I've had multiple people reach out telling me I buried a significant detail in my post: developing the curriculum on the adversarial use of language, and teaching it for a few years as an adjunct professor. So, here it is, in detail.
To be clear, I did not create the course itself. I had discretion on the specific material and approach to the course so long as it fit appropriate catalogue requirements: a multidisciplinary offering on the use of language to manipulate & persuade.
My own implementation had 3 pillars, with a central, loose thesis: Fundamentally, propaganda consists of poor arguments made in some way incomplete, incorrect, or insincerely, and simply learning to recognize their hallmarks is a 1st line defense against it. The first pillar used an excellent book, Logical Self Defense, as the foundation and I tried to entertain as best I could while hammering home its tenets on logical fallacies, premises, sufficient claim support, etc. The second pillar was a little light psychology and cognitive science. Influence techniques, psychological studies, cognitive blind spots, Benjamin Libet's readiness & awareness experiments, eye tracking saccades, even a live demonstration on the ease of implanting false memories through word choice. The message being that the human mind isn't perfect, it takes shortcuts, and care & awareness of that fact are the minimum requirements to avoiding some of it. The third pillar was simply case studies in propaganda. Readings, movies, news stories, as long as it didn't derail conversation I changed things to whatever was most topical at the time.
To be clear, I did not create the course itself. I had discretion on the specific material and approach to the course so long as it fit appropriate catalogue requirements: a multidisciplinary offering on the use of language to manipulate & persuade.
My own implementation had 3 pillars, with a central, loose thesis: Fundamentally, propaganda consists of poor arguments made in some way incomplete, incorrect, or insincerely, and simply learning to recognize their hallmarks is a 1st line defense against it. The first pillar used an excellent book, Logical Self Defense, as the foundation and I tried to entertain as best I could while hammering home its tenets on logical fallacies, premises, sufficient claim support, etc. The second pillar was a little light psychology and cognitive science. Influence techniques, psychological studies, cognitive blind spots, Benjamin Libet's readiness & awareness experiments, eye tracking saccades, even a live demonstration on the ease of implanting false memories through word choice. The message being that the human mind isn't perfect, it takes shortcuts, and care & awareness of that fact are the minimum requirements to avoiding some of it. The third pillar was simply case studies in propaganda. Readings, movies, news stories, as long as it didn't derail conversation I changed things to whatever was most topical at the time.