How to Tell Propaganda from Education: CIA Psychological Warfare and Information Control

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] So if you think about prior propaganda, this is another key difference. Like in advertising. Similarly, like you drive to work, you'd see what, 10, 15, you know, signs like road signs, like maybe you'd see something on the bus, maybe you'd hear a few commercials. Most of your experience would be outside of the information stream that's trying to coerce you into thinking certain things, alright? Whereas now it's the opposite. Most of your experience is consuming an information stream that's trying to coerce you into doing that. This is Michael Ring. I'm a cattle and crop farmer from Northern Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome to the podcast, I'm glad you're here. Today we speak with Zach Stein. I came across Zach when he was on the Jim Rutt podcast, which as many of my listeners know, I love the Jim Rutt show. It's, it's great because he finds all these crazy characters. And on this show, Zach was talking about propaganda and how it's being used in the United States. And when I first heard it I thought, ah, this guy seems a little nuts. You know, he is trying to tell us that our government is telling us things. And then you start looking at the world around us and you start saying, wait a second, he's totally onto something. And the more I listened to, the more I was captivated. So I pulled over to the side of the road, listened to the whole interview, and by the time I drove home, I, I was writing Zach a an email to see if he would come on. He did. And we have a wild and wide ranging conversation about what is the difference between propaganda and education? How do you know that propaganda is going on in the world? What does it look like and what position are Americans in right now?

Vance Crowe [00:01:33] And we end with a little bit of a conversation about talking with your children. You know, what do you tell them in a world that is built on information asymmetries? And it's really just a fascinating conversation. So I hope you buckle in. Before we get to that all Christmas season, I was doing Legacy Interviews. This is when I sit down with a loved one and I talk with them about their family stories, the values that they want to pass on and things that they want to remember. This has been a wonderful way to capture those stories that oftentimes you've heard your parents or grandparents say, but nobody's ever had the time to write it down. Or often I'll ask people questions that they'll say, you know, I've never answered this and I'm looking forward to my daughter hearing this. And so a lot comes out in these interviews. If you would like me to personally interview one of your loved ones to capture their stories, go to store Articulate Ventures and you can set that up. Also, you hear me mention the Articulate Ventures network in one of our monthly shared experiences. This month we are doing a digital sunset and a bedtime, which sounds like a weird thing, but when all of a sudden you have dozens of other people going to bed at the time they agreed to and putting away their cell phones, all of a sudden you feel this good social pressure that gets you to do things that are really difficult. And you might like joining this group. If you like this podcast, we talk about the podcast, but we also get together for book club. This month we're reading Dune and we do these monthly shared experiences where people get a chance to do things, try things, experiment with life, and share the experience with other people across the United States that are doing it.

Vance Crowe [00:03:09] So if you are interested in joining the network, go to network dot Articulate Ventures. Thanks so much for stopping by and enjoy this interview with a new friend, Zach Stein. Zach Stein, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, I hired you on Jim Ruts podcast, which my guests know quite well. And I actually heard you speak about a year ago on some interesting concepts about the way the human mind works and how you develop skills. But it didn't dawn on me to have you on the podcast until I heard you come back on Jim Ruts show and talk about propaganda. And I was so enthralled with your take on that and how much I had missed just in the water around me. They actually pulled the car over and stopped driving to, to listen to the rest of the interview. So we have a wide range of things that I wanna talk about. But first, why don't you introduce yourself a little bit about your background, what you do with the Consilience Project and kind of what the Consilience project is. Yeah, thanks. I'm glad you didn't get in an accident due to my use of use of language. Yeah, that was a fun conversation with Jim. And you know, the Consilience project is an attempt to articulate like a core body of social theory that can be used to understand the current moment. And the current moment is a moment of meta metris. So we're trying to raise public awareness about the depth of the metris, which threatens basically civilizational continuity.

Vance Crowe [00:04:40] So we're working on those issues. I'm a philosopher of education and a psychologist and was actually brought to the study of existential risk and civilizational collapse through the route of looking at educational systems failure, specifically standardized testing. So my first book is on standardized testing and then my second book called Education in a Time Between Worlds basically looks at the current moment of civilizational transition. So that's a little bit of my background. I was also involved in getting a, a nonprofit going called Lika, which was an attempt to use the new sciences of learning neuroscience, educational neuroscience. And the model that you heard me speak about with Jim, which is a cognitive developmental model to use that to redesign standardized testing because the multiple choice kind of no child left behind raced at the top approach is just has destroyed the schools. So that was that Lika is continues on. I'm, I'm an advisor so I have my hands deep in kind of like educational reform work, you know, looking specifically at standardized testing. And I seeing just how one could decimate human potential made me realize that if you had what I called a catastrophic bifurcation in intergenerational transmission, which is a terrible word that basically means like we forget how to pass on stuff, like important stuff, if that occurs too deeply, that's a kind of a vector or cause of civilizational collapse just by definition because civilizational, you know, you recreate the civilization by passing on the key skills and personality structures and other things that allow it to be itself into improve or you know, at least not completely collapse.

Vance Crowe [00:06:36] So that's how I kind of got into this conversation with folks like Daniel Schmuck Berger and others in this and Jim Rudd and Jordan Hall, and people in that zone thinking about, well wait, this civilization is mortal, you know, and it may be terminal and we have to think about a deep, deep redesign. And so I focus on education broadly construed so broad that things like propaganda fall under that banner. So I took to the propaganda literature surprisingly enthusiastically, like I really understood it. I was like, Jesus, you know, what have we done here? So let's talk about that. You give a history about propaganda that was really surprising to me and you kind of compared it to entering into the war when we eventually hit the nuclear phase and everybody had to be like, all right, let's stand down. But that didn't happen with propaganda. So, so kinda give a history of how long have we been using propaganda in society and how does it play out? Yeah, I mean the metaphor you described there is one of the key points that I was trying to make in the consilience papers on propaganda, which is that we've reached a point of mutually assured destruction in the space of information war. So like you know, when the nuclear bomb was created and actually before that with certain chemical weapons in World War I, there was a stance of people like, oh my goodness, we could destroy humanity itself because our technologies for creating weapons are so powerful, we have to reconceive how we use weapons, right?

Vance Crowe [00:08:09] So we've been working on propaganda scientifically, military industrial complex, like massive amount of attention on propaganda for just as long as weaponry. And we only recently with digital technologies crossed that threshold into information weapons of massive power mass destruction through information weaponry. And this comes with the digital essentially. And so that's the call that I'm making in these consilience papers. It's like, look, there's this history of propaganda and it was a big deal at certain times certainly, but it always coexisted with other forms of social communication in the public sphere and education. We've reached a saturation point with the presence of ubiquitous computing that makes it almost impossible to escape the propagandized environment. And we've studied undue influence in psychological, psychological coercion and addiction dynamics enough to actually literally design these things like TikTok to be the almost optimal kind of Skinner propaganda delivery machine. So, excuse me, these technologies have gone from persuasive technologies to coercive technologies and that's a threshold that civilizations have predicated upon human choice making can't, can't stomach or hold without profound self-contradiction. So like if the propaganda is so strong that you can't be held responsible for your decision making, then market theory and democratic theory just breaks down because we're no longer autonomous choosers who are essentially instruments of who ever, you know, manipulating us through these kinds of course of technologies.

Vance Crowe [00:09:55] And that sounds extreme, but if you look at the neuroscience behind screen use and the addiction patterns that are already been demonstrated by Facebook's own data, we're in an unprecedented situation in terms of the information. So, and the history of propaganda, as I mentioned, goes way back. I mean we're talking Ramsey's the first, right? For as long as we've had communications technologies, we've had people using communications technologies strategically as opposed to let's say educationally. And this is an important distinction that the very same tools used to create propaganda, printing presses, you know, radios, televisions, eventually social media and before that, huge monuments and other things, right? Those same things can be used to educate in a non-coercive way where the whole intention is to bring the next generation up and into the same amount of knowledge held by the people creating the artifacts. So propaganda you can tell because there's no intention for you to ever bridge that knowledge asymmetry, propaganda's is there almost precisely to keep you out of touch with the actual state of knowledge and in a manipulable position. So there's always been that dichotomy as we've gotten more communication technologies, it's kind of a marshal clune type point, we've expanded our capacities both to educate and to propagandize. So although the propaganda papers are saying we're in a mess, they're also saying we could use the same tools to create the most profound educational system that has ever been seen.

Vance Crowe [00:11:38] But we have to really reconceive the way we're using digital technologies. You know, how do you define the difference between what is education and what is propaganda? So I mentioned a a one quality, which is that, so lemme take a step back. So I work with a concept in my second book called Concept of Teacherly Authority. It's a very important concept, which we've actually as a culture don't hold very well teacherly authority. But it, there's a situation where, you know more than me, let's say we're looking at a tractor or a car or something, right? I don't know anything about tractors or cars, I know a lot about other stuff, you know, I've got a doctorate. But if my car was broken down and you were a dude who knew a lot about cars, I would come to you, we would look at my car together and there would be what I call an epistemic asymmetry, right? You would know more, we would both know that you know more and we'd both be interested in basically me learning enough to fix the situation, right? So that's kind of like, just take that out as like a model that's like, that's teach teacherly authority and it occurs all over the place and it's a necessary social function and it involves this epistemic asymmetry and precisely the mutual interest in bridging the asymmetry. So like if you're a good teacher, you want the student to come to know as much as you or more than you. And for civilization that's key because basically you have to take over kid when I'm gone.

Vance Crowe [00:13:13] So like I can't propagandize you entirely, otherwise I keep you out of touch with the realities you need to know to actually keep the system going. So you can see how if we get totalized propaganda actually lose touch with reality, we're not turning on, we're not passing on the actual ability for younger generations to get in touch with reality. So teacherly authority exists, there's legitimate teacherly authority, there's bureaucratic teacherly authority, or the reason you're my teacher is 'cause the institution tells me you're my teacher, but you don't actually know more than me, right? So there's all of these subtleties to the concept of teacher authority. Propaganda is similar because it's a situation where there's epistemic asymmetry. Like you're the government, like you're a massive media organization, you know more than me, we both know you know more than me, right? And I need the information you have and you release the information in such a way that there's no ability for me to bridge the epistemic asymmetry, right? So that's one telltale sign of propaganda is that the episte, like we know more than you and we're giving you information, but you will never know as much as us by design, right? And by the way, in one-on-one relationships, like with specifically like spiritual teachers or religious teachers, this is one of the signs of like cult dynamics where there is esoteric knowledge, which is privileged only to either a small group or one single person basically. And they're running propaganda to keep the cult together. There's comparable comparisons. This guy Steve Hassan, he's like the leading cult expert in the United States.

Vance Crowe [00:14:47] I pulled on his work when I was talking about how social media enables undue influence, which means it enables that situation of epistemic asymmetry. That is, you know, through the use of coercion, basically perpetuated indefinitely instead of resolved and overcome. So that's one sign. Another sign is that I've been mentioning throughout is coercion versus persuasion, right? So like if I want to convince you of something using reason, I would want to get you in a situation where you are optimally alert where you were well caffeinated, you're well rested, right? We even, we have a thing where we're like looking together at a shared object that represents like, like it's a, it's a respectful dialogue, right? If I want to just like basically make you do something, I'll wear you down, you won't have sleep, right? You'll be distracted by way too much information coming at you way too fast and you can't tell what's true and you don't know kind of who to look to for advice, right? So I will then basically at the right moment put in moments of clarity that resolve things for you and make you come into a situation where basically through information control, you know, almost like certain forms of altered states of consciousness, which get induced from information overwhelm, you can have someone take on ideas without having thought them through. The classic word for this is a thought terminating cliche, right?

Vance Crowe [00:16:20] So a thought terminating cliche is offered in a context of information overwhelm that has been intentionally created in order to resolve the discomfort of being inundated by information with a, with a cliche that stops the rest of the conversation. And, and so the presence of thought terminating cliches, the use of context and control of context to create environments where you can't, where you're literally being discombobulated and hypnotized. So, and of course advertising and this is what, that's how you get it in there. You know, you don't want people alert looking exactly what's going on. You sneak the message in behind emotional defenses and other things by creating context that allow you to do that. So like nudging through micro targeted advertising is an example of that where it's like they're precisely getting you right where they know they can, 'cause they've studied you and they're, they're, they know your newsfeed is hot with emotion right now and they know that something could be brought in that could resolve that emotion. So they'll give you an ad for a medication for example. And so that's not making that up. That's how they do it. And if your, if your goal is to optimize getting people to do stuff as opposed to optimizing, getting people educated, then there's no route other than to just nudge and basically subtly coerce. Now ric coercion is violence and so it's it, you know, propaganda bleeds into a form of psychological violence and in the most direct contexts the recourse is ultimately to violence.

Vance Crowe [00:18:02] And people know that. And so they pretend like we're having a rational argument when in fact we know that you're the one holding the big stick. So I'm agreeing with you 'cause you're holding the big stick. And so there's that spectrum of like coercion. And so that's another factor is that, you know, the presence of the thought, terminating cliche and the creating of these contexts of where thought becomes basically impossible and you become manipulable and sometimes you don't even realize what's happening. That's the best kind. You're being entertained, you're on your newsfeed and you're in a daze. Would a thought terminating cliche be something like, well we trust in the science, science, the science is settled. That's probably the best thought terminating cliche out there now. And with, I mean, and there's many things to say about it. Like from the outside, the thought terminating cliche seems absurd, right? From the inside it, it solves everything cognitively and emotionally and ends very complex trains of thought and very difficult conversations through a kind of a magical incantation. And so through television you could, you could deliver thought terminating cliches, but you couldn't force people to use them. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, right? On social media, not only can you deliver thought terminating cliches, you can basically create context where you have to use them or you're kicked out. And that's actually, that's basically precisely the dynamic that Robert j Lifton, who is an Air force psychologist, is a fascinating psych, a very important psychologist, studied Korean war veterans who'd been literally brainwashed by the Chinese.

Vance Crowe [00:19:49] The Koreans brought them up into China in these camps. And it wasn't as, it was violent, but it wasn't it. They basically sat in circles and argued for hours, argued about ideology, argued about the difference between capitalism and communism, argued about the colonialist ambitions of the US and a whole bunch of other things. And in that context, you weren't allowed to sleep, you were maltreated, you weren't fed. If you started to agree with the group leader and the other soldiers who'd been there for months to use the thought terminating cliches, like for example, you know, chairman Mao is yada yada, or you know, that's not a, you know, materialist, dialectical idea, right? That's a colonialist idea. That's a capitalist I did. Right? If you, if you fell into those buckets using the thought terminating cliches, you were rewarded basically with food or sleep, right? And so soldiers came to just repeat these thought terming cliches through a kind of subtle conversion for months on end and became confused about what their own ideas were concerning capitalism versus communism and the role of the US and the east and things of that nature. And a small number of them chose not to return, chose to stay in North Korea. And those who did return, it was very, very complex for them. Because basically like, you know, your identity runs who I am. It runs on a narrative involved with words and language and concepts.

Vance Crowe [00:21:20] So if you start to get certain words basically inserted, forcibly into your identity structure, things get weird and it, and it happens. So my argument is that something very similar to that context that enables brainwashing happens right between us and our screens, especially if you're addicted to social media. 'cause like I said, it's not just a one one-way broadcast receiving propaganda, it's a receiving propaganda forced to articulate the language given to you by the propagandist for social approval in the mix, right? So it's a sociotechnical engineering of a certain way of thinking and being. And sometimes it's a duplicity, you know, you're doing it for show so you don't get kicked out of the group or so you don't get scapegoated for saying something controversial on Facebook. And then in real life, you know that what, you know this. Yeah, but I mean even the research shows that if you write a paper, you know, counter to the perspective that you had before, if you come back and and say, well how much do you feel about this? Just having done the act of writing the paper pro something you didn't agree with before changes your position on it. And on one hand you could say, well maybe that's 'cause you know a little bit more, you have a broader perspective. But it could be on erroneous things. You could do it on why planes actually can't fly. And people will eventually be like, yeah, you know, some of those things we learned about why planes, planes can't fly. Well that's a subtle point, right? Because again, education and propaganda are like twins, right?

Vance Crowe [00:22:51] But propaganda's like the evil twin of education because the thought term terminating cliches are concepts, right? So like you can say like, you know, science has decided this issue, if you're looking in a very narrow way at a very specific experiment, right? That's got a whole bunch of backlogs, right? So like gravity's an interesting one, right? Not really disagreeing with gravity. Now if I Einstein, I can in some way using equations probably reconfigure gravity, right? But for all Newtonian purposes here on the planet earth, like gravity works. And that's important educationally that you can give people concepts in the context of legitimate teacherly authority that expand their agency and expand their understanding of the actually real world. Something like that's education. You can also give people concepts, concepts and language in the context of illegitimate teacherly authority which limit their agency and detach them from reality. Now what's in an interesting wrinkle here is that a lot of propaganda is actually true, which is to say it's a limited amount of information with a very narrow, kind of cherry picked way of being presented, which you could claim we're past the fact checkers. But the way it's organized and the way it's presented in the context in which you receive it and repeat it and the end result ends up being a kind of coercion into a, you know, a belief you wouldn't hold if you were being dealt with by an educator. It's funny, when I speak with children, I, I was talking with Yosha Bch and he talked about the, you know, most people don't have agency over their beliefs, but we all believe that we do.

Vance Crowe [00:24:30] We believe that I have these thoughts in my mind and if you talk to a child and you hear them assert something and you can say, well why do you think that? Right? And you can see them searching in their brain and that there, there is no answer for why they think that that just is what they think. But if you've gone through and explored propaganda, you probably had to go through and and say, Hey these are things a axioms that I hold to be true. You know, maybe they aren't as solid as they were. I mean just, just the very act of studying propaganda had to change you and, and how much agency you felt you had over your own beliefs I would imagine. Totally. Yeah. It's a ho of mirrors in there when you study propaganda. 'cause it's also the case that many of the books written about propaganda are themselves propaganda. Yeah. So there's a long history of the CIA writing about the KGB publishing it under some academic, giving them the manuscript. And it's like a propaganda book about the KGB, which doesn't mention that the CIA also runs propaganda, right? So like you have to look carefully at the propaganda literature and then of course you have to self apply the critique Now, and this is where ultimately education and the study of propaganda comes back to these deep epistemological questions. Like I think most people do have some agency over their beliefs and so we don't just believe it. So like I would disagree with hard reductive materialists and people who would equate what machines can do with what humans can do that the human mind is not ultimately best thought of as a computer.

Vance Crowe [00:26:06] And so there's a baseline of things that even children have a right to assert even though they can't justify it through propositionally differentiated speech. So like, I don't know if you're married or if you had kids, but Oh yeah, I have a jutter. Yeah, totally. So if I asked you like do you love your wife and kids? Of course, yes, yes of course. Right? So like do you have agency over that belief? Oh wow. You see, do you have agency over that belief? And if I asked you to justify the love you have and explain to me what it is, where it comes from, where is it grounded? This is where we get into the work I do, I've done with Gaffney and Ken Wilber, mark Gaffney and Ken Wilber at the Center for Integral Wisdom or the Center for World Spirituality, we're actually looking at what is the basis of human knowledge and where have we gone wrong in terms of our epistemological and thinking about our own minds, right? 'cause many people don't think we have free will. And if you don't have free will, then you don't have control over your thoughts. Then everything I say to you is not my choosing. You're accepting to believe. What I say to you is not of your choosing, therefore there's no difference between education and propaganda. 'cause it's all causality. Yeah. The whole, the whole thing about the, the lack of free will. This is something that just doesn't compute in my brain. Like no matter how many times I've seen the, the people talk about, well you know, we can look at when your brain makes the decision and when you push the button and we can tell that it wasn't you making that decision. There's something intrinsic about that that I, that that doesn't help me to believe and therefore I don't, I don't actually explore it that much more because it seems like it takes away literally, like you were saying, all of my agency over everything in my life.

Vance Crowe [00:27:50] Well, and, and so this is of course a deep question, but there's one thing that explains, we talk about anthro ontology, we talk about the, there's a like basically that the human being has the capacity to know truth. Like without apparatuses like apparatus can help methods help, you know, a whole bunch of things help. But we are equipped the eyeballs, the heart, a whole bunch of stuff. Like we can know the truth. So like when you say I love my wife, it's like that can be just true. Like can I empirically verify that by looking at your hormones and your neurons and stuff? You could do that, but you don't have to because we can say things that are true to each other even though we're not scientists or experts. Right? So that's important to get. And so the intuition you have that there's something wrong with that free will argument comes from the idea that basically scientists assert hypothesis as true to one another on the assumption that you accept my hypothesis 'cause it's got reasons behind it. And I give the reasons that I give 'cause I'm free to give them or not to give them, right? If you accept a hypothesis with a gun to your head, as we've discussed, right? That's coercion, right? Not reason. And so there's what's called a philosophy of performative contradiction in the scientist asserting that there's no free will when it takes free will to assert anything at all, right? Technically. And so you have to be very careful looking at that and all of the things that get tied up in making the claim, like so many people will say, well there's no free will, so therefore prison punishment should be rethought.

Vance Crowe [00:29:31] And it's a very complex discussion and there are contexts in which I just discussed, like when you're under coercion or you're deeply distressed when there is not really as much quote unquote sovereignty of choice and choice making and agency. But if you go all the way into this position where our given beliefs are kind of a folk psychological illusion and that we don't actually have free will, then all of the systems we've created, for example, like giving scientists money for doing research on free will or giving philosophers money for writing books like Sam Harris against free will. Why do you get that? Like if we can't punish people 'cause they're not responsible for their criminal behaviors 'cause there's no free will, then we cannot reward people for their meritorious behaviors because there's no free will. So the whole system of evaluation that we deploy in every day life, like in legal courts for example, like to what extent is one responsible for their actions, I if there's no free will, then how does voting work or free markets work? So if we talk about these institutions in the context of propaganda, help the, you know, we're fish swimming in water. So to, to describe the water is nearly impossible 'cause we've always been in it. So help me understand like, is propaganda going on all, you know, you've mentioned things like TikTok and micro-targeting of Facebook ads, but that seems rather innocuous compared to what we learned about as propaganda when we're kids.

Vance Crowe [00:31:13] That the Russians are doing it and you they're bad and we've gotta stay away from it. What is the state of propaganda in the, in the US right now? Yeah, this is tractable question. Unlike the free will question. So the, so, so a few things to say. One is that there was a transition in warfare basically from kinetic war to information war after the bomb with the beginning of the Cold War. So there's a lot in there. So basically the, the statement is that just as I discussed, we reached mutually insured destruction and there was a sense of like, geez, we can't actually deploy all of our kind of weapons of physical war, right? So there was actually a redeployment of a whole bunch of resources towards winning a war of ideas with the Russians classically. So Eisenhower in particular built a Cold war propaganda machine that was both domestic and international. That was one of the largest, I mean it's, it's, it's incredibly called, its psychological warfare explicitly. And it was probably one of the most complex endeavors actually birthed a new form of warfare, which is sometimes called fourth generational or fifth generational warfare where there's still kinetic conflict occurring. But even the kinetic conflicts occur in a symbolic matrix created by the information war taking place at a higher level. So think about Vietnam, right? An example of that, meaning people fighting in Vietnam thinking we're fighting for democracy.

Vance Crowe [00:32:49] And these people saying, no, we're fighting to keep the co colonialists out and everybody fighting in a war that was actually much larger than just those two places. They're shooting bullets. But the real war is between the Russians and the United States in a trade and oil and those kinds of things. Well and specifically for the hearts and minds of the respective nations, like you know, during the Cold War, you know that there's a saying that something like, you know, we took the Russians down with blue jeans and rock and roll, right? Like unconventional warfare got unconventional like the CIA was funding Jackson Pollock, right? I mean it got very weird in there because once you're in an information war, you're not doing propaganda like Hitler was doing propaganda or like the Uncle Sam pointing at you propaganda. It all becomes part of the culture. So this book, you know, there's several of 'em, but Louis Milan's most recent book, the Free World specifically about this, this period during the Cold War when we opened the gates of info information warfare meaning like covert funding of students for a democratic society by federal agencies where we wanted protest cultures in our schools because it showed the Russians that we allowed protests, right? And then the Russians themselves were, so we're sending blue jeans and rock and roll and freedom and Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock playing the Star Spangled Banner.

Vance Crowe [00:34:21] It's like, whoa. They call that horizontal propaganda where you don't know that you're creating propaganda, it's just so much in your field that you're doing something out of your own volition and it ends up being the perfect piece of propaganda. Like Jimi Hendrix playing the star span banner at Woodstock is an amazing piece of propaganda which the Russians were aware of. And so what the Russians played instead was race. Like there's a long history of KGB creating perceptions and realities of racial conflict in the United States before the 1987 Olympics. It may have been earlier, it may have been 82, which everyone was in la there was a letter sent with like a, you know, a very racist letter with like K, KK stuff on it. Like to the Olympic committee like saying we can't have the Olympics. And they thought it was the American KKK for like, for a long time, but it was the KGB who sent this letter trying to create this perception, right? Trying to show that we were a divided country trying to divide us against ourselves by actively funding racist groups and the groups that hated the racist groups. And so that was one of the largest enterprises like militarily, Eisenhower's information wars, massive. And then so the idea that when the Cold War ended, we just like took it all apart and put it away. No, right?

Vance Crowe [00:35:51] Didn't happen that way at all. And this is where Ed, Bernie, Edward Bernays and others come in who kind of reconfigured the field of propaganda into the field of public relations specifically. So that many of the techniques that were tried and true developed during the Eisenhower period and other periods became just how governments operated with their information in general. There was a general consensus and this ties back into the free will thing that people can't be really allowed to have a lot of control over their thinking. And we have a responsibility actually as benevolent technocrats to direct the population's attention on certain issues and have them see it in certain ways. Like, you know, so that notion of a kind of centralized public relations run information management system as a stabilizing force in the United States was quite successful. And then digital came and it, and it did a bunch of things, but one of the things it did was allow the Russians and other foreign actors to begin to work in the culture of milieu in a much more powerful way. And it lowered the barrier of access to the game of propaganda tremendously. 'cause like in the Eisenhower days, you no one could shoot a movie like who the hell could shoot a movie? Very small number of Hollywood studios could shoot a movie. And all of those Hollywood studios are working for Uncle Sam, right? So this is easy now you can shoot a movie on your iPhone and then post it on your mom's basement and it goes viral and it gets more hits than a studio produced comparable propaganda piece, right?

Vance Crowe [00:37:34] So lower barrier, lowering the barrier of access to playing the information warfare game, change the whole playing field. And then as we've discussed the TikTok and microtargeting and addiction dynamics and the basically brain brainwash machine that was created and that being everywhere with you all the time also changed the dynamic, which put us in a situation where our propaganda used to galvanize us and often draw us together. Our domestic propaganda used to galvanize us and draw us together. And now we are running on like 13 different conflicting propaganda campaigns, which are dividing us in basically driving us a little bit crazy, like technically putting us out of touch with reality and out of touch with the ability to get back in touch with each other in reality again, right? And so to this question of how does one deal with that? And it's back to like your wife and kids and it's back to the things that the human knows irrespective of what the media tells it. And this is why certain types of practices usually associated with, with religion and community and meditation and things of that nature are, are essential. 'cause you need to be able to identify what's something that's been put in you and what's something that's come out of you that's you and what's something that you know, because you actually know it the way you know you love your wife and what's something you know, because you were told it by a second, third hand, fourth hand source.

Vance Crowe [00:39:17] And so there's a, there's what I'd call something like an imminent metaphysics that surrounds you where you can be in touch with reality. And that when that is out of touch with the narrative, the meta narrative that's being told you by the media, that's where these incongruities really occur in people's lives. And so people feel that a lot where this, you know, anyway, so, well we, so I run a network that people kind of get to, it's kind of a digital network and we try these different experiments every month. So one month it'll be like, take a cold shower, you know, for, you know, no hot water or just do these different experiences and then we talk about it. But we're all in different locations and one of the ones that's been the most profound is getting people to both set a bedtime and set a digital sunset. So, you know, the digital sunset is sometime before you're gonna go to bed you just put your electronics away and then you know, you're living in the world wherever you're at. And then, you know, making sure you go to bed and get a full eight hours of sleep. And you can tell the group has responded to this in like extremely powerful ways because they're, they're saying like there are things that were going on around me that I just didn't realize or I wake up in the morning and the fact that I separate my waking up from when I touch my cell phone for the first time, for the first two hours, that my level of anxiety about things is just way lower. And it's one of those things that when you're sitting there before you do the experience, you think, nah, it couldn't be like that. But when you actually do it, you're like, I really didn't realize just how many times my attention was given over to this box that told me I should be feeling a different way than I'm feeling right now.

Vance Crowe [00:40:59] Yeah, that's exactly right. And I mean, we're so deep in that we're now studying scientifically what it's like for people to be away from their screens. We used to study what it was like for people to be on screens 'cause it was novel to be on screens. Now the screen is so ubiquitous that literally send kids to camps where they can't have screens. And then we study them scientifically like what are they gonna do? They don't have a screen, right? People were more excited to do the cold water showers than they were to do the digital sunsets. Like it was like a really intimidating thing to get involved in. Yeah, exactly. So that, and that's important to, to see how normalized the ubiquitous information exposure is. And so the main way outta the propaganda is to, is to make that information stream an object instead of to be swimming in it basically. So if you think about prior propaganda, this is another key difference. Like in, in advertising similarly, like you drive to work, you'd see what 10, 15, you know, signs like road signs, like maybe you'd see something on the bus, maybe you'd hear a few commercials. Most of your experience would be outside of the information stream that's trying to coerce you into thinking certain things, right? Whereas now it's the opposite. Most of your experience is consuming an information stream that's trying to coerce into doing things. And if you think they're reading the New York Times or whatever, watching Fox News or looking at the media is somehow different than that, than read, read the propaganda papers. You know, the media is precisely not trying to educate you, it's trying to create a certain cultural mood and affect large scale choice behavior.

Vance Crowe [00:42:32] I talk about this a lot that, you know, a few years ago the, the number of people that say they belong to a church dip below 50%, which, you know, for the last 80 years in the United States, it's been above 70%. So, so this is kind of a, kind of a big deal. Now it's below 50%. And you think about the consequence of this is not like, oh, people aren't going to church and hearing that they should be good. The biggest consequence from my perspective is you don't run into the people that live in your neighborhood. You don't run into the people that are in a different socioeconomic strata than you. But, but you still, you would meet them in church or people that believe things different politically. 'cause you know, I grew up in a small town, the Catholics got together, some of them were, you know, conservative, some of them are liberal, some of them thought this and that. And you'd be pushing 'em together and you'd have to see, hey, the plumber isn't actually that big of a jerk, right? But when I read him on Facebook, I want to kill him. I don't wanna be anywhere near him. Look how dummy he is. And, and so I think the fact that we're not meeting in physical space at the same time that the digital, you know, increase has gone on has far deeper implications than, than than anybody is realizing right now. I completely agree. I mean, and as an educator I see it with children and the kind of dynamics of schools and the increasing of screen use in schools and the changes in adolescent culture and socialization patterns as a result of these digital contexts. You know, the, the kind of, it's hard to interpret the church statistics, you know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:44:05] Because it's not clear to me people are becoming less interested in religion, but it does seem that people are becoming less inclined to get together with people who are different than them. And so I think that's clear and that kind of necessary kind of like bringing together a difference is what the schools were supposed to do, is what the church is supposed to do is what the town hall's supposed to do. And the schools, the church, the town hall's all basically been captured by a small number of technologists, communications inventions. And so you get to get that. Yeah, it's being, the public spaces are being gutted and kind of like, you know, brought into con containment and enclosure the way many commons is. You know, common spaces get enclosed by enterprise. And so we're moving the town square outta Facebook, right? We're moving the church to groups on Facebook where you can be in some group that believes specifically what you believe and in a unique group, you know, with all of these. And so there's so much diversity and emerging religious trends based on social media, but your point holds, I mean, I don't, I it's, it's very hard to see with the schools. And of course the pandemic has made it much, much worse so that we've all retreated to a kind of individualism.

Vance Crowe [00:45:39] I I, when the masks first started coming on as a mandate, I was completely against them. Like I'm a communications person, right? So I wanna see faces. I i I want to be able to hear intonation. To me, being able to see the full scope of a human being just makes me feel far more comfortable. And, and listening to you talk about the asymmetry of people in an educational or propaganda situation, this also holds true for the mask, right? If you put a mask over over everyone and then one person is in charge, there's so much less information that you can read on their face. Should I trust you? Are you sending me signals that where your face is deceiving, you know, giving away that what you're saying you don't actually believe. Mm. And I, I think that this, there, there's no way that the human mind can just overcome that and say, oh well, you know, we'll just pick up all the signals we need based on the eyes or above. And I think that that has to make people either, either more vulnerable to authority or something because there, there's, there's things that are going on in your brain that you're just not allowed to use anymore in that context. Yeah, I mean, I agree. You know, whether it's necessary or not scientifically is a separate question from the effect it has. So like even if we need to be wearing these masks, suppose we do, we do, perhaps we would still have this effect and it would be neurologically most important for the youngest among us who don't have any experience with even interpreting the lower half, right?

Vance Crowe [00:47:12] So like I note, you know, co-occurrence between certain eye gestures and certain mouth gestures regularly. And then I just see the eye gesture and so I infer the mouth gesture. But if I've not ever had a chance to establish that correlation between eye gesture and mouth gesture, then I'm left guessing. And so yeah, there are whole complex dimensions of socialization that take place through full-blown facial recognition, trust being a key one, attractiveness and other things as well. So the, my main concern and the dynamic isn't is like the, the children basically the effect on children. But what you're saying in terms of like group dynamics is also true that a store full of people with everyone has a mask on is a very, very different social place than a store where everyone does not have a mask on. So, but of course a store, any store in the context of a pandemic is a very strange social place. So we've already crossed that kind of Rubicon. So it's all just weird after that basically. So when you think about the ubiquity of this propaganda, some part of it looks like the free, the free hand, the, the, the, the market just having its free hand where, you know, there's companies that want to advertise to you, so they're gonna use the tools that are available to them. But it sounds to me like you're implying a level of centrality about this propaganda that, that that, whether you're talking about the CIA or the KGB, there are groups of people that are in government and they're using this specifically on citizens.

Vance Crowe [00:48:43] Is, is that right? Oh, correct, of course. I mean that, that's a known thing. We don't call it propaganda, of course, like I said, we call it public relations. But that's going on in, that's inevitably occurring. And what's interesting about the current moment is that while there's centralized for what I call vertical propaganda, in the second propaganda paper, I have a taxonomy of different forms of propaganda. There are many forms. The, the most classic form of propaganda is the centralized vertical deceptive propaganda. Basically where a centralized authority uses its power to basically deceive people. And that happens all the time. But there's other things which are horizontal propaganda, decentralized, organically emergent propaganda, which is what you get often occurring in like insurgencies and things of that nature, you know. And so we have now a situation where centralized vertical propaganda used to work really well in the United States. Like if you look back during the Cold War, you think about the polio vaccine and other things where there was a sense of like national triumph and success as a result of a really well orchestrated public relations dynamics between government and industry and media and the people. Even if there was some small minority that was worried about the polio vaccine, they wouldn't have the power to create the level of impact of propaganda with the centralized campaign.

Vance Crowe [00:50:17] Just took everything out. If you look at the World War I mobilization efforts where we created the committee on public information, it's just stunning what they were able to accomplish in terms terms of the centralized propaganda. So we were able to do that for a very long time. But again, with the emergence of digital, so wait, how does this connect with polio? This is a little mind blowing. Well, and that's just an example of, you know, of a very complex public situation where the amount of descents was very, very small even though the situation on the ground was very, very complex. Right? And so you had a, you know, all of the apparatus of the Cold War Eisenhower kind of psychological, you know, operations being deployed domestically to create the perception of, of what was the success. I'm not saying it wasn't a success, but I'm saying that like it was a freaky enough situation. Like if that happened now, for example, like can you imagine what would happen? So that's, and that's the main difference. And oh, that's super interesting. So if you make the comparison between, hey, we found the cure, you know, the cure for polio or at least the, the vaccine for polio so we can get rid of this disease. And then you look at the, the way that the government was able to convince people, Hey, not only is this safe, but this is a triumph and we should feel great about this is a nation, the exact opposite has happened Now the centralized propaganda around the, the COVID vaccine, you know, maybe worked on 40% of the population or 48% of the population.

Vance Crowe [00:51:51] But there's a huge percent of those of the population that's saying like, not only do I not believe you, I think you are lying to me and I should actively avoid this thing. Right? And, and that's, so that's kind of the issue is that it used to be centralized propaganda works really well and we're still actually doing a ton of centralized, like probably more money has gone into the centralized propaganda around the pandemic than has gone into any geopolitical events since World War ii. This would be my guess. I don't know. 'cause you can't, they don't even call it propaganda. The monies everywhere, advertisement companies on government contract, like, you know, edit editors and major newspapers and like, it's a whole thing. Celebrities and all of this stuff. It's a whole, it's of propaganda operation. It's a centralized propaganda operation. It's huge. But it has not succeeded. Why not? Because the digital, because of the lower of the barrier of access to entry into the information war and the difference of exposure so that you're not just getting exposed to what the government shows. You're getting exposed to all kinds of stuff. So you're also getting, like, your attention is being captured not just by the government but by anything. And so there's an information. So the overload of information is so much more overload of information, right? So you can't even really be useful pliable citizen anymore 'cause you're like entertained and confused and hypnotized and you'll, you'll do whatever they kind of want if you have to. But you're not tracking it like an information, you know, or responsible consumer of information. The responsible consumers of information, you know, know, are also tracking more sources.

Vance Crowe [00:53:28] Like, like for example, during the polio vaccines, like where would you get numbers if you're interested in the actual numbers? Where would you get the numbers in in the sixties or the fifties? You know, like you wouldn't, you wouldn't, like now there's numbers everywhere. There's numbers everywhere. And it's precisely the fact that there's numbers everywhere, but there's specific numbers you won't show us, but there's numbers everywhere and you won't show us those ones. It's that kind of where the epistemic asymmetry becomes apparent and that it's being guarded against the gap becomes apparent. That's when we start to get the, what what's called counter propaganda and kind of a kickback specifically called like a counter expert discourse. So that every time the expert centralized propaganda makes a statement, there's a predictable counter propaganda response which draws a certain amount of comparable attention. And so those eddies in the field of the culture eventually delegitimate and make that centralized campaign very, very hard to operate. And that's why you end up using coercion because persuasion has failed. And so you're basically gonna force people. So this is fascinating. You know, I, one of the comparisons that I make for a while I worked for Monsanto, right? And I was actually in their public relations arm, right? So I'm helping to spelling of the beast articulate, yeah. Why, why is it that GMOs are okay or better for society than not having them? And the people that popped up that would say, no, these are bad, and I have evidence that they're not, they had a certain way of behaving and acting and talking that when I was inside of Monsanto, I was like, that was a detection that they were not telling the truth here, right?

Vance Crowe [00:55:14] And then you fast forward to COVID and the vaccines and the same thing happens, right? You have people that come out and say, the vaccines are safe, they're, you know, the right way to go. And now there's a counter like the Eddie that you described. I think that's an actual perfect metaphor. And I see many of the things, the tricks that they do to be able to call attention to themselves and to be able to say you're being lied to as the same ones with the people with the GMOs. So the people that are saying, Hey, I, I'm, it's, I'm being blocked from being able to tell you the truth about vaccines. The crazy thing is when I was doing Monsanto, I looked at these people over here saying, GMOs aren't safe. And I thought, you people are crazy and you're bad and you're doing this, you know, for your own personal reasons. And then with the vaccine ones, I don't feel that way, but I see that their behavior is very similar. And so now I have two different eddies that I'm, that I'm seeing that make me very uncomfortable as, as I sit here because I'm like, I, I don't, I don't know which one is right here. It's important to get, again, the hall of mirrors, right? So if I was want, like there's, you would fund the most irrational voices on the side you're trying to discredit, for example, you would even create incredibly irrational voices precisely on the side you're trying to discredit. And then that would allow you to have a certain ability to smear the entire side with the most irrational voices, which Oh, that's good.

Vance Crowe [00:56:48] Which have been intentionally amplified, right? And so, like for example, for a very long time it was difficult to critique in any way psychopharmacology without being called a Scientologist basically. And so they had very successfully seeded the field, the a PA, the American Psychological Associ and Psychiatric Association had f seeded the field with these extreme crazy voices. Draw attention to them, pull them out, say, look, anyone who says this stuff is like, you know, completely nuts. They're a Scientologist and that just shuts everything down, right? So it's very complicated when you're looking at the counter expert discourse, especially the extremes of the counter expert discourse, which becomes so extreme thorough. And then you say, oh wait. And so similarly with, and now back to the broader picture of foreign actors intervening into American cultural space. So it's very clear that those cultural eddies become a vector for information warfare to increase the internal division of our country as a whole, right? So like the more these issues are not handled well by us, the more they become a vector for information warfare where they're trying to put the most crazy shit on both sides. When, when I ended up leaving Monsanto, you're, you're describing something I've never put into words. So when I ended up leaving Monsanto, they had been bought by bear. I, I was, it was just time for me to go, I really thought that it might be a good idea for me to sit down with the anti GMO people and be like, look, let me explain something to you. You have done Monsanto a favor for the last 20 years that you cannot even begin to describe because what they would say when you get a victory, oh, GMOs are bad, is they would say, you know what, why don't we add on another two, three years of testing?

Vance Crowe [00:58:33] Why don't we have a few more regulatory bodies come in here, just add $10 million on? And so before you know it, the only way you can get a genetically engineered product is to have $130 million in 15 years to burn. Right. And that's the, so that means all of their competitors, all those little startups that would come, the anti GMO people just went and flamed all of them. They have no chance of getting their products to market. And Monsanto gets to just continue to grow bigger and stronger and stronger. And so it's like you fools did all at, like I used to say this, like no one did more to make Monsanto the largest company that, that the large company that they were than the activists that they actually did the work of, of pro Monsanto ultimately. Yeah, no, it's, it's very, very interesting. It's very, very interesting. And these are vulnerabilities in the, in, in the kind of national culture and information ecology that didn't used to exist when we had a, a well-contained centralized propaganda apparatus. Right? And so the ability for the wedge issues to become targets by Iran and China and Russia, like they are, both sides are getting radicalized intentionally. And there's a lot of documentation of this in the consilience papers where they're agitating for both sides in the same protest that Russians and Russians in particular. And so similarly with debates like the vaccine debate and other contentious issues, you know, it's hard not to see the most extreme players in the counter expert discourse as not somehow kind of patsy making it so that it's easy to dismiss that whole counter argument as completely irrational.

Vance Crowe [01:00:17] And so that, that's something that's like a tactic that's kind of known. So that's why you have to look so carefully at what's occurring. Man, this had to really mess you up because it's already messing me up just in this conversation where, where you're sitting, that's why I stopped the car. 'cause I was like, if you start to think this way, you run the risk of getting to the point where you're almost wearing a tin foil hat because you're like, look, how do I know who's who to trust? How do I know if there's any communications work that's noble? How do I know? And so, you know, one, are you really messed up because of this work? And two, what do you, what do you do about it? I mean, I think, you know, I came to it as an educator. So I came to it after having studied the way communication goes, right? Right. After having studied the best way to get people to learn about the realities of the actual world, right? How does learning work, how does teacherly authority work? So like those things are real and super robust. Like humans are built to learn and we're actually built to be in touch with reality and built to be in touch with one another in relation to reality and to talk about it and to learn more about it together. Like we do that naturally, actually. So that's why I think it, it's, it doesn't mess me up as much 'cause it's an artificial simulation of reality that's been created fairly recently, you know, by the civilization. So like, if I read books from prior epochs, it's not, it's not Biden's propaganda, you know, it's a book from the 16 hundreds right now, maybe it's Queen Elizabeth's propaganda or something, but it's a different era, right?

Vance Crowe [01:01:56] And so there, there are many routes into sanity and being in touch with reality. Now media and social media are not, are not them. And so what this means is that there's a class of issues, geopolitical issues, economic issues, health issues. There's a class of issues where it becomes very difficult to be able to see what's going on. You know, in my own family there's been cases of extreme iatrogenic injury, which is an injury that comes from taking a drug, right? Like a, a pharmaceutical drug, right? As prescribed. And you get brain damage and it's terrible. And yet, so years ago I was already familiar with the deception and simulation created by media and specifically pharmaceutical advertising interfaces with large scale media apparatuses internationally. And so I'd already looked at that like very personally, like, oh no, my experience, which tells me this happened, contradicts this meta narrative, which is two, three times remove where I can get access to the actual data, right? And the data's built by people who are trying to profit from, et cetera, et cetera. So there is a certain kind of like comfort one has to have with not knowing, certainly like not having certainty about certain types of issues, basically. But that doesn't mean you can't have certainty about other issues.

Vance Crowe [01:03:27] You can. They're the ones that Yeah, I really like that. I mean, they're the ones that aren't mediated through the, through the media. You know, and it's interesting because the media does have, it does create a sense that you should have an opinion on every single issue. You should know how you feel about Russia invading the Ukraine. You should have an opinion on Chinese and Taiwan relations. You should know what's going on in Seattle or Minneapolis and you should have an, and, and you know, you could say they, they put the opinion that they want to have in you. But, but just the very idea that you should have an opinion about these things at all is in and of itself a, a, a major difference from other parts of time in. Yeah. Well, and there's, and there's two ways that works, right? One is that's how democracy works. The fourth estate. Like if you need, you need an informed citizenry to make decisions, but then you can kind of parasite on that as well. That's how media companies sustain their role in the attention and economy. Like it's how they generate demand. The way you generate demand to read the news is some kind of obligation. You have to read the news. And so you're right, there's a very strong sense people have, like I have a civic duty to stay on Facebook and stay informed, basically is the way people think. But that's just market demand being generated by media companies detached from the actual noble motive of the fourth estate, which was to keep the citizen informed. And now we're back to education. And what would an actually educational civic infrastructure look like?

Vance Crowe [01:04:59] It's completely possible with digital, now we're just choosing to have a civic, civic infrastructure that's mostly for distributing propaganda. And we can't even run it in a centralized manner. China at least runs their internet in a centralized manner. The, the education system became very scary to me. Well, one, when you have a child, like all of a sudden you start being like, oh wait, I'm gonna have to dive back into this area. You know, I escaped it as a, after I graduated high school. But then you start reading history and you find out that governments have taken over entire countries by indoctrinating children to report on their parents to say that their parents are doing bad things. And that is one of the scariest things in the world to me, because I can't think of a betrayal any deeper than turning, than the state turning a child on its parents. There's, that's, that's like the darkest of dark things that I can think of. And, and I'm, I'm, I'm concerned when I watch the news that tells me this is what's going on. So I don't know, is it propaganda that this isn't actually going on in the schools? Or is it propaganda that it is going on in the schools? Like, you know, the hall of mirrors we enter again, right? Yeah. The hall of mirrors. I mean, so I've already mentioned that phrase intergenerational transmission, so like intergenerational transmission, and then the idea that we could really screw up intergenerational transmission somehow. And so the argument I'm kind of making in general is that technologies have really screwed up intergenerational transmission to the extent that the generation gap is wide, really wide and perceived as unbridgeable by both sides.

Vance Crowe [01:06:32] And so then you have a purely strategic relationship being taken up between the younger and the older members of the same civilization. So that is what's called generational warfare. And there was a hypothesis by certain neo Marxists, they thought that class warfare would ultimately be sublimated into a form of intergenerational warfare. And you're right, it's the, it's the kind of deepest mistake that a civilization can make is to disrupt continuity of intergenerational transmission abruptly. And sometimes it's done like Mao intentionally, and sometimes it's done by accident because of the rate of the technological innovation, which basically strands the next generation in the land that the parents have never even been able to imagine. And then the children look back and they say, what the hell can you possibly teach us? And by the way, you created this mess that we're inheriting, you know? And the parents are like, oh, I failed you. I have nothing to teach you. And so that gap between the generations and then they just relate strategically. And so the boomers hold everything 'cause they don't trust the young kids, and the young kids resent that. So they're undermining the intentions of the boomers. And so it's a, it's actually deeper than most of the other crises. And yet invisible is this crisis of intergenerational transmission. And so all of the things happening in schools now are rooted in that. Like, there'll be different content like race and like medicine and other things, but it's deep, it's rooted deeper in like we don't know how to pass on like, and what the value of what we're passing on is, or even what they will grow up into.

Vance Crowe [01:08:10] So there's a deep ambivalence by both parties in engaging in this teacherly authority thing. Well, and this goes along with the, the whole concept of social technology and, and how you can lose a social technology. I think religion played such a deep role in, in the social technology of intergenerational pass down that people have no concept of it. I mean, like, if you go open up basically any major religion, you will find in the very beginning pages, how does inheritance work, right? Who is responsible for children? How does the raising occur? When does somebody stop being a child and move into adulthood? And these kinds of concepts are, you know, you think like, ah, those kind of seem, you know, old fashioned or we don't use those ideas anymore, but without a structure to know how to pass those things on. I'm sure whichever cultures did survived and went on to have a large, you know, religious base and the ones that didn't are gone. Yeah. I mean it's, it's interesting, right? Like one of the ways to kind of test the quality of a culture is to look at the way it treats its children and how it passes on its knowledge. Like, so take back to the free will thing. Like if I was a neuroscientist raising a kid, would I tell what age would I tell him he didn't have free will? Right? Is that an idea? You can, right? Seriously. Like, and it's one way to think about like, what are we doing with our science? Like how do we actually pass on the knowledge that we value? And if we can't in good faith actually say the things we believe to our children because it will just, it's irrational and will destroy their sense of who they are and the value of the world and other things, then why do we believe those things?

Vance Crowe [01:09:48] Right? And so similarly, it's like at what point do you tell your kid that it's a dog eat dog world and you shouldn't have compassion for anyone. And that empathy is for weak people. At what point do you say that? At what point do you tell your kid that you've been a politician in a corrupt system for 40 years and dug your hole so deep in blackmail and how do you even hand over the family business? Right? So there's a bunch of things that make intergenerational transmission tricky, shaky. And many of those are kind of like upon us, you know, now at this point. And so what religion did was provide a certain container. Now back to propaganda, religion was one of the first and greatest and remains propagandist of all time. So you can create Yeah, they're the goat, right? Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. They're the goat religion. Catholicism in particular is the goat of propaganda. And so you're looking at that and you're saying, well, there's a reason modernity kind of got itself out of this whole religion thing. And there's a reason we separated church and state. And so what we're looking at is something like a post secular age, which Charles, Charles Taylor writes about. And in in that sense, the the religious kind of resources that modernity ran on capitalism ran on families, ran on religious resources from an outdated period. And those are dwindling. We're running on like the fumes of the pre-modern, in the late modern. And, and so this is why people like Revey and others speak of a meaning crisis. And that at the root of a lot of this is our inability to make sense of the deepest issues.

Vance Crowe [01:11:22] 'cause that's ultimately what education, that's why religion and education go together. Because at the end of the day, you have to answer these questions to kids. What happens when you die? What happens when you sleep? Right? Is the world going to end? What is good to do to other people? What's bad to do to other people? Right? Those kinds of basic questions, without clarity on that, it's gonna be very hard to move. And so religion kind of firmed up certain mimetic kind of resources that were a scaffolding for a whole bunch of kind of easily administered education. And so with a breakdown of that, we've lost certain kind of like backstop, a cultural backstop so that now we're at a loss for what to tell our kids about the most important things. And so they end up, other people who are less reasonable are willing to talk about those important things in crazy ways. And so we don't start saying really reasonable things about the most profound issues. Then people who will say unreasonable things about profound issues will gather followings. You know, if you, if you look at woke, if you look at Q you're looking at digitally media enabled quasi religions which provide identity and morality and inquisitions and all kinds of things. And so with, in the absence of religion, something has to function as religion. And this is what Paul Tiller called idolatry. When you take something that's actually finite and give it infinite value.

Vance Crowe [01:12:56] And so if we don't somehow resuscitate certain religious forms, we will be run unconsciously by kind of a religious script that's been given to us through the propaganda. Propaganda. I mean, I, I parasitic, I talk about this all, all the time. Like astrology right now with women between the ages of 18 to 35 is making a huge comeback. And like I tell my friends this, and they roll their eyes and they say, I don't know who you're hanging out with, but I'm telling you it is a big astrology isn't making a a comeback. 'cause astrology never went away, man, like astrology. So here's a little story, and maybe we should probably wrap, but like, there's a story where at the end in Berlin, Hitler's going down, like it's the end and the propaganda that Goebbels and Hitler's propaganda chief is running can't maintain the perception that they're not losing the war, right? All the Germans start to realize that losing the war, but they're still trying to control the German population. So Goebbels start to put things in the astrology, in the newspapers. So the, the centralized Nazi propaganda was manipulating astrological readings in the last ditch attempt to try to get people to have hope, to have hope and to act in certain ways, right? So the astrology that you're reading could potentially be written by the CIA. So that's pretty good. Well, Zach Stein, that is a great place to wrap up, but I will most certainly have you on anytime you want to come on. This was a great conversation.

Vance Crowe [01:14:27] Yeah, we'd welcome that, man. So if people wanted to read more about your thoughts on propaganda, i I highly recommend about your education and learning strategies, how, how would they go about doing that? Yeah, so there's the consilience project.org, which is where you can find a series of four papers on propaganda that cover a lot of this stuff. My book Education in a Time Between Worlds is on Amazon. And then I've got a website, just Z-A-K-S-T-E-I n.org is where you could get info. We'll have all those links. Well, Zach Stein, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, it's been a pleasure.