dead, and then disseminate our zombie spores to those around us. It's those ants who live far away from the fringes in the heart of the community that are protected from zombification. I used to think there was no Cordyceps variance that could infect humans, but I was mistaken.

Propaganda has created a spore of zombification, which I'll call cordycepsion, short for coordinated inception or deception. Whatever. Take your pick. The news media, willingly or ignorantly or both, is working as a semi cohesive unit that incepts information and ideologies into us by selective silence and selective questioning. The cordyceps fungus wants to eat your brain and use you to help them eat the brains of your friends and family too.

Hopefully, you are beginning to see a little bit better where the fungus resides and how it functions so that you can fight the horde. Stay safe, my friends. That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network.

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