Thread by @caitoz

THREAD
Ongoing list of tips for navigating your way through the personal, cultural and international narratives we tell ourselves about what's going on in a world that is saturated with manipulation, cultural mind viruses and propaganda.

1. Watch people's behavior and ignore the stories they tell about their behavior. Applies equally to people in your life, to politicians, and to governments. Narratives can be manipulated and distorted in many different ways, while behavior, when viewed with objectivity, cannot.

2. Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and how they are; they're trying to control your narrative about them. Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you are; they're trying to control your narrative about you.

3. Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim off-balance and unable to orient themselves. Applies equally to government officials.
narcwise.com/2018/05/22/nar…

4. Know that mass media propaganda rarely consists of full and outright lies. It's made almost entirely of half-truths, omissions, and unquestioned repetition of lies told by opaque government agencies. Pay more attention to distortions and to what they're NOT saying.

5. Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your cognitive wiring is susceptible the same hacks as everyone else, and manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit them. It's not shameful to be deceived, it's shameful to deceive people.

6. Bear in mind that the science of propaganda has been in research & development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be. Respect this.
medium.com/rally-point-pe…

7. Become acutely aware of cognitive biases, because the manipulators most certainly are. Especially research confirmation bias, the illusory truth effect, and the backfire effect. Be humble enough to know that you are susceptible to their exploitation.
theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

8. Don't let paranoia be your primary or only tool for navigating the narrative matrix. Some people just let themselves become suspicious of everything, which is about as useful as a compass which tells you every direction is north. Find positive tools for knowing what's true.

9. Develop a good news-sense, a sense for what's newsworthy and what's not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative.

10. Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for navigating the narrative matrix, and stay plugged in to them. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no outlet is 100% solid, but some reporters are close. Here's an article on one way to do this:
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

11. Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do the liars. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them. Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view.

12. Understand that humans are storytelling creatures, and whoever controls the stories controls the humans. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what's going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control
medium.com/@caityjohnston…

13. Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set, you'll suck at it for a while. If you learn you've been wrong about something, just take in the new information and keep plugging away.

14. Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs, and at the narrative managers know this, & they exploit the fact that you don't. Just look at the way the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador & Australia collaborated to imprison Assange then pretended they were acting independently.

14 cont'd: They worked as one single empire, but they sold the narrative of being separate sovereign nations who were merely concerned about rape, bail protocol, & cat hygiene. This happens all the time with wars, trade deals, and shoving non-aligned nations off the world stage.

15. The people who become billionaires are the ones sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total narrative control via media ownership/influence, lobbying, think tank funding, & campaign finance. This explains everything.

16. Understand that war is the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire crumbles. This is why war propaganda is constant and often extremely forced.

17. Hold an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would look like. The contrast between this image and the world we have lets you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things like war, poverty, and ineffectual electoral systems.

18. Trust your own understanding above anyone else's. It might not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink. Be brave enough to stand alone on every issue and say "No, I'm right."

19. Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at any time in the light of new information, but tightly enough that it can't be slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident, authoritative tone.

20. On that note, be suspicious of confident, authoritative tones. It's amazing how much traction people can get with a narrative just by pretending they know what they're talking about, whether they're an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. Bullshitting is easy.

21. Be aware of projection, and how it cuts both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don't let your goodness deceive you into thinking there aren't monsters who will deceive and manipulate you.

22. Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons are always wrong. They have been so consistently reliable in this that you can safely take whatever @BillKristol and @AmbJohnBolton are saying about what should happen with a given nation and advocate the opposite.

23. Practices like meditation, mindfulness and self-inquiry are powerful tools which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others.

24. Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can't navigate your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren't clear on your own roll in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.

25. Understand that truth doesn't generally move in a way that is pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to. Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate kicked into lava (Russiagate, QAnon etc) is manufactured.

26. Propaganda is so central to the maintenance of dominant power structures that a large amount of it goes toward advocating the propaganda itself. Much effort is spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing distrust in dissenting voices.

27. Watch out for appeals to emotion. Manipulators have a much easier time pushing particular narratives by appealing to your emotions rather than to your logic. They'll use tragic photos of dead children, they'll slam you with guilt trips for voting for the wrong person, etc.

27 cont'd: All in the name of getting you to support an agenda like invading a nation or supporting the Democratic Party out of anger, fear, guilt, etc. It's far easier to lay out an emotional case for action than to form a logical argument based on facts and evidence.

28. Notice how they'll often split the population in half arguing over which ways we should support the establishment. Should we attack Syria or Venezuela? Should we support the US president or the FBI? Vote Dem or GOP? Arguing over HOW censorship should happen instead of IF, etc

Expanded, more detailed article version of this thread:

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1135641293185593345