In response to Nitewriter:

You bring up some very interesting points that deserve further consideration.  First off, I’d enjoy learning about your research on propaganda and the methodologies of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis because they strike close to the core of my own work in many ways.

That said, I would like to respond to your concern that getting beyond FUD techniques takes away our side’s (however we choose to define it) ability to employ the same tactics.  I don’t see this as being a problem if the goal is to change the nature of the game entirely so that such tactics are generally recognized as problematic and discouraged.  I believe it is possible to cultivate a deep cultural change that leads to this widespread rejection of FUD.  But it depends upon organizing people and information flows in fundamentally different ways than they were during the 20th Century.  Also, it requires a new understanding of the human mind – one that is based on advances that have occurred since the mid-20th Century.

There is much more than I can unpack in this comment about these thoughts, but I merely want to ask you to consider what the world could be like if our economy were based on sharing, rather than hording (a shift that we are in the midst of on a global scale), and if the modes of production for media were profoundly democratized (all the way down to understandings of human cognition and the neurophysiology of semantics).  This would be a very different world with a different set of socially acceptable practices, values, and norms.

I realize that this is a very ambitious vision, but it is becoming possible through a series of shifts in media production, norms and expectations around a sharing economy, and paradigm shifts around understanding the nature of humanity and the workings of the mind.

All the best,

Joe Brewer
Founder, Cognitive Policy Works

The lesson here is simple:  The persuasive devices, cognitive vulnerabilities and manipulative techniques are more-or-less universal.  When you neutralize the opposition’s weapons in this regard, you also neutralize your own.  The only hope is that if your opposition is too stupid to realize what you’re doing, and that isn’t likely.  I can’t see any way to get around this.  Stereotyping, demonizing and marginalizing is the same whoever does it, and so is hypocrisy.  The use of these, or any other devices, would have to assume that the end justifies the means and as I understand it, that’s precisely what you’re wanting to avoid.

I’ve published a list of several hundred quotations on propaganda, persuasion and deception if anyone is interested. 

Got any ideas?