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A Quick 'Best Guess' Self-Test for Thinking about Your Personal Vulnerabilty to Propaganda

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
I'm not sure many folks these days understand clearly enough how well propaganda these days has been tailored by both privately and publicly conducted scientific research to exploit our universal human nature.

That is, to exploit our universal human nature for someone else's gain than that of the individual humans who are the targets of propaganda. Or even the accidental casualties of propaganda that was meant for someone else.

If you're curious about this, here's a quick, easy way to see for yourself if you think the test here might mean to you anything beyond what you already know about today's propaganda in something more less not too much like being 'last century news'.

It just makes sense, I think, that the science of propaganda has branches, and possibly subbranches, dedicated to how and why humans decide this or that 'truth' is actually true.

So far as I every reason to believe, one of the well established results of that science is just as well known to the 'interested' public as is anything else of a similar detail of science.

Here's the test: Simply see if you have heard of what we humans look to notice or discover as clues, signs, etc. about other people's behavior when they are speaking to us face to face about anything or everything -- in order to judge whether they are lying to us.

If you have somehow heard or seen before now a scientifically informed explanation of that stuff, and especially anything like a textbook chapter or two on this subject, then that's the equivalent of 'neutral' here -- or a yellow light. You're ok, but please don't assume you have found reason to believe propaganda can't influence you to take sides against what you yourself think of as what's best for you.

If you have not heard that scientists during the last century looked into and studied how and why humans decided if they are being lied to by someone whose face they can see, then please above all else do not assume you are either stupid or especially ignorant. You absolutely are NOT.

Human knowledge is so vast today it long ago became impossible for anyone to know enough of it that there are not perhaps an actual million ways they do not know enough about some area of knowledge that a Public Relations House could not assign a small team of trained specialists in how to lie to people to find out any number of ways they could be dupe, fooled, and delivered to some client as his her pawn, willing to do just about anything he secretly wants them to do.
To make sure: That was NOT a test for you to measure how well you understand propaganda. Not in any real sense of that.

That was my best effort today to help you see for yourself if it's possible that you do not know enough about something so absoltuely relevant to the science of propaganda, that you can not be reasonably certain that you have a personally useful enough understanding of how many ways and means lying can be professionally used to cripple your ability to captain your own life.

My 2 cents. Make of this however you will.


 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
Propaganda started with the rise of the printing press. A literate society with access to multiple platforms of information is especially vulnerable.

Knowledge of the science does not make us immune as this works mostly on a subconscious level.
I suspect people would need specialized training to condition themselves to combat propaganda.

Propaganda triggers our desires & fears, which trigger our thoughts, thoughts trigger our actions.
 

lewisnotmiller

Grand Hat
Staff member
Premium Member
Propaganda started with the rise of the printing press. A literate society with access to multiple platforms of information is especially vulnerable.

Every form of transmission and discourse changes the nature and avenues of propoganda.
But propoganda did NOT start with the printing press.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
Every form of transmission and discourse changes the nature and avenues of propoganda.
But propoganda did NOT start with the printing press.

I meant to say it proliferated with it. Prior to the printing press, its scope was pretty limited.
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
Shouldn't everyone?
No, as phobias are irrational.
And except for a few situations of extraneous variables, we should all be intolerant of lies and manipulation. And that's not irrational. People who tell mistruths and deceptions can potentially be dangerous.
 

The Hammer

[REDACTED]
Premium Member
No, as phobias are irrational.
And except for a few situations of extraneous variables, we should all be intolerant of lies and manipulation. And that's not irrational. People who tell mistruths and deceptions can potentially be dangerous.

Semantics aside, this is what I was referring to by a "phobia of".
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
Semantics aside, this is what I was referring to by a "phobia of".
But phobias are irrational. That's what makes it a phobia. Aversions towards and intolerance of liars is rational. It's really not much different than an establishment banning someone with a history of starting fights at the establishment.
 

The Hammer

[REDACTED]
Premium Member
But phobias are irrational. That's what makes it a phobia. Aversions towards and intolerance of liars is rational. It's really not much different than an establishment banning someone with a history of starting fights at the establishment.

Still semantics.
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Do you have a phobia of liars?

I assume you mean 'phobia' in the common sense of 'an irrational fear'?

Like, when a person might routinely see themselves as somehow inferior to other people who have this or that trait. A trait that he or she has somehow come to see as a cause or reason for the human superiority/inferiority reflex to kick into high gear. And will then cripple their ability to see themselves or the world around them with as much realism as they might otherwise see it.

That universal human reflex would come across to me as a likely source of anything irrational, and of anything fearful to anyone of us, that could unite somehow to become a real phobia. It's certain that's our universal DNA at work in all of us.



I don't have any phobias that my therapist, my psychiatrist, or anyone close to me has ever told me about. But the professionals are on the look out for depression. Maybe they've just not seen any phobias at anytime over the 15 or so years they have been my go-to defense team for dealing with chronic depression. That stuff developed in childhood, was misleading diagnosed by accident, then became a roller coaster ride for decades. I finally figured out what it was. Took enough of an interest in the neurosciences to puzzle it on my own, basically. Then I got looking for professional help They were my team, along with my family and closest friends to finally get a handle on it a dozen or so years ago. It took a team.

Not surprising for the earth's best socially evolved species to be equipped to tackle any challenge most efficiently and effectively by a group effort, always in so many ways reliant on shared facts and understandings of what, why, and how they are going to get their work done.

Possibly Rupert Murdoch's 'socialism' as he understands the concept, only in the natural state, which is well before he gets his brain wrapped around trying to spin any reality of universal human nature that his network labels as some kind of 'socialism'. The 'reality' that he actually uses is what he uses to understand how to exploit universal human nature to his own personal advantage -- in all of his favorite ways.

The value of knowledge, if you can see it as such. To me, it comes across more fascinating as the dangers of misleading information -- even when innocently passed along.



I'm honestly wondering why you even would use 'phobia' as possibly a choice of words here? Too many vague and possible meanings for it not to come across to some people as a mild smear of sort. 'Mild' in terms of anything I would likely feel about it if it came from, say, an angry friend. The gods only know these days what limits there might be to us humans anymore in how we think we most actually, pesonally, and meaningfully feel about an insult.

Could you clarify what you meant by 'phobia' in reality-based language so I have a chance of understanding you?

It's ok if you don't want to do that so far as I'm concerned. I almost never take anything seriously in a personal way about something someone says to me until I see in due time a vividly defining pattern of behavior. To me, insults are like reading a map. I don't read maps while thinking of cutting lose to emote like I am actually hiking the trails shown on the local ones here. My life-long interest in epistemology coming through once again.

I suspect that's what they called 'philosophical detachment' in the ancient world. The Stoics were the best examples of it by far. It came with their territory, then they topped that off by cultivating it. My mom worked her take on stoicism into my brothers and I, alongside of her sense of life as a duty to one's community. More or the less the opposite of BSing people, so far as I can see her notion of duty.


Personally, I most often encounter phobias in the sense of an irrational fear of someone based on one's own feelings of inferiority to someone else in the various ways people can think of anything I say as personally humiliating when at times I come across to them as someone who knows more about something they might even have nothing more than a mild interest in knowing anything about it at all.

I'm always more curious about learning something from someone than I am too afraid of someone to learn what I could otherwise learn from.

That's mostly because It's gotten me laid by so many women I have found fascinatingly attractive during my life. That's mostly the only reason I've ever had for ramping up my natural, DNA-based, intrinsic boredom with my fellow humans and especially with women into making me think of actual ways to work around my phobias so well, that --- as some kind of unintended consequence of wanting to get laid -- I've never myself have had reason to believe I've had a phobia in my life. At least, in the sense of having created the monster myself, other than in the sense of the very many phobias I've had as some one person's or another's cliche joke about me.



Did you really want to know why I'm concerned with lying these days? Or was that not actually why you asked the question in the first place, now that you think about it?

I don't expect it would be likely, but if you do react to my post, could you reign in any use of cliches, common talking points, group think, or other such things, please? Assuming you would use them, of course.

I've been finding it hard these days not to expect everyone will say the same sort of things in the sort of ways so predictably often such that I might be too easily convinced that it really wasn't them saying those things, it was actually some kind of propaganda that was doing their thinking for them, and then saying those things for them.

Like,'propaganda induced form-letter attempts to react to someone just as if that was the way they would think you saw and understood their words well enough for them to believe they were hearing a personal idea or thought from you', or something like.

It's the root of the phobia I am currently in self-denial of possessing. It comes out in me as the six or so nightmares I have each week about logging onto the net someday only to discover Tucker Carlson is yelling, screaming, shrieking, and squealing like a pig at me about the terrifying socialism he's found in today's chipmunk population. Only in this case, it's Tucker's take on reality coming out of the mouths of everyone on the net, and everyone is swearing as they go along that it's really and honestly themselves doing the thinking and screaming, and not Tucker after all.

Totally irrational, if you ask me. I mean, Tucker doesn't scream. He instead convincingly emphatizes his concern for people's freedoms and liberties, just like the best of the Swanson family always and so nobly do. That's not at all like screaming in any way. But that's nightmares, right? Totally irrational.




Hopefully, someone will find a use for this post. Hopefully in the sense of another RF babe PMing me for my deeply personal take on her epistemological thoughts and thinking. Almost the only real conversations on the net these days are by PM.

'Alt-conversations'. Mark it. It will be born a word if this BS goes on long enough.


Interested in this kind of music? Serious question, if you yourself can take it seriously.

Hanggai is the group. "Reincarnation" is the cover song.

 

Heyo

Veteran Member
Do you have a phobia of liars?
No, it's more an allergy. And it's not about all lies, just manipulative lies. I feel physically uncomfortable when I'm exposed to advertisements or a special sort of politician. I usually like to go to the source but I'm perfectly fine when I hear what Trump said second hand so I don't have to listen to his voice.
 
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Hockeycowboy

Witness for Jehovah
Premium Member
Propaganda started with the rise of the printing press. A literate society with access to multiple platforms of information is especially vulnerable.

Yeah, blame it on Gutenberg. I’m all for that!

About time he gets blamed for something. It really irks me that he’s gotten away with stuff for so long!

Just kiddin’
 

PureX

Veteran Member
I think that deliberately misleading blocks of information have become so common and pervasive in our culture that we cannot possibly fact-check them all. And we know it. And it's exhausting being constantly assaulted by it all. So we've taken on the habit of simply accepting what we intuit to be true (because it aligns with how we're feeling), as being true, and just ignoring everything to the contrary.

And I honestly don't know how we combat this.
 

Shadow Wolf

Certified People sTabber
Still semantics.
It's the definition of the word. Intolerance towards liars should never be thought of as a phobia because there is absolutely nothing irrational with that, there is nothing wrong with that, and it should never be on par with things where such fears can cause real problems for people other than the hater. It should also not be comparable to something that is clinical. Because that is needlessly causing problems in someone's life. Keeping liars out of your closer circles is preventing problems in your life.
 

The Hammer

[REDACTED]
Premium Member
It's the definition of the word. Intolerance towards liars should never be thought of as a phobia because there is absolutely nothing irrational with that, there is nothing wrong with that, and it should never be on par with things where such fears can cause real problems for people other than the hater. It should also not be comparable to something that is clinical. Because that is needlessly causing problems in someone's life. Keeping liars out of your closer circles is preventing problems in your life.

You obviously don't like metaphor, and are not picking up what I was putting down. That's ok.

Edit: phobia: "an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something."

It does not always need to involve irrationality. To have an extreme aversion to liars should be normal, considering the damage lying causes. As evidenced by today's political climate.
 
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