GLOSSARY

WORLDVIEW

Our worldview is formed by our education, our upbringing, the culture we live in, the books we read, the media and movies we absorb, etc. For many people their worldview is simply something they have absorbed by osmosis from their surrounding cultural influences. They have never thought strategically about what they believe and wouldn’t be able to give a rational defense of their beliefs to others.

PROPAGANDA

Propaganda is a form of communication or manipulation aimed towards influencing the attitude/beliefs of an individual or population toward some cause or position.

Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (using logical fallacies) to encourage a particular synthesis or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. Propaganda can be used as a form of ideological or commercial warfare.

While the term propaganda has acquired a strongly negative connotation by association with its most manipulative and jingoistic examples (e.g. Nazi propaganda used to justify the Holocaust), propaganda in its original sense was neutral and could refer to uses that were generally positive, such as public health recommendations, signs encouraging citizens to participate in a census or election, or messages encouraging persons to report crimes to law enforcement, among others.

CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking is the study of clear and unclear thinking. The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.’ Critical thinking is a very important tool against Propaganda.

LOGICAL FALLACIES

Closely related to Critical Thinking, a Logical Fallacy is an incorrect argument in logic and rhetoric, which undermines an argument’s logical validity or more generally an argument’s logical soundness. Fallacies are either formal fallacies or informal fallacies.

Example:

Ipse dixit (Latin for “he himself said it”) is an assertion without proof; or a dogmatic expression of opinion.

The fallacy of defending a proposition by baldly asserting that it is “just how it is” distorts the argument by opting out of it entirely: the claimant declares an issue to be intrinsic, and not changeable.

GASLIGHTING

Gaslighting or gas-lighting is a form of mental abuse in which information is twisted or spun, selectively omitted to favor the abuser, or false information is presented with the intent of making victims doubt their own memory, perception, and sanity. Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

The term owes its origin to the play Gas Light and its film adaptations, after which it was coined popularly. The term has been used in clinical and research literature.

Gaslighting 101

FALSE FLAG

False Flag describes covert military or paramilitary operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by entities, groups, or nations other than those who actually planned and executed them. Operations carried out during peace-time by civilian organizations, as well as covert government agencies, may by extension be called false flag operations if they seek to hide the real organization behind an operation. Geraint Hughes uses the term to refer to those acts carried out by “military or security force personnel, which are then blamed on terrorists.”

GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM (GMO)

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using genetic engineering techniques. Organisms that have been genetically modified include micro-organisms such as bacteria and yeast, insects, plants, fish, and mammals. GMOs are the source of genetically modified foods and are also widely used in scientific research and to produce goods other than food.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

COMPARTMENTALIZATION

In matters concerning information security, whether public or private sector, compartmentalization is the limiting of access to information to persons or other entities who need to know it in order to perform certain tasks.

The concept originated in the handling of classified information in military and intelligence applications.

The basis for compartmentalization was the idea that, if fewer people know the details of a mission or task, the risk or likelihood that such information could be compromised or fall into the hands of the opposition is decreased. Hence, varying levels of clearance within organizations exist. Yet, even if someone has the highest clearance, certain “compartmentalized” information, identified by codewords referring to particular types of secret information, may still be restricted to certain operators, even with a lower overall security clearance. Information marked this way is said to be codeword–classified. One famous example of this was the Ultra secret, where documents were marked “Top Secret Ultra”: “Top Secret” marked its security level, and the “Ultra” keyword further restricted its readership to only those cleared to read “Ultra” documents.

Compartmentalization is now also used in commercial security engineering as a technique to protect information such as medical records.

ROBBER BARON

In social criticism and economic literature, robber baron became a derogatory term applied to some wealthy and powerful 19th-century American businessmen. The term appeared in North American periodical literature as early as the August 1870 issue of The Atlantic Monthly magazine. By the late 1800s, the term was typically applied to businessmen who used what were considered to be exploitative practices to amass their wealth. These practices included exerting control over national resources, accruing high levels of government influence, paying extremely low wages, squashing competition by acquiring competitors in order to create monopolies and eventually raise prices, and schemes to sell stock at inflated prices to unsuspecting investors in a manner which would eventually destroy the company for which the stock was issued and impoverish investors. The term combines the sense of criminal (“robber”) and illegitimate aristocracy (a baron is an illegitimate role in a republic).