Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. I know this probably isn't an episode that everybody's looking forward to. In fact, it'll probably be an episode that people are going to tend to skip over. But I I really hope that I can convince you not to do that. See, so far in this season, we have talked about propaganda.

And this episode is a resource episode. I'm going to share with you a bunch of different resources. Now people might skip over that because they might say, Well, this isn't really, you know, a part of building up your case and leading me to the information that I want. This is sort of an extension. But at the same time, I I think that's really really important because there there are a lot of things that I want you to get out of these episodes, which is why I'm doing a resource episode at the end of each section of this season.

So hang in there for like the next five minutes. Let me tell you why I think this is important. These episodes are important. And then if you want to decide after that to skip these episodes in each part of the season, go for it. But my hope is that you'll you'll stick around for it.

So why are these resource episodes important? Well, first of all, I think it's important because I'm gonna provide you with a big picture rather than parts. So what you get in in the individual episodes leading up to this point, up to a resource episode, is you get a zoomed in view of of whatever I'm talking about. Here, you're gonna kind of get a bigger picture and that's gonna help you get a lay of the land a lot better and see how everything fits together. So I think that's gonna be important for for it just to kind of cohere in your mind if you're able to to get a big picture view and and see all the pieces fitting together, like taking a look at the picture on the puzzle box.

Second, I'm gonna fill in some gaps for you. I have condensed this season down insanely. Like the amount of reading that I've done for this season, listening to podcasts, reading articles, watching movies and videos and YouTube video, like all kinds of things. I mean, I've done a lot in regard to propaganda. And there are so many gaps in the stuff that I'm telling you and the information that I'm telling you in just the content that's out there.

And so in this episode, I'm going to help to fill in some of those gaps and maybe not tell you specifics, but say, Hey, go check out this resource, or this resource, or that resource. And I think that that's extremely important because, you know, my approach to studying and reading is to read extremely broadly. And in fact, at the end of the season, I'm going to do an episode on how do I read so much in a year. Like this year, 2022 when I'm recording this, I I've read like a 195 books, like counting audiobooks and stuff, and that's like, sounds unmanageable if you would have told me like four years ago. I pretty much read nothing in my adulthood other than like articles and stuff until maybe four or five years ago.

And if you would have told me five years ago that I would be reading 200 books in a year, I'd be like, That's insane. When would I ever do that? But I've got a lot of a lot of tips to help you do that at the end of the season, and that's really important because if you understand propaganda more, you're gonna understand that that reading broadly helps you to get a much bigger picture. It helps you to see where there's a lot of overlap with with between people saying different things. And so you're going be able to identify a lot better where the truth is and kind of get a deeper understanding of the topic.

Third, I think these episodes are important because you're going to be able to dissect my research and my rationale. Who influenced me? Who did I read? What resources did I use? If you understand where my information is coming from, that's going to help you know what other resources you should use to kind of check me up on that, to kind of maybe push back on.

So understanding my research and rationale is going to be important for you to be a good critical thinker. Fourth, this is going to help you to dig deeper. Like I said, there there's so much here and my hope is that in each section, I'll be able to provide you with a number of of different resources that I've used, but also a bunch of resources that I might say, hey, I didn't get to these, but these looked really interesting. You might wanna check these these guys out, these people. So hopefully you understand that these aren't throwaway episodes then.

Maybe you choose to throw them away, but there is a very important reason, a number of important reasons to have these episodes here. So like I said, feel free to skip them if that's what you want to do, but I think they're vital to providing the content that you need to do due diligence. All right, so let's get into my resources for this first part of the season. The first way that I would categorize the research is in regard to how humans think, like our blind spots, our psychological influences, all that kind of stuff. There are a number of books I'll throw out here I'll make sure to link in the show notes as well.

The Case Against Reality, Irrationality, The Intelligence Trap, The Delusion of Crowds, The Craving Mind, The Forgetting Machine. And I think that's those are kind of the main ones that I would focus on. But these these books are really important because I think the the very first step you want to do when you're studying propaganda is to look at how does memory, how does perception, how does thinking, how does rationality, how does that stuff work? And then not only how do we think as individuals, but because a lot of propaganda is really based on social structures, things like the delusion of crowds, like how do we do we think collectively because those are two different things. How you think as an individual is different than than how you think as a group.

Like there are significant differences, significant nuances, and understanding where we can be tricked, understanding how we're educated, positive and negative, right? Where are we susceptible, like in the periodolia episode, but also like how do we learn positive things? Because there's a lot of propaganda that's it's not necessarily intended to be there's not malicious propaganda like people are intending to misinform you, it's just the way that societies and cultures educate us. So how do we learn things? How are we educated?

And those types of books are going to be really important for that. Once you kind of take a look at how the the mind works, how rationality works, how discourse, discussion, thinking, susceptibility to to faulty thinking, once you kind of have a grasp on that kind of stuff, then looking specifically at how propaganda functions is going to be helpful. So here are some resources for that. How propaganda works, the technological society and propaganda, both of those are by Jacques Eloule. How Propaganda Became Public Relations, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, Manufacturing Consent, Politics in the English Language, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Grice's Cooperative Theory, some resources on that, which I haven't read a book on Grice's Cooperative Theory, but you could get I'll put some YouTube links and things.

And I actually have an episode on that sometime later in the season, maybe under media. So we'll we'll definitely talk about it. But it's something I would put actually in this section because it's gonna kind of help you understand how people can be manipulated, how propaganda functions. So understanding how propaganda functions is going to fit once you you know how people think and how ideas and beliefs are formed, then propaganda is going to show us well, how how are people trying to form our beliefs? Like how are we being manipulated?

This is the specifics of how it's being done. Once you have a clear idea of how we as humans think and how we as humans are manipulated or, you know, purposefully or just unintentionally like how society propagandizes us, then it's going to be great to look at propaganda history and the implementation. So show me specific times like I'm not able to able to see how I myself am propagandized. That's hard to do, right? It's easier for me now, but it's still, there are all kinds of areas that I'm sure I'm propagandized where I don't realize it because that's what it means to be propagandized.

Like you you don't realize that it's happening and it's happening to all of us. So if you can look at the history of propaganda, how people have implemented it in the past, how has it succeeded in the past, like why couldn't people see crazy ideas in the past? Then that's going to help us to put some flesh on these ideas of of rationality and propaganda. So a couple a couple of books that I'd recommend in this area would be Manipulating the Masses, Mein Kampf, Politics in the English Language again, and Taking the Risk out of Democracy again. Those are going to be good resources to give you some specifics on, you know, manipulating the masses.

That talks about in The United States and it deals with Europe too, like Germany and Great Britain, how did propaganda really start its rise, like back in World War I. And it's going to show you, you know, things were were really crazy. Lack of free speech and alien sedition acts, all kinds of things were going on. You know, we think we we have a free country, but we've got a very big history of that kind of stuff going on. So that's going to give you some very clear examples of how how things have developed in The United States and might give you some understanding of of how things are now, like some of the precedents that that are in place that have created some of the laws that we have and and the government's powers that they have.

Mein Kampf, you know, nobody wants to read that because Hitler wrote that, but it's super important to to understand how did he do what he did. You could add books to this like, know, Ordinary Men or They Thought They Were Free, which which goes into how individuals who enacted Hitler's plan, like how did they get duped? How did they think through things? So understanding that that history of propaganda and seeing it when it's it's clear to us that it's propaganda. You know, when you see it a hundred years ago, it's clearly propaganda.

When you're being propaganda as today, you don't see it because propaganda, it infiltrates the culture, right? It uses what it knows is going to be culturally appropriate and indiscernible to you. So you can see it a hundred years ago, and by seeing it a hundred years ago and seeing the way that different institutions and powers have implemented propaganda, that's going to make modern propaganda a bit more clear to you. And that kind of merges that section merges into, you know, okay, seeing propaganda implemented in the past, you know, is going to also overlap with, okay, well then, I need to understand how did the propagandized become propagandized? How did they fall for it?

And so, They Thought They Were Free Ordinary Men and Defying Hitler are three really good books. I would really like to branch out and do more than those are all about Nazi Germany. And I think there's a danger in, you know, in focusing so much on on one era because it's like, oh, those those Germans, right? Those Nazis, they were just uniquely gullible and stupid or immoral, whatever they were. Which is why, you know, manipulating the masses is a a good one to kinda go with that because that focuses on The United States.

But I would definitely branch out there. That's one area that I would I would recommend figuring out some other resources to branch out on. I know there were some I forget the authors now, but I I know that I I saw some in regard to South Africa, I believe. And then there was one on like Malaysia or Indonesia. I don't know.

There was no. I think it was another it was another African country. Maybe it was Uganda. But there are definitely some works out there which are going to give you examples that are from outside of Europe, outside of Nazi Germany, outside of The United States. I would I would definitely recommend adding to that portion right here because my list is kind of weak here.

Then you could also get into the area of after you you see all of these things in reality and see what it is, you can get into fiction and artistic envisioning, you know, into things like thought experiments. So take nineteen eighty four, or Brave New World, or The Book of Eli, which The Book of Eli, I I don't know if it's actually a book. I know that I've seen the movie. But those are our three really good envisionings. And I think the importance of artistic envisioning is that sometimes it it kind of paints a picture of possibilities for us.

Well, does two things. So first of all, it paints a picture of possibilities for us in that it shows us, hey, if like we think that this kind of thing is nuts right now, we can recognize how crazy something like a world like 1984 is, right? We can see that. But what if, like, gradually over time one day we came to not see how crazy that was? Like, what what could like, what could we extrapolate reality out to if things got really crazy?

And so artistic envisioning is kind of it's a little bit like maybe satire. It's it's kind of an exaggeration to make a point. But when you kind of exaggerate things and and you see the point that's being made and then you pull that back, pull that exaggeration back to see reality, you're kinda like, Oh, yeah. I see. I get that.

And I think it kinda helps to expand our mind. Finally, for for more of like the Christian focus because as a Christian, it is important to me to understand things from a Christian perspective and to see where does my hope lie, why are things the way that they are, why is the church complicit in some of these evils that we're going to talk about. And so I would recommend two powerful books. The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb is one book which interviews a number of Christian writers, speakers, leaders throughout the last, I guess, fifty years or so. And there's some interviews with them and they talk about power in the church and manipulation and that kind of stuff.

And then there's also Celebrities for Jesus, which I thought was was a really good look at power in the church and and how the the church is trying to wield, maybe not specifically information and propaganda, but that's certainly a part of it. Because when you're talking about power and control, going back to David Graeber, one of the ways that you do that significantly, especially the church which doesn't have violence at its hands that the government does, at least at the moment in our part of the world and in this part of history. Doesn't have the police and the army to kind of do its bidding. What you have is manipulation of information. And so Celebrities for Jesus and The Way of the Dragon or The Way of the Lamb are two good books that kind of delve into that.

So closing out, let's talk about where I would go from here. So I already told you that one of the things that I would do is I would I would extend out from some of the focus on on Europe and the West and how propaganda has been used here. That's been my focus, but that's where I would like to read more after that. You could also so that also, I would say, extends in time. So not just reading things other than a Western perspective or how propaganda has been implemented in the West, but also how has propaganda been implemented throughout time.

Because propaganda in its full force, like being used on an extreme scale, that is relatively new, like World War one ish era is when things really started to ramp up. But certainly, propaganda existed before that. For hundreds of years, it was was certainly used. But then, even going back to like Roman times and stuff, there were some examples of propaganda. I have not found very many good books.

Well, I haven't found any good books on propaganda in the ancient world. I did try to read one, I can't remember the name of it now, but it was just like, it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. The manipulative mode, that's what it was called. It was just weird and I didn't like it. So I read like maybe one or two of the the chapters and it was just odd, not what I was going for.

There is one I think I saw entitled Roman Propaganda. So I mean, it would probably be worthwhile to see how has propaganda been used throughout the more distant past. And that might help to put some more flesh on propaganda today and kind of give us insight into how governments of old use that kind of stuff. Sure. But I I think for us, propaganda is done on such a significantly different scale today than it used to be.

So I don't know how beneficial that would be to go into the past. But I would definitely break outside of the West and study more of how propaganda was used across the world. You could also get into things, you know, why words matter, our selection of words, things like narrowcasting, some of the specific strategies. So talking about, you know, the books Off Menu and Secret Soldiers when we talked about our Pareidolia episode, I think that would be helpful, you know, looking into some specifics of priming and framing and how that's done. Some of Neil Postman's stuff, I've read two or three of his books, and they were all really helpful and insightful.

And that would just be more information on what to look out for to not let your senses kind of be fooled. So like for instance, going back to our pareidolia episode, talking about how if chips are in a crunchy bag, crinkly bag, it makes you perceive their freshness different and their crunchiness different. Well, know, one solution to if you wanted to get the chip for the chip and only for the chip and not have your senses influenced by something else, but like you just wanted to compare chips and you didn't want the bag to influence you and you wanted to compare two different brands of chips, then what you might do is you might dump both out on the table or both into a, I don't know, a non ornate bowl, just a regular salad bowl and then come back to them a couple hours later and and try them so the crinkly crinkly bag didn't influence you. Right? Well, that's sort of the same thing.

I don't think framing and priming, we are able to avoid that that the news outlets do that. But if we know how they do it, if we know that people prime us through through various methods, like let's just say the front page of the newspaper, which I mean who buys newspapers anymore? But if you buy newspapers, I don't know, what's something that you might be able to do? Maybe you have somebody else read the newspaper to you. Maybe you start to get it online so you don't have you don't know is it front page or is it not front page?

Which I understand that if you go to a news site, you know, whatever pops up on the page right away is the important things. I don't know how you do it. But if you know how institutions and people try to propagandize you, there might be some types of things that you could do to avoid being influenced if you know knew how those influences happened. I would put that down towards the bottom of my list. I don't know that that's exactly what I would pursue the most.

You could study, like if you looked into casinos and how casinos influence you with smells and those types of things, you know, that might be interesting. But I don't know that it would be super helpful because what we're trying to do is we're trying to figure out, well, how would we rationally evaluate information? And understanding our biases and the ways that we can be manipulated is helpful, but hopefully, we'd be digging into information deeply enough that those things wouldn't ultimately matter. But I don't know. Whatever you think, that's my rationale for how I got to where we are in the season so far.

Hopefully you find this helpful and I will link my Goodreads my Goodreads whatever link in the show notes so you can see what I've read. And I also have a propaganda like a section in a list, reading list, whatever in my Goodreads, might be helpful because there are way, way, way more books that I've read than what I've listed in this episode. So if you want to see all of those books, go ahead and check that out. And I'm also adding adding to it. I've got like three or four more months until this episode releases, so I'll be reading more until then.

So there might be some links that I put in the show notes for other recommendations, which, I just didn't mention in this episode because I haven't gotten to them yet. I hope you enjoyed and I hope you'll check out all of our future resource episodes as well. 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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