Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, we're going to be diving into the biggest propagandist of them all, the government. While the government's application of abuse is unique, its uniqueness doesn't really come from the angle that it takes on propaganda. You know, we've explored how each domain of propaganda, you know, the domestic abuser all the way up to the medical community, How each of those tend to harness a particular power of propaganda. They take a different angle.

Derek: 01:01

They kind of, emphasize a different tool. With these rings of power, each propagandist controls their own domain. The power of Earth with which the corporate sphere propagandizes comes through the creation or the inception of ideology and desire. The power of fire wielded by the domestic abuser isolates from information. The power of wind controlled by the racist propagandist bellows the furnaces of mythological narratives.

Derek: 01:30

The water of information is sifted and funneled by the media to deliver only that which they want you to know and focus on. And the heart of the scientific and medical communities is a dark heart which hides behind a demure benevolence. Every propagandist has their niche. But by their powers combined, earth, fire, wind, water, and heart, they come together to form the greatest propagandist of them all, commander in chief. Okay.

Derek: 02:00

I mean, the government as a whole, of course, but had run with the Captain Planet theme here. So, yeah, the government isn't going to be unique in that it creates a new form of propaganda. The uniqueness of the government is that due to its scale and its reach, it has the resources and the ability to implement all forms of propaganda on a scale that we really have difficulty comprehending. And this is exactly why I structured the season the way that I did. It's much easier to see and understand how one domestic abuser functions and manipulates, though we're unfortunately even pretty bad at discerning that.

Derek: 02:38

But at least if we can start painting a picture of propaganda on the small scale, my hope is that by this point, you'll have eyes to see better what happens on the larger governmental scale. My goal for this episode then is not to set up a new angle on propaganda like I have at the beginning of all of my other sections. Instead, what I want to do here is to give you a few examples of how this governmental propaganda plays out. Then over the next few episodes, we'll zoom in on the military arm of the government specifically and take an in-depth look into a few true conspiracies. I think the best way to go about this episode would be to just go down the list here.

Derek: 03:18

Let's take a very brief look at government involvement in all areas of propaganda that we've discussed so far. First, let's take a look at government as an abuser. If you remember from our first section on domestic abuse, abusers often tend to isolate their victims from the outside. This is why traffickers often select vulnerable individuals to abduct or exploit. The less input and oversight from the outside, the better.

Derek: 03:46

Abusers want their victims to be as oblivious as possible to outside voices speaking into their situation because abusers don't want their victims to see the truth. Instead, the abuser wants to be the victim's only lifeline to the outside world, her or sometimes his savior. Sure. The abuser is also a captor, but that truth fades away or is at least obscured by isolation. You end up with a Stockholm syndrome of sorts.

Derek: 04:18

For governments, patriotism often functions as this arm here. Now I don't wanna say that all patriotism is necessarily bad. And I actually posed that question to doctor Christianopoulos two seasons ago, and you might wanna go hear how he answers the question of of patriotism as, you know, being bad and othering and all that stuff. It was a it was a good conversation. And I think his nuance is is really great.

Derek: 04:45

So ultimately, no. Patriotism isn't necessarily bad, but I think that it often is. Take as just one example, kneeling for the national anthem. Forget for just a moment how odd it should be for a Christian to pledge allegiance to a flag or to every everyone stand in one accord to honor a flag. I mean, if it were the bust of Caesar, an image of Nebuchadnezzar, or even the statue of a saint for conservative Protestants, we'd have a cow doing what we do to the flag.

Derek: 05:20

Veneration and worship carry no distinction for conservative Protestants, save for when it comes to patriotism. Then we can recognize that there's a distinction. But is there really a distinction? Put that big pet peeve of mine to the side for the moment and and just imagine that most forms of patriotism aren't idolatry. K?

Derek: 05:42

I'll I'll pretend that for the sake of discussion. Think about how this small act of patriotism, honoring or venerating a flag, isn't nearly as small as it seems. I mean, when one person started kneeling for the national anthem in order to highlight that much of America for its whole history has equivocated on the notion of freedom for all, and America has changed definitions depending on which minority group you happen to be in, the the definition of freedom. What happened? The staunch American patriots had a cow.

Derek: 06:18

Refusing to honor Caesar, or at least his emblem, was sacrilege. How dare one refuse to honor their father, their fatherland, their provider? How dare one refuse to honor the one who gives them their daily bread, Who forgives their debts? Who delivers them from the evil of communism? Whose kingdom is coming day by day to be the greatest kingdom in the history of the world?

Derek: 06:42

A kingdom whose will is done on earth as other kingdoms bow to and honor our kingdom of power. I mean, who would dare to refuse paying homage to such a kingdom? To our savior? Forget all the abuse that's going on. Better yet, don't forget it.

Derek: 07:01

Fail to see it in the first place. There's nothing going on here. That abuse that happens that one time, that's in the past. It won't happen again. He promises.

Derek: 07:15

All that bullshit all your friends are telling you, those gossips, nah, they're lies. Cut your ties with them. You don't need to listen to them. Your country really loves you, baby. Don't leave.

Derek: 07:30

Hopefully, you get the point. Government is an abuser, and that abuse often comes through the isolation of patriotism. The way that patriotism causes us to other others. Right? To make them other than ourselves, to, separate ourselves from them, and not listen to their voices because they're just mad they don't live in The United States, or they should just go live somewhere else because they're not really part of us.

Derek: 07:57

Right? So it causes us to other people, and then it helps us to identify people that we want to exclude from our group that aren't us. It's it's abusive. It's isolation. So next, let's consider government as a racist propagandist, or maybe a more catchall word here might be as an elitist, because it's not always in regard to race.

Derek: 08:22

I mean, isn't that really what racism is essentially? It's elitism. Now patriotism, while it seems to be a positive concept, at least growing up in The United States, patriotism was was viewed very positively. It it seems like it's this, this belief that we hold that that builds us up, that trains us. Right?

Derek: 08:46

I think that what I'd really argue at this point is that patriotism is more of a, a negative concept. It's not this positive thing we take on. It's a negative concept. Patriotism isn't so much the inculcating of positive belief as it is a test for negative belief. Let me give you an example here.

Derek: 09:08

So standing for the national anthem, placing your hand over your heart, saying a pledge, putting a flag decal on your truck, or attending Memorial Day parades. These events don't really teach you anything in terms of history or information. They they certainly have an aspect which they teach. Yeah. And and I'll discuss that later in the season when I talk about, doctor Drew Johnson's work on rituals.

Derek: 09:33

But I don't think that primarily what patriotism is is this this positive inculcation. Rather, I think patriotism serves two functions. First, it's meant to highlight anyone in the group who doesn't go along. Right? And so we need to excommunicate them from the group if they don't, kind of, get their stuff together.

Derek: 09:53

You may not have to go all out for patriotism, but if you do something viewed as going against accepted patriotism, like kneeling for the anthem, not saying the pledge of allegiance, hoisting another country's flag in your yard maybe, or commenting on injustices which can't possibly exist in a free market, free democratic republic like ours, then you're marked. Right? Patriotism shows you who's marked. You're a Marxist, a liberal, unpatriotic, un American. You name it.

Derek: 10:24

But clearly, you're not one of the group. Your unpatrioticism marks you as distinct. And to be a distinct individual in the herd mentality of nation is not a good thing for your health or your reputation. Patriotism exists in part so that dissenters can be identified, pigeonholed, demonized, and dealt with. Dismissed.

Derek: 10:47

This often means that the arguments and dissent of the unpatriotic aren't ever listened to because marking them as an enemy from the start polarizes the conversation and lets the true patriot know that they shouldn't engage with them. But patriotism doesn't only exist to out dissenters. It also exists because it primes the pump for the second form of propaganda that we're gonna talk about here, a form which takes on more positive elements. Rather than being intended to identify a negative, to spot dissenters, our second form of propaganda, as you'll see, is meant to educate, a more positive education rather than a negative one. Patriotism essentially tears down the negative barriers of resistance and thoughtful reflection about the nation, making one a willing recipient ready to receive the next form of propaganda, which is positive.

Derek: 11:37

It is the inculcating form, the the educating form. Participating in the rituals of patriotism is what leads one to more readily accept the mythologization of nationalism. The two don't always go hand in hand, but rarely, if ever, will you find nationalism without patriotism leading the way. When we looked at racism in our season, we noticed that there's a whole lot of information framing involved in that aspect. One of the standout examples for me was how a century ago, black moms, single or otherwise, were lambasted by white society for working outside of the home.

Derek: 12:14

Of course, many who were single moms were such because their husbands had to migrate for work, or were lynched, or run out of town, any number of reasons. A great book to to read on this is, The Warmth of Other Suns. It's a wonderful book, that if you can get a chance to read it, you should. But anyway, the, the moms were critiqued because what kind of mom would leave their children to go to work? Certainly not a good, loving mom.

Derek: 12:42

Right? They must black people, black women, mothers must not really have motherly instinct. They must not really care too much about their children. And I'm sure this is the same kind of narrative that was going around when they would separate children from their mothers, under slavery. Right?

Derek: 12:57

The you just you say that, oh, they're not really moms. They're not good moms. They don't care for their kids the way that we white people do. Of course, fifty years later, single black moms were framed as welfare queens. Black moms were now being critiqued for doing the exact thing that they were being told to do just decades before.

Derek: 13:18

If they left the home, they were damned. And now, fifty years later, if they stay at home, they're damned. That right there is some slick framing, looking at information with the end goal already in sight and framing that information one way or the other, you know, always to get the the result that you want. Society knew that whatever minorities were doing was bad, so it didn't matter what they did. There would be some lens that one could look through to frame their actions as bad.

Derek: 13:48

And that's important because we know propaganda loves enemies and problems because that's what it needs in order to offer up a savior. Under racism, that savior is the white race, and you get paternalism and oppression as a result. Nationalism is essentially going to do the same thing with our nation, though, rather than with our race, being, the benevolent savior. Right? So instead of whites to save the world, it's The United States to save the world.

Derek: 14:20

And if you're a white nationalist, it's it's better if, your nation's all white, because then it's your your white nation that's the savior. Now nationalism is going to feed us information and apply a certain frame or lens to that information in order to see others as enemy and to see ourselves as all good, as savior. This often involves some kind of mythologization, a digging back into the distant past to create some kind of origin story for our group. If we're just like everyone else, it's hard to see how we could be inherently better than them. I mean, that was that was part of the Eugenics Movement, in the the eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds is, hey, we have to distinguish ourselves somehow.

Derek: 15:02

Right? Without mythological roots, we'd have to take people as individuals rather than as stereotypical groups. You see this with Christian racists of the past who dug deep into the Bible to find the curse of Ham as a grounding for the inferiority of blacks and and a justification for slavery. Likewise, with nationalism, you see people fighting over the myth. I mean, the historical facts of our nation's founding.

Derek: 15:29

As we saw with the interview of doctor Wellman, author of Hijacking History, you can generally tell that someone is doing good objective history when the information is complex, and they don't give you easy answers. And they might not even come to any solid conclusions at all, because, information, especially historical information that we don't have access to, all the way. Right? We can't talk to the people who who were involved hundreds of years ago. That's gonna be complex.

Derek: 16:01

And, and that generally indicates good history. Clear cut history, on the other hand, is often indicative of myth and propaganda. Of course, making things clear cut, obvious enemies, obvious good guys, obvious saviors, that's exactly what propaganda seeks to do. And that's why mythologization is a vital tool in the tool belt of propaganda. The two go hand in hand.

Derek: 16:28

Keeping all this in mind, I want to point out just a brief example of this type of mythologization or reframing of history. And I'll do it with an example that's, I think, pretty objective, because, I want to avoid the more subjective myths, like, you know, our country was founded as a Christian nation, which I think would be less clear cut, because, you know, you can delve into the religion of of everybody and show that a lot were Christians, but then, that there's that's just a whole lot more subjective and, and difficult. So let me go with something more objective here. Let's talk about the Boston Tea Party. Now it's astonishing what the vast majority of Americans think the story of the Boston Tea Party is.

Derek: 17:13

Here's the story as most understand it and as I understood it as of only up to a few years ago. So the British were a bunch of jerks who exploited the American colonies through taxes, while simultaneously refusing to allow the colonies governmental representation in Britain. The colonists eventually got fed up with these high taxes and dumped their tea into the water as protest. Clearly, good guys, clearly, the bad guys. Right?

Derek: 17:40

Good guys, the colonists, fighting for freedom and, not to be oppressed by heavy taxation and to to have representation so they can do good things with the government. And then you've got the clear bad guys, the the British imperialists. Well, the story is actually a bit more complicated than that. The twenty years prior to the Boston Tea Party, the British army fought the French and Indian war for the colonists. Sure.

Derek: 18:07

Some colonists fought too, but you had you had the British army that was Great Britain who was largely paying for and manning this stuff. Now this gained and protected certain territories and holdings of the colonists, and it secured their situation. You had a number of people, George Washington included, who had pretty big land interests in, in some of these territories that had been procured in the French and Indian War and kept safe, and which, seemed like were going to be given up by Britain in order to have peace with, France and the the natives and stuff. They're they're gonna lose some of their financial investments there, because they were a lot of them were land speculators. But, you know, all of this this land procurement and protection and all that stuff, it came at a cost.

Derek: 19:00

Right? A a significant monetary cost to the crown, not to mention the loss of British lives, the the human cost, for British soldiers. So while the colonists didn't have perfect representation in the British government, they received some really significant benefits from the crown. Benefits which cost the crown greatly, right, financially and in in lives lost. Of course, the governments the British government wanted to recoup some of what they spent to support the colonies, which is part of the reason taxes were raised.

Derek: 19:34

Hey. If we're gonna go gain you all of this territory, if we're gonna protect your borders, we're gonna supply you with a really well trained army, to to protect you and build these forts and all this other stuff. Like, you guys are gonna have to contribute to that, because you're you're gaining a lot from us. And, it seems like you owe us a little bit. So with the the raise in tax rates, you know, the American tax rate was ended up being something like, as best I could find, something like 2%.

Derek: 20:05

Alright? 2%. Imagine what we would all all do with the 2% tax raise. We'd, we'd install whoever got that accomplished as dictator. Dictator.

Derek: 20:15

Heck, we wouldn't we wouldn't revolt. Right? 2% is nothing. And that 2% tax rate was dwarfed by the tax rate of those in Britain, which was, anywhere from two to four times higher than than two percent. So the colonists were receiving significant benefits with extremely low tax rates, but they bulked when their taxes were raised to, to this amount.

Derek: 20:41

Okay. Fine. Everyone hates taxes, and I'm not saying taxes are good. But when we get to the Boston Tea Party, everyone thinks that this was a tax rebellion against an unjust group of people who are raising taxes to an exorbitant amount, for zero representation at all. And that's just not the case.

Derek: 21:03

Yeah. And and not only that, but the Boston Tea Party wasn't even a tax rebellion. So the colonies were, throwing tea into the harbor here because they were upset, not with an inordinately high British tax. Right? That's what everybody thinks, but that's not the case.

Derek: 21:23

So why did they throw tea into the harbor? Well, for the exact opposite reason. But to kind of get a a bigger picture, you have to understand, a little bit more background here. So when the the British did start raising tax rates and they, they ended their policy of salutary neglect, which was, you know, we we'll just let the colonists do their own thing. Right?

Derek: 21:45

They ended that neglect, of hands off policy, and said, okay. We're gonna become more involved with the colonies. In part, because they wanted to raise taxes to recoup some of their money and stuff. But anyway, when this started to happen, the colonists started a number of what were often successful nonviolent protests. And you can go go back to our season on nonviolent action and listen to our episode on the, the American Revolution and get a glimpse at, some of the things that were going on during this time.

Derek: 22:18

But the colonists were were, pretty rebellious, and they did so often non violently and and through a number of means. So in in 1770, the Townshend Act, which raised the number of, which raised the taxes, is repealed for everything except for a tax on tea. So what did the colonists do? They, they started a very lucrative side hustle. Just like we saw under Prohibition when the government creates a force contrary to the interests or desires of the people, you're gonna end up getting those who circumvent the system and often do so while making a a good profit.

Derek: 22:55

With the rise in taxes, many colonists were making some decent money from smuggling goods without having to charge the British imposed taxes. But with the passing of the Tea Act in 1773, the British actually lowered or dropped the Tea Tax for the British East India Company. So that meant that not only would tea become much cheaper, it would also mean that little or no money spent on tea went to the British crown. If you're a colonist interested in that sort of thing, that might be interesting. Right?

Derek: 23:26

Okay. We get cheaper tea, and, we'd we're not. They're not paying a tax on that tea. So, hey, I'm not supporting Great Britain. However, if you're a colonist who's smuggling and you've been making a good profit off of that kind of thing, off of the economy that that British pressure created, a drop of the tea tax for your competitor isn't a good thing.

Derek: 23:52

Therefore, your competitor's tea has to be thrown into the ocean. Now we could talk about government subsidies, monopolization, and whether those things are good or not. Right? Talking about how complexity is is a whole part of this discussion. I'm not at all saying that, you know, that what Great Britain did was was right or good, and that it it wasn't harmful to the economy or I'm not saying any of that kind of stuff, but that's not really the issue here.

Derek: 24:22

Right? The issue here is is, what our conception of our founding and founding events are. Just think about how the story is framed versus the reality of the story. The truth is that the British were giving the colonists some significant benefits, benefits which included arm protection by a well trained army, expansion and protection of land claims, lower tax rates than citizens, on the in Great Britain, large sovereignty in local matters, and responsiveness to boycotts and demands and repealing many unpopular taxes and laws. The colonists had more freedom than minorities and women would have for another two hundred years.

Derek: 25:01

They had tax rates that were really low for their time and incomprehensibly low compared to what we experienced today. In the course of two decades, they had a number of big pieces of legislation repealed with items like the Stamp Act repealed in less than a year from its passing, which you you just need to understand how amazing that is, because you have to consider the time that it took to send the news of the passing of legislation across the sea, implement that legislation in the colonies, have it implemented enough that people get ticked, and they're like, hey. This is terrible. Have time to push back and and boycott and all that kind of stuff, and then to send that communication back and forth across the ocean, trying to hash things out and figure out how we're gonna resolve that issue. And then finally decide to, to send an idea for repealing this legislation through the government and get that passed.

Derek: 25:55

Like, all of that to happen within a year is is insane, but the colonists were were so good at their nonviolent action, their boycotting, making their voices known that the British government was was pretty responsive at times. So when we look at how mythologized and exaggerated many of our founding events are, it it should cause us to ask why. Why do we believe things the way that we do? Sure. Sometimes we just get historical facts wrong, and those misunderstandings just perpetuate.

Derek: 26:26

Right? That happens. That's misinformation. We're misinformed, common misconceptions. But when you have so many myth mythological misunderstandings, and, there's just a general lack of complexity that's concentrated on one small period of history, like the founding of The United States, you should begin to see that something else is probably going on here.

Derek: 26:52

We don't have simple misunderstandings about our founding. We have an understanding that has a particular shape, and it has been shaped as it has for a reason. To survive and dominate on the world stage, one has to believe in their own benevolence. A benevolence infused into who we are because we see that benevolence all the way back to its roots. Right?

Derek: 27:14

We were birthed in benevolence. If the roots were benevolent, aren't the branches and the leaves? The founders identity becomes our identity. Their rebellion was justified, and our preservation of the just and free world that they fought for so indignantly is likewise good. We are benevolent imperialists who want to help those in shithole countries who don't have the benefit of the deep roots that we have.

Derek: 27:42

Our wars are always justified, and we're always the good guys. Our policies are always just. Rightness is just in our veins. It's who we are. Now hopefully, you can see how mythologization and nationalism go hand in hand.

Derek: 27:58

Now these relate to the propaganda of racism or elitism. These educational narratives teach us, instill in us an identity, not just an identity of ourselves, but the identity of others as well. Patriotism paves the way for us to accept the supposed truth of our greatness and uniqueness and to identify those who don't comport with the social norm. But it's nationalism which teaches us that for which patriotism has primed us. The third area of propaganda we discussed was that of corporate propaganda.

Derek: 28:34

The unique aspect of corporate propaganda was that it sought not only to educate us, but to shape who we are. Rather than simply try to indoctrinate us with information, corporate propaganda figured out how to shape our desires. Since choice and action are birthed out of our desires, this is no small feat. But the corporate world isn't the only group that shapes our desires. There are some even bigger propagandists in action here.

Derek: 29:01

Propagandists who are, not coincidentally, composed of many corporately connected individuals, the government. With the revolving door from the corporate world to the political world and back again, along with a great deal of corporate subsidies, lobbying, and all that goes along with these things, the government is extremely adept at the inception of desires. That's just one example. Let's take the oil and gas industry. When I first moved to Romania, One of the biggest eye openers for me came from filling up a tank of gas.

Derek: 29:35

The cost was double or triple what it would have been in The States. Now the way that narrative usually plays out in discussion with those from The US is, wow, that's crazy how expensive gas is in Europe. The government there must just tax them ridiculously high, or our economy is a lot better as we can see from our low gas prices. So what really makes the difference? Sure.

Derek: 30:01

Taxes in Europe might be more than in The States, but the most significant culprit is the fact that The United States so heavily subsidizes the oil industry. Without government subsidization of oil and gas, gas would cost a whole lot more. And that's only factoring in the monetary cost. It's not even considering the loss of life we spend waging wars and engaging in conflicts over oil interests. So how does this subsidy end up playing out?

Derek: 30:30

When the cost of gas rises, the first thing people do is point to the current president and congress and accuse them of screwing up the economy because people can't afford gas for, because gas prices are going up. We can't afford it because our whole society is built around commuting. We're not a walking society or a society with public transportation or a society which values renewable energy. So if anyone fails to adhere to the oil lobby's demands, if we don't fight a war to protect our oil and our oil prices I mean, the world's oil. Sorry.

Derek: 31:05

Or if leaders decide to pull back funding to reveal the true price of oil to the consumer, then those politicians must be incompetent or malicious. Unpatriotic, probably, really. They're seeking to undermine the average citizen, or there's some libtard environmentalist who believes in global warming and wants to hug trees all day. So much for the free market. Right?

Derek: 31:30

The same people who just learned about the truth of the Boston Tea Party and changed their defense of it from freedom from taxes to freedom from novelization are the same people who judge the effectiveness of a government in large part based on their propping up the advantage of the oil industry and the energy market. But that's because the government, a group composed of many, many, many individuals closely tied to the oil industry, have, through various means, created within us a desire for oil and an acceptance of all that it entails to fulfill and protect that desire. Speaking of oil, let's talk about media's tactic for propagandizing. While we're gonna talk about some of the media's propagandizing through information when we get to the military, most of our focus on media propaganda up to now has been on the power of silence. The media has a great power, not so much in what they do say, but even more so in what they choose not to say.

Derek: 32:29

Media is the magician of propaganda. You see the hand the magician wants you to see, while being kept fully unaware of what's going on in the other hand. I don't think you see this kind of thing more with the government than when we talked about what the Pentagon called message force multipliers. These were analysts who were trained by and associated with US government to convey their themes and messages to the media for interviews leading up to the end, during the second Iraq war. The government essentially decided that it wanted to invade Iraq.

Derek: 33:00

It started preparing a bunch of, plants, you know, media information plants to say what the government wanted, and then had the media push those message force multipliers through. Well, there was great power in the fact that these message force multipliers repeated a message over and over and over again, which is vital for priming and shaping people to receive information as true. What those message force multipliers did was take up the airwaves in new space so that dissenting voices would be crowded out. The point of propagandists telling you the same thing a hundred times isn't only so you have a better chance of believing what they say on its face. It's also to prevent you from hearing anything that would make you question that message.

Derek: 33:41

Even if you don't believe what they say any of the hundred times they say it, it's gonna be hard to know what to do with your distrust if you don't hear anybody else pushing against that narrative. Maybe you're just crazy. Maybe you're a conspiracy theorist because you're the only one who deviates from the narrative. Not only at play is your sanity here, but silence also allows you to avoid a conflict of character. You can see this really well in a book called They Thought They Were Free.

Derek: 34:10

It's been a while since I read the book, and I think I actually read it twice. But it's such a fantastic book where this guy goes back to Germany pretty soon after World War two, and he just, like, interviews, I think, ten ten men, and just tries to figure out, like, what was going on in their minds? Like, what did they know? What's how did they come to this? And do they still think that they were right, or do they kind of see the error of their ways?

Derek: 34:39

And it's fascinating. And he gets he gets a bunch of different perspectives, because, yeah, you just you find out different things from from, each person. But one of the common themes that he saw was that there's this idea of okay. We ask, how did they not know what was going on in the concentration camps? How did they not know what was happening to, Jews and stuff?

Derek: 35:06

And it's like, well, okay. They saw them being shipped away, but you can think in your mind, yeah, maybe they're being shipped away to, to a labor camp. Okay. That's not great, but they're not being gassed. They're not being whatever.

Derek: 35:18

So there are lots of just there's lots of unknowns. And people didn't ask for a bunch of information. And if you found out information, you didn't really talk about it. And so maybe you even did know what was going on, but there was just this air of nobody really knows. Right?

Derek: 35:36

Because nobody talked about it. And there's there's this really poignant, I don't know if this is a direct quote, but, the concept here is, it says in the book, what your neighbors don't expect you to know, they don't expect you to act on. And that's really powerful. Because if you don't know if you don't know for sure, like, can you really act on it? I mean, I've experienced this, and and I know other people experience it when, you know, if you if you, see something and you're like, oh, is is that person okay?

Derek: 36:11

Oh, yeah. They're they're probably okay. It looks like they're fine. Right? Where you have that question in the back of your mind, like, are they okay?

Derek: 36:17

Or with, abusers and and victims. Right? I see that she she has a bruise kind of often, but, you know, she says she's clumsy. She's probably okay. You you don't know that she's being abused.

Derek: 36:32

And so it's not my personal business. I'm not gonna go and and dig into that information. If she wants to come and talk to me, she can talk to me, and then I'll I'll definitely help her. But we kind of have this understanding that we feel like if, if if we can avoid the expectation of having knowledge, that then we are not culpable to act on that, to act on what we think is true, if we think that other people wouldn't expect us to know that truth. You can couple this concept with another really, really interesting point that, that the book made, which was that, you know, it the government is never worried about getting people to do the dark work.

Derek: 37:18

It says that's easy. What it's scared of is active resistance. When you couple these things together, you get this concept that, well, if people don't know things or if we don't make knowledge readily accessible of the truth of what's going on, then people aren't going to be expected to act or revolt or, or push back. And that's good because what the government is scared of, is is active resistance. And we've seen in in books like, Chenoweth's Why Civil Resistance Works.

Derek: 37:54

3%, you don't fail with a resistance movement that has 3% or more of the population involved. And that's even high. She's like, it'll usually succeed with less than 3%, but guaranteed, over 3%, we haven't seen seen, actions fail. Right? The the government is scared of active resistance.

Derek: 38:17

It it's not worried about getting people to do the dark work to be in the gas chambers and all that kind of stuff. You can do bribes and threats and all that other kind of stuff. You can get people to do your dirty work. But it's making sure that you don't have enough people in the know who, who are gonna push back. So silencing dissent is really important.

Derek: 38:37

And that's something that we've seen over and over and over again through this podcast. I reference it frequently. Vaclav Havel's, idea of the greengrocer sign, and how, if the government has has you, under communism, put out the sign that say, workers of the world unite. And this one greengrocer is like, I'm not gonna put that out. He's dead.

Derek: 39:00

Right? He's gonna go to a a reeducation camp, and he's gonna be dead. We're working the rest of his life. Well, why? He just refused to put out a few words on a sign.

Derek: 39:11

That's because, being willing to, to not repeat the narrative and being willing to, to to pull that sign and to not go with the flow, that shows that you're you're gonna expose the system for what it is and that you're not willing to go along with it. And they can't have that. Because if it only takes a few percentage of the population to, to create successful movements, you can't let that snowball start rolling down the hill. And so that's that's a super important concept to grasp. So for all of these reasons, the government is a master at Legurdamine, at silence and avoidance.

Derek: 39:55

They don't want you to know because they don't want you to act against them. So they release information when they want to, and they withhold information that they want. Oftentimes, what they do tell you is meant to divert your attention from what they don't want you to know. I think, the recent release of UFO information may have been one of those times, as I think it was, Russell Brand that pointed that out in, one of his his, the talk shows that he was on. I'll try to put a video clip of that in the show notes, but I thought it was really pertinent here and interesting.

Derek: 40:27

As we get, patriotic movies like Top Gun two coming out, a movie basically about The US versus, I think, China, pretty clearly, maybe. And a release of UFO information after decades and decades of silence. It makes you wonder what's going on. What is The US preparing for? A fight with with Russia, with China, and what is The US wanting us to look away from?

Derek: 40:52

That last part is is conjecture, of course. I don't know if there's necessarily anything they want us to look away from. But when you understand how propagandists work, these sorts of things just make you wonder. Finally, we ended our deep dive into propaganda this season by looking at the scientific and medical communities. We noted that one of the key aspects of their propaganda was their air of benevolence.

Derek: 41:18

Whatever they did, all sorts of great evils was sanctified as good because of their intentions and the results which they predicted. Nowhere else do the ends justify means more so than in the medical and scientific communities. The Tuskegee experiments in testing black men for the greater good of disease research, gynecological procedures without anesthetization on black women so that white women could be served effectively, experimenting on prisoners like those in Philadelphia Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison for the good of the regular populace and for the armed forces, forced sterilization as we saw with the Supreme Court's Buck versus Bell decision, which still stands today as far as I'm aware, And, of course, the work of the Nazis on so many victims, which was for the betterment of the world, and especially for the Aryans and the Germans. Good as the medical community defines it and has works for the greatest number of people, people of value, anyway. Of course, from this well of supposed benevolence brings all sorts of consequentialist evils, justifications for what information is told or withheld, Justifications for the countries from which we'll accept wealthy and presentable immigrants.

Derek: 42:31

Or from the shithole countries from which we'll turn away the too tired, the too poor, and the too huddled of masses. Justifications for wars and defining who our enemies are and who we can kill. All evils and injustices flow out of this well of benevolence. We are doing it to secure freedom for more people or to protect our freedoms. And because there are many times the government's interests and my interests overlap, it's not too hard to believe them.

Derek: 42:59

It's only those whose interests don't align who tend to see through the lies. A great place I think you can see this is with the war on drugs. Now that's a good thing. Right? As usual, there is certainly nuance here.

Derek: 43:14

But let me leave you with, with some words that, John Ehrlichman told in an interview with Harper's writer, Dan Baum, because I think it's it's kind of insightful in regard to the war on drugs. Quote, the Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies, the anti war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or to be black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

Derek: 43:54

We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did. End quote. Now that comes from the the mouth of John Ehrlichman, who was a former Nixon domestic policy chief.

Derek: 44:14

Now you can take those words or leave them, and you can also balance those words with understanding how how truly horrendous drugs are for families and and what they do to a person's body and all of that kind of stuff. Like I said, there's a whole lot of complexity and nuance. But certainly, the way that drugs have been portrayed, and the way that policy has been enacted against them, and the communities that they have affected, and the, the way that, you know, things like the crack epidemic versus the opioid crisis, Right? Even even in the words, the language there, is is just, it's insightful to understand all of the motivations that go on and how government can frame medical things, how they can frame your public well-being, or the public's well-being and your personal well-being. They can frame that, as this act that they're doing is benevolent, even when a significant interest, if not the sole interest for them, is actually to curb certain communities and control them.

Derek: 45:19

And this right here reminds me of, of a famous C. S. Lewis quote, where he says, quote, of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. End quote.

Derek: 45:40

So don't think benevolence, even feigned benevolence or benevolence that is is misguided is benign. Oh, well, they're just doing it for your own good because it's not. Some of the greatest atrocities, many, most of the greatest atrocities come because people think they're doing a good thing. So whether people are feigning benevolence, to make you buy something, to to make you believe something, or whether they truly believe in their benevolence, False pseudo benevolence here is is a really, really terrible thing, and it should it should scare you. You're not gonna find an institution with a bigger benevolence complex than the government.

Derek: 46:28

Everything they do, so they say, is for your own good. And the things that governments do in order to do good, the good that they say that they're doing is, is pretty terrible. I mean, you could just look at the, the incarceration rate in The United States and how many people we have in prison. The numbers are absolutely insane. I mean, even just by numbers, just the number, we blow other countries, even countries that have a significantly higher population.

Derek: 46:57

We just blow most of those out of the water, having the most people incarcerated. But then if you go by by incarceration rates, that's pretty insane too. I don't think we're we're quite at the top. I've seen a number of different stats, and some stats were towards the top. But, you know, if you go to the Wikipedia stats, they currently have us at at six, the United States at six, in regard to incarceration rate.

Derek: 47:21

Right? But what was really interesting when I when I was looking at the stats, a lot of the, the countries with high incarceration rates like, I just looked at the top 20. If if you went down further, if you did the top 30, it would be even it would be just as bad. But the top 20, you have, I think it was like 12 or 13, are from the American region. So, you know, South America, Central American countries, many of which we undermined, The United States has undermined them through coups and, invasions and other sorts of things.

Derek: 47:59

And then Oceania, you're like, why does Oceania have such a high well, you look at the three or four nations in Oceania that, that have high incarceration rates, and they're all associated with The United States. So, like, Guam, for instance, is a territory, or American Samoa. But then you also get I I had to look up Palau, and I I wasn't sure what that is. And so I don't think that they're actually a US territory, but they have, like, really, really close associations with The United States, even, having a bunch of people in in the US military, and the military US military provides defense for them and all kinds of stuff. And then some of the other places in The Americas are you've got a bunch of, you know, former colonies or or current colonies, like the British Virgin Islands.

Derek: 48:45

And, so the association with, like, British imperialism and Amer and the American state, now The United States, and incarceration rate is just insane. So I can't really speak too much to that at this point, but it's something that that you should definitely go and and dig into. Because I've always associated, like, Russia, China, all these other places. They're they're the really bad people. Now they're maybe they have less people in prison because they just outright kill them more so than than they do in The United States.

Derek: 49:19

We don't have too many extra extrajudicial killings, I don't think, by the government. Sure, there are some, but I don't think it's as systematic as it is in places like China. Nevertheless, point is, we have all of these policies and we say that we're doing all of this good, but we're just blind to how terrible and and unfree our society really is and how we've got our own gulag system here, that that came out of the war on drugs. And that war was at least in part, I think, a significant part motivated by, you know, political interests. Point is, benevolence is a really dangerous thing.

Derek: 50:07

Alright. Well, that is a quick look at how government is the captain planet of propaganda or the commander in chief of propaganda. Government combines and amplifies all the powers of propaganda that we've explored this season. We're gonna dig into the military arm of the government next and continue our discussion of the greatest propagandist of them all, the empire. That's all for now.

Derek: 50:34

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 nonviolence and kingdom living.