I began this month by reading Free Your Mind by Laura Dodsworth and Patrick Fagan. This book expands upon the valuable insights Dodsworth’s previous book, A State of Fear, shed on the misuse of ‘nudge’ policies to manipulate our thinking and change our behaviour during the Covid-19 pandemic. Free Your Mind covers broader terrain and looks at how advertisers, the media, educators, a whole host of policy makers, and even our family and friends are trying to influence our thinking and actions. Dodsworth and Fagan do a brilliant job of exposing the nudgers’ tricks and showing how we can become more resilient to such manipulation. This is vitally important: we need to be aware of how even seemingly trivial attempts to change language - for example, referring to ‘global heating’ rather than ‘climate change’ or ‘gender’ when we really mean ‘sex’ - can come to shape our thinking.
I thoroughly recommend this fellow: www.john-guthie-author.com
Of special interest are State and Guardians. :-)