Lessons are for kids, themes are for adults. We want to build highlighters into themes…

What are the concepts, highlighters, principles, and messages that we want to focus on? What are the "tools" we are passing along through our content?

Firstly, it is worth mentioning that we should judge which highlighters to use based on two verticals:

Telos Highlighters

What is a “highlighter” specifically? A highlighter is a simple, effective point that we wish to make. They’re articulated concisely (or visually represented quickly) in consideration of the pacing we require for our videos.

Highlighters can be:

• a distillation of a concept (like cognitive bias)
• a scene depicting a particular principle (how do we know what we know?)
• a message (soldiers too are manipulated and positioned by those in power, so we should be wary of blaming them for decisions their leaders make)

Overall, highlighters are points that (we believe) when understood by a large percentage of people (our viewers), will help them to re-orient their perspective of the world and engage with it in a more critically minded way.

To use the well-known metaphor - "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

Highlighters

Personal Vulnerability

• General Idea: We all must accept the fact we have vulnerabilities, and be ready to try and reduce them. Otherwise, the more we deny them, the more susceptible we become. As mentioned here:
• Link to Propganda: People cannot accept that propaganda works when they cannot accept that propaganda works on them. To believe yourself above the influence of propaganda, is to become more susceptible to propaganda.
  • “Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda [1]
• Contemporary Example: Traditional Masculinity
  • The ideology of masculine strength is a useful tool in keeping everyday people subordinate. If one has to be strong, that implies they can’t be vulnerable. If they can’t be vulnerable, then why would they look for (and attempt to resolve) any vulnerabilities- doing so would contradict their notion of masculinity, and cause a kind of cognitive dissonance, pushing them away from self-examination. This leaves men open to manipulation because they will relate to images of strength, power, etc. The more they avoid looking inside, the more they’ll look to the powerful for answers, breeding a cycle of loyalty/manipulation.