“My personal feeling is that citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self-defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy.” Noam Chomsky framed the idea of intellectual self-defense. At the CdE Winterakademie, Rainer Engelken and myself tried to hold such a course.
What should a course on intellectual self-defense teach? While it is impossible to include everything that one could possibly use to detect the lies of a propaganda system, we have focused on six subjects which we found particularly useful:
1. Logic and argumentation: What constitutes a valid argument in a discourse, and what kind of arguments should not have any influence on our opinion?
2. Psychology; here our focus was on the psychology of influence and the theory of cognitive dissonance.
3. Language. In George Orwell’s 1984, a new language is developed to make critical thinking impossible. While my impression is that language has evolved on a very different path than Orwell thought in 1948, there are many battles on words going on trying to give a subject a more positive or negative spin.
4. Numeracy. How to quickly become more familiar with numbers by using the technique of “Guesstimation”. Also, one should be well acquainted with the possible manipulations of statistics and opinion polls.
5. Philosophy of Science. Science is nowadays the highest authority in many fields. But who decides what science is?
6. Media and democracy. This is mainly about propaganda. Wait a minute, “propaganda”? Isn’t that the thing they have in North Korea? According to Noam Chomsky, even a free press can serve as a propaganda machine for a democratic government, and his “propaganda model” explains why.
A highly recommendable book that covers many of these aspects is Normand Baillargeon’s “Short Course in Intellectual Self-Defense“. However, we have made a collection of many more sources, many of which are also fun to read (or watch). I will post a little summary of each of the subjects covered in the next couple of weeks.