Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. We are now well over 50 episodes into the season on propaganda and conspiracy and we have seen quite a lot of material. Before we move on into our next section of the season where we're going to deal more with the positive aspects of truth and discipleship, I think it's important to draw some conclusions and bring our material together from what we've learned so far. What are kind of the big takeaways that we should hang on to? The first thing I need to address before kind of digging into all that though is, now, I wanna address my expertise or the lack thereof on this topic.

Derek: 01:10

You know, and as reading Elul back in the day, it was a bit sobering to think about endeavoring on such a gargantuan task as tackling propaganda when I don't have any formal training on the topic. Now that right there could be an indicator that I'm just another mouthpiece of misinformation or propaganda, right? But I also struggle with the idea that those who come out of institutions and certain study programs don't also have their objectivity compromised in certain ways, being trained in their own echo chambers. So is expertise a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, remember that Elul said that, you know, it was often the most informed or the intelligent who are often the most propagandized for various reasons that we mentioned at the beginning of the season.

Derek: 02:03

Now, at the same time, you can kind of see what uneducated people and people who aren't experts, how they can just spout off any anything they think, and that leads to some pretty crazy places too. So is me being, not being an expert, does that make this better or worse in terms of, the informational value? Am I credible? Should you listen to me? Of course, I think so.

Derek: 02:34

I mean, I can vouch for myself, but it's not because I'm an objective observer. It's not because I'm smart or I'm I'm an expert, I'm trained. I'm none of those things. Rather, you should listen to me because I have used a wide variety of resources. If you go to my Goodreads list, I'm sure that you're going to find the list weighted more towards one poll than another.

Derek: 03:01

But I also think that you'd be surprised at how broad my reading list actually is. In the last year, I've read from anarchist authors, capitalist authors, nationalists, communists, democrats, republicans, Christians, and atheists. I've really tried to extend my ear to the wide diversity of people who are out there in the world, and my hope is that this not only helps to balance my views and to make them more objective, but also that the transparency of my sources helps you to extend your research and check my biases. I might not be objective, and nobody really really is, but I try to be as transparent about the data as I can so that you can see where my objectivity might be lacking. And besides just being transparent, my philosophy of epistemology to a certain extent is wrapped up in this idea that broad reading and broad exposure actually helps to fill in a much clearer epistemology than, you know, maybe being expertly trained and really honing in on a very narrow field.

Derek: 04:13

I'm actually like 10% of the way through through a book that makes that argument as well. A book on epistemology called Longing to Know by Esther Meek, and it's a fantastic book, and like I said, I'm only 10% of the way in. But just the beauty with which Esther Meek writes, and the way that she describes things, and knowing, and this passion for knowing, and how you come to know through covenant, through relationships, through, you know, interactions with the world, not just, you know, not just looking at at arguments and and all that stuff. It's fascinating and and sold on it. So I think this diversity of of seeking knowledge is a very healthy way to go about doing things.

Derek: 05:03

Not only because there's transparency to it and you're able to see where objectivity might be lacking and, you know, you're not just in an echo chamber, but also because that's just kind of how knowledge is formed through coming at things from different angles. So with that sort of defense out of the way, let's go ahead and dive into some of the big takeaways from this season so far. So first conclusion that I would have is power corrupts. Yes, the corrupt seek power, but power also does inevitably corrupt. Now, don't know where the line of power is that shouldn't be crossed, but it is very clear to me that power absolutely corrupts.

Derek: 05:51

Now, I'm skeptical of any personality pastor, any mega church pastor, any CEO, and definitely anyone in government office. There's so many resources you can look at to see this, but, you know, the one that stands out to me most recently is a book called Nixonland. And you can see Richard Nixon, the son of this idealist pacifist who justifies all sorts of evils in the name of doing good for the country. By the way, on a on a side note, it seems like a lot of times it's these presidents who come from pacifist parents that end up being like some of the the craziest and the worst. Was it Truman, I think was another one and or no, no, it was Woodrow Wilson, think, World War One.

Derek: 06:37

I think he he was a pacifist or had pacifist roots too. But there are several others where you're just kind of shocked at their their background. But anyway, Nixonland, great book. And you just see this immorality and this consequentialist ethic just all throughout it. You know, this ends justifying the means.

Derek: 06:56

It pervades so much of the corruption that you see in Nixonland, and Nixonland, I think, gives you a really good peek behind the political curtain. And people get power and they feel as though that they can control the future and it's their responsibility to do so, to shape the future to their definition of good. And then they just justify all sorts of evils to do what they deem is good. So when we get to governments, of course, there are going to be thousands of true conspiracies and great evils because there's so much power there to wield. But we can track this all the way back to the small scale and the domestic abuse.

Derek: 07:42

One of one of the books that I really enjoyed that gives you a glimpse at that is The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb, and there you can see how power corrupts in the church. How just having a platform and having a certain church model where pastors are celebrities, which is another good book, Celebrities for Jesus, but you see it everywhere, not just governments and people who have power over armies, but in in the church, in any institution, even as small as the family, which is where we get a lot of our our domestic abuse and such. So power breeds violence and injustice, and violence and injustice are covered up by conspiracies and propaganda. All of these things work together. But here, you know, the word conspiracy is often, in my opinion, such a misnomer.

Derek: 08:38

Know, the word itself seems to have been hijacked and has become synonymous with crazy or malicious. Now sure, some conspiracy theorists are crazy, and sure, some conspiracists are malicious. But the second thing I've learned from doing this season is that so many conspiracies are just haphazard. And that's because a lot of times the way that we think of conspiracies is we think that there's some really intricate plan by by some cabal or some small group of powerful people who, you know, have this master plan, this decade long master plan that they're planning to implement. And that's just not what you find even in a lot of the big government conspiracies, you know, it doesn't really end up being the way that that people plan it and it sort of snowballs into a bigger and bigger thing.

Derek: 09:32

And the conspiracy isn't that a government planned, you know, to create some Manchurian candidate thirty years down the line, it's they had this program and they wanted to run some tests and they figured out a vulnerable group of people to do that on, and then they're like, oh crap, somebody's gonna find out about this, and then they try to cover their tracks and when they do that, you know, the snowball just gets bigger and bigger. The Pinochet File was was a great book that I I thought showed this well where it's sure, The US was trying to assassinate, you know, a bunch of people in Chile and trying to exert their will in the world and and do these intricate sorts of initial events. But what ended up happening is is the whole system, the whole event grew into something much much bigger, but it was through a series of just haphazard events. And I like the way George Carlin talks about this. He I'll see if I can find the clip and put it in the show notes.

Derek: 10:38

But he talks about this as convergence, you know, somebody kind of talks to Carlin and and says, what? Are you like a conspiracy theorist? You you think it's a conspiracy? And he's like, look, it doesn't have to be a conspiracy when interests converge. Right?

Derek: 10:54

When interests converge, it's not some master conspiracy, it's just human interest and human nature taking over. Maybe the the Iran coup that The US and Great Britain helped implement were maybe that would be a good example of this. And sure, you can say, well, a coup, that's a that's a really intricate plan. Well, when you look at it, it's like, well, Iran's gonna take back their oil that they were exploited out of by imperialists. Great Britain doesn't like that because it's gonna cost them a bunch of money.

Derek: 11:32

They're gonna lose a bunch of money. Right? And so, The US Great Britain asked The US for help, right? Their allies, interests converge. The US doesn't want Russia to come into Iran and and have influence there, and so they're like, sure, we'll help you.

Derek: 11:50

What's this great grand conspiracy that the the The US implements to overthrow Iran? Well, sir, sure, there are some some sort of intricacies, but by and large, you just give people a bunch of money and guns and you say, hey, go, have at it, and and they just are are able to overthrow a government relatively easily. All you generally have to do is set the stage for discord. You can look at with Chile and some of the other countries, you know, The US just refuses to send the aid that it had been sending for decades or when it refuses to give the loans that it has promised, when it does all of these sorts of things that cause inflation in your currency, causes people to not be able to get food. You just you just are creating discord.

Derek: 12:49

You just throw a bunch of wrenches into this machine until the machine just dies. And that's not a really super intricate conspiracy, it's just this haphazard messy sort of thing that The US has has done, but it works. In my opinion, where I would say that the more true conspiracy lies isn't in the actions that US has done by and large. I mean, what have I talked about this season that isn't easily available common knowledge? I haven't talked about anything that's hard to find.

Derek: 13:30

Genocide of the Philippines, the Platt amendment with Cuba, Chile, all these governments that have been overthrown by The United States in coups, assassinations. I mean, what have I said that every American citizen can't know? Nothing. But hardly any American citizens do know these things, and if they do know them, there's still this inclination that, you know, we're the land of the free, home of the brave, we fight for freedom and all that stuff, like, it's just ingrained into us. So, in my opinion, it's not these these big conspiracies that are really conspiratorial because they're common knowledge, like they're they're easy easy to know.

Derek: 14:20

It's why don't people know them? Why isn't this information circulated, perpetuated? Why don't people care? That's why I think propaganda is so important because there are hardly any real, crazy, deep conspiracies, but there is a whole lot of propaganda that has has shaped our view of history and world events. But to take this, you know, this haphazardness down to the the smaller level, let's again, let's look at this small scale with Ravi Zacharias or or Harvey Weinstein.

Derek: 14:58

Weinstein, how do you say his name? I really don't think either of those guys planned on abusing the amount of women that they did or hatching some huge elaborate plan. They weren't like, hey, you know what, my goal in life is to molest or to abuse 50 women before I die. Right? That's, they weren't planning some huge, big ring.

Derek: 15:20

But as they realized success you know, their first abuse and then their second and more and more and more, they figured out what tactics worked and how to avoid detection, until the injustice that they perpetuated was on a very large scale. And in that process, you have friends and family with their own interests who respond to allegations and news, and then they double down on their positions and figure out how to navigate the situation. You know, by that point, when people were kind of getting whiffs of what was going on, you've got two very successful people in very different industries, and for for all of the people who've supported them and gathered around them and love them and think their work's great and are making money off of their work, it's gonna be really hard for them to accept these allegations, right? Their interests converge with the abuser's interests. It's just that the abuser is, you know, seeking whatever sort of fulfillment they get out of abuse, and these other people are seeking other things, whether that's maintenance of pride, it would be embarrassing to work for a guy that you found out was a sexual assaulter, so they're working for pride, for money, whatever it is, but their interests converge.

Derek: 16:39

And so even though the the people who are protecting the abusers may not want to be involved in a conspiracy, they they might not even consciously be conspiring, but they are self deceiving and they are part of what we would deem a conspiracy, even though really what it is is interest converging in human nature and selfishness just kind of doing its thing and running its course on power. And in the end, it might look like you have this sexual deviant criminal mastermind with a cabal of trustees and family who condone sexual assault, But what it really is is someone who did great evil, got away with it, and it's hard for those who love him or her, those who want the work or ministry to be successful, those who don't wanna lose jobs or admit the truth. It's hard for them to kinda cave to that. In that sense, conspiracies as we know them often aren't planned. It's more like they're they're grown over time.

Derek: 17:46

It always starts with a seed of conspiracy, but conspiracy is is really this very intricate, masterful creation from the start, even though it ends up being that way, like a big knotted ball of yarn or something. Now that does change, I think, when we get up to the governmental level. I mean, there there are definitely some pretty big conspiracies at the governmental level, even more longer term and and stuff, but it's still still very haphazard most of the time. The next major thing that I learned about propaganda and conspiracy is related to something I just heard about maybe a couple months ago, Hanlon's razor and Clark's law. Hanlens razor is similar to Occam's razor, which Occam's razor states that the simplest adequate explanation should be preferred.

Derek: 18:41

For example, you know, if you're talking about theism, right, if you're saying, well, you know what, because of complexity, apparent design, the causality, you know, there was a beginning and things don't come into being out of nothing, there must be a God that exists, right? A supernatural being outside of space and time who started it all. Okay, well, you could say, well, no, I think that there are gods, There are many gods who started it all. And Occam's razor would just say, well, if one god can do it, why would we pause it more? Right?

Derek: 19:21

And that's just an example of Occam's razor. The simplest adequate explanation should be preferred. And that's where adequate comes in because somebody might say, well, God is not the simplest answer. Right? Just matter always existing is the simplest answer because you don't have to posit anything outside of nature, anything supernatural that just complicates things.

Derek: 19:45

You say, okay, but I'm arguing that it has to be an adequate explanation. If there was a beginning of the universe, and that means that there had to be something outside of it to start it. Right? And we can get into all of that argument. The point isn't whether or not God exists, the point is we need a simple adequate solution, a solution that fits all of the the evidence.

Derek: 20:13

Now, Hanlon's razor is going to say something somewhat similar and says that we should never attribute malice to that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I'll repeat that because it was new for me and I had to think about it. We should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. So, for example, when someone cuts me off in traffic, they're probably just an idiot, right? Stupidity.

Derek: 20:47

They're not a CIA agent out to get me or an enemy seeking to make my life miserable, right? So to attribute malice to something that I can adequately explain by stupidity would be to complicate my hypothesis or my idea, right? So you can see how it's kind of similar to Occam's razor there then, simplest adequate explanation. And of course, in driving, people have this problem all the time, right? We attribute malice to people who pull out in front of us or do whatever, and most of the time, are just being dumb, just like when we pull out in front of somebody, we're just being dumb, We're not being malicious usually.

Derek: 21:34

So that makes a whole lot of sense, right? Yep. And when you look at history, when you see the terrible injustices and the conspiracies that have transpired, and you see how much mythology we embrace, and how little of history we know or care about, you have to wonder, are we really ignorant people? Are we really just that stupid? Or is there something else going on?

Derek: 22:03

You know, my wife and I had this conversation before I knew about Hanlon's razor because that would have helped. But when she was listening through and critiquing one of my episodes on propaganda and racism, at the part where I talk about how voting against MARTA was a form of racism, she paused it and she she said that she thought that this hard line stance, calling something like voting against MARTA racism, she thought that people wouldn't be able to to hear that. She said, think about this this guy that we know, John Smith. I'm not gonna name him here, of course, but, you know, this guy, John Smith, that I really, really like, and I think he's got a great heart and he does so much good. She said, think about him.

Derek: 22:54

Do you really think that he dislikes black people? Or that when he votes, he's voting with the intention of of keeping black people out of his neighborhood? Do you really think he's a racist? And on the one hand, I really get the argument, and I think Hanlon's razor applies, right? He's just being stupid.

Derek: 23:16

He's not being malicious, like he doesn't want to hurt black people, or minorities or or anybody else. I really, really don't think that John sees the racism present in things like voting down MARTA. But then there is something that I think you need to balance out Hanlon's razor here, and that is Clark's Law, which pushes back a little bit because Clark's Law says that any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. I'll repeat that one more time. Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Derek: 23:59

So in the end, it doesn't really matter if John Smith fails to see the racist implications of his actions. His ignorance or incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Now, this still doesn't mean that he is malicious, he's trying to hurt people, but it's his actions are indistinguishable from malice, like, I can't tell the difference. And this is where, if we go back to our our getting cut off in traffic example, I think you can see you can see how this would work out. Me getting cut off in traffic by, you know, this guy in a red car, Okay, he's just being stupid, right?

Derek: 24:38

He cut me off once. It's not malicious. But then we we keep drive driving down the highway and he swerves and cuts in front of me again. Then he swerves and cuts in front of me again and he does this for like 10 miles straight. Am I still supposed to think that this is stupidity, right, and not malice?

Derek: 25:00

Like at some point, stupidity turns into malice. It's indistinguishable because I'm essentially being targeted, you know, whether the driver in that car is intending to or not. He passed the threshold for which I I can reasonably believe that he's just being stupid. At best, he's being really negligent and just coincidentally hurting me or or, you know, coming close to hurting me every time. And that's, you know, I think that's really where we're at in this season.

Derek: 25:34

And I'm thinking especially of our episode on Haiti. You know, the information about The US Empire is out there for anyone who wants to see all that information. Easy. It's accessible. The truth of the subjugation and depression of others, all the land and money we've stolen, the people we've massacred, all that is right out there in the open.

Derek: 25:58

And the ramifications of those actions aren't too difficult to piece together either. So this ignorance or incompetence that we supposedly have, keep having over and over and over again, we keep swerving in front of various groups of people. You know, this inability to see the truth of history and its impact on the present, it's really not an excuse for the malice that is our maintaining of our convenient ignorance. Does that mean that John Smith is a racist? Yeah, I think it does.

Derek: 26:32

But, I mean, I would say that all of us are probably racists or imperialists or some other sort of ist in in some sort of way. We are willfully ignorant and we want to maintain that ignorance, and propaganda really helps us to do that. And then when somebody calls us whatever kind of ist it is that we are, we throw our hands up in the air and say, well, how? No, I'm not, right? I just swerved in front of you, right?

Derek: 27:03

No malice here, but really, it's the tenth time you've swerved in front of that group, whatever your ist is against. And you just can't use stupidity as an excuse anymore. So saying a word like racist today, it sounds really harsh, And in some ways, I think that's good because we need to stop harboring abuse in any form and if it takes a slap in the face to cause us to to recognize this supposed stupidity that we have that keeps hurting people, then yeah, let's let's recognize that. But on the other hand, the harshness of the word and society's unwillingness to allow for change, to allow for repentance, means that it's impossible now to call a spade a spade and make any progress, right? I should be able to call racism racism without it being viewed as a damning judgment, but rather a call to change and move away from the untruth of racism.

Derek: 28:03

I want John Smith to be able to see what he's doing, not because I'm pointing my finger at him and saying, you're a racist, but saying, hey, I know you don't want to be a racist, like, let's let's move away from this. Here's the truth about what you're doing. Let's move together. Unfortunately, that's not how our culture tends to do things, and quite understandably so. I mean, how long can can a certain community, an oppressed community be patient and coddling to people who are actively harming them over and over again, actively swerving in front of them.

Derek: 28:41

Like, I get why that's, it's not that way, but as a Christian, I I hope that, you know, we can move more towards reconciliation rather than, you know, oh, gotcha, you're a racist. So I think the the final thing that I would want to pull out here, and it's something that I've talked about since probably the the first main episode where we discussed propaganda, is in regard to these propaganda and and conspiracies, is the idea of isolation and polarization. And really the two go hand in hand, because to polarize something is to isolate into two groups, right? If you've got a right and a left pole, or a north and a south, or a positive and a negative, you're really creating two groups and you're distancing them from each other. And that's what propaganda and conspiracies tend to do with people.

Derek: 29:47

It's gonna isolate and polarize. And that's one of the reasons that, another one of the reasons that I think reading very broadly is extremely helpful and extremely important, listening to a variety of sources. I, yeah, I can't tell you how many times my views have been tempered and, you know, balanced out by doing this. In fact, this is something that I've, without knowing that it was a healthy thing to do, maybe it's not healthy, it's not healthy for other people, but playing devil's advocate was healthy for me. I I was always able to understand where other groups were coming from even if I didn't believe what they believed because a lot of the times, I would argue from the opposing position in order to help me solidify my views and to learn about the other views.

Derek: 30:45

And I think that's extremely healthy, because even if you can't, even if you don't change your views, you'll find that you're, you move more towards the middle and at least have empathy and understanding and you can listen to people at the other pole. And in fact, I changed my mind on quite a number of issues by playing devil's advocate and ending up coming to the the other view. But that's really scary too. I don't think people want to do that. I think there's probably a fear that people have that if they would give ear to the other side, their minds might actually be changed.

Derek: 31:24

And this is something, you know, I've talked about elsewhere before about, you know, Thomas Kuhn's on the structure of scientific revolutions and his idea of paradigm shifts and essentially saying that, look, you don't change your mind when you get 50.01% certainty that the view that was opposite to you is now right, right? You don't just tip the scales and, oh, well, now I've changed my mind, I'm on the other side. Because there are a lot of forces that hold us to a view. There's a heavy cost to change what it is that you're doing most of the time. I mean, it's just one small example.

Derek: 32:08

My wife, when we found out that she needed to eat gluten free because of all of the eczema that she got and figuring that out through when she stopped eating gluten, our son stopped getting eczema when she was breastfeeding him, she's like, well, I guess I need to eat gluten free too, and her eczema cleared up completely. It's kind of like, it took her many, many years to come to that conclusion. You just didn't want to face it because that meant a change in her lifestyles. It meant that she wasn't gonna be able to eat pizza like, you know, we had eaten, loved eating all the time, or the various things that just gluten is in, which is like everything. And so our lifestyles were going to have to change and we'd also incur more cost monetarily.

Derek: 33:05

Sure, her health would be better and her comfort would be better, but there's a big cost to changing those things. And then also, you're gonna have some people think that you're one of those weirdos, like, oh yeah, right, you have to go gluten free. So there's there's some level of social cost to that too, being a crunchy weirdo. And it took a while, like it wasn't it wasn't something that she just decided to do because there was there's a cost to it. You could look at other things, you know, to do well, is a car company going to want to admit when it has a faulty part?

Derek: 33:42

It's gonna cost it a lot of money. Maybe a great example of this, I forget what the what the the play is called, All My Sons maybe, but it it's the the play that twenty one Pilots is named after, but you've there was this airplane company in World War II and they they made faulty parts or something, they cut corners, I don't remember exactly what, but their their machines ended up crashing. Their airplanes ended up crashing and I think killing 21 pilots. And when it, you know, when they did, there were there were a whole lot of ramifications for that, but it's like, man, if we recognize that this this part is faulty, it's gonna cost us like we wanna be really sure before we overhaul everything and basically go bankrupt from this. And so they risked people's lives in order to, you know, come to certainty, more certainty, but by the time they came to enough certainty that made them want to pull the trigger on fixing the problem, right, and it ended up being a greater cost.

Derek: 34:51

So the point is, people don't want to change their minds. There's a whole lot of inertia keeping people going in the direction that they're already going, and they don't want to change from whatever pull they're moving towards. And it's hard, and this is what propaganda and conspiracies do so, so well. There's a whole lot of framing of issues and there's a lot that's done to keep one's momentum going in a particular direction, and to keep one from changing course. Well, I think that about sums up my thoughts at this point.

Derek: 35:35

There's so much, absolutely so much that, you know, I could pull out from this season. But those are, I think, the big takeaways that that I would want to walk away with because that that really just summarizes so much of of what's happened this season and why these things are important. So hopefully, as we move into next part of the season, it's a overall shorter part, you know, less episodes and less time for sure, but it's a really important part because we see what propaganda, what conspiracies are like, and what they do, and the power trips that people are on, and how it just, it messes with people, and it shapes people, and it's just evil. And so we wanna look at truth and discipleship, and we wanna see what is what is the positive iteration of this, okay? If we don't want a world run on propaganda, if we want to seek truth, how do we do that?

Derek: 36:44

And is truth even important? Like, maybe I should play the propaganda game. If I can do it better than the other person, and if I can wield it for good, however I define that, then maybe I should play the game too. So we'll get into morality and other sorts of things as well. So hopefully you stay tuned for the most important part because this next part is the part that's going to help you build your life up.

Derek: 37:11

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. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.