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Thanks again for this sub!

Not sure if this is outside the scope of this sub, but I'd love to see a companion list of the influential works used by the founders. For example, LeBon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind and Trotter's Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War works are often cited as being highly influential on Bernays. Many of the foundational concepts come from folks less oft cited, such as Gabriel Tarde. I'd argue his book The Laws of Imitation is a core basis for concepts like message diffusion, bandwagoning, etc.

This is a PhD thesis.

From the wikispooks page on the author:

>Maurice Tugwell was a career officer in the Parachute Regiment who served in the 1939-45 war and in a succession of colonial counterinsurgency operations.

>Tugwell served most notably in Ireland where he headed the black propaganda Information Policy unit (1971-73 (March)) which operated covertly inside British Army HQ in Lisburn in Northern Ireland.

>After leaving Ireland in March 1973, Tugwell 'transferred to Iran as an instructor at the Imperial Armed Forces College', during the reign of the Shah. 'He was awarded the CBE the same year. In 1975 he went to Nottingham, and in 1976 he took up a defence fellowship at King's College, London'.

>His Phd focused on revolutionary propaganda at King's College in London, following which he moved to Canada and became involved with right wing think tanks including the Centre for Conflict Studies (1980-86) and the Mackenzie Institute (1986-91).

One of the operations he is well-known for managing is Bloody Sunday in 1972 in Northern Ireland.

I'm just in the middle of Thinking, Fast and Slow, so I've little to offer by way of analysis of Kahneman. I'm basing my (too short) definition on my reading of Steven Pinker, and to a lesser extent Walter Lippman and Jacques Ellul and even Bruce Schneier and Richard Feynman.

What I was trying to say is that we have all sorts of blind spots, failures of reasoning and simply being creatures of habit. Game Theory touches on this as well. Kahneman definitely contributes to this, but I haven't personally synthesized it yet.

Propaganda uses our cognitive weaknesses against us, but also employs a number of other tactics, like appeal to prejudice.

Naomi Klein - The Shock Doctrine - How (artificial) crisis is used to guide policy.

John Pilger - The War You Don't See - Explaining the practice of war correspondence with focus on the new propaganda technique of embedded journalism.