How Did Your Beliefs Become Yours?
Updated: 2 hours ago
Michelle Stiles on propaganda, persuasion, and learning to recognize the forces shaping our view of reality.
An idea appears in the news. You hear it again from someone you trust. Soon, it seems to be everywhere.
Does that repetition mean the idea is well supported? Or could it mean someone has been effective at promoting it?
In this episode of Connecting with Coincidence, Bernard Beitman, MD welcomes back author Michelle Stiles for a conversation about propaganda, corporate influence, and the ways public opinion takes shape.
Michelle argues that understanding persuasion requires looking beyond whether an individual statement is true or false. We also need to examine how messages reach us, whose interests they serve, and why some ideas gain visibility while others struggle to be heard.
She offers five lenses for doing that: history, economics, communication, relationships, and selling. Together, they encourage us to trace a message’s origins, examine its financial incentives, consider who controls its distribution, notice how language affects us, and ask what we are being persuaded to accept.
Bernard and Michelle explore these questions through the history of public relations, including Edward Bernays, and extend the discussion to media, education, institutions, and political influence. Michelle draws connections between techniques used to sell products and those used to promote ideas and versions of reality.
For anyone interested in coincidence and pattern recognition, the conversation raises a useful question: when several messages seem to converge, are we encountering independent evidence—or a coordinated effort? Recognizing a pattern is a beginning. Understanding how it arose requires further investigation.
The discussion also reaches artificial intelligence and the continuing importance of critical thinking. Michelle’s invitation is to become more deliberate about what we accept, more curious about how we came to believe it, and more willing to examine the influences behind our certainty.
Meet Michelle now on the Connecting with Coincidence podcast:
About Michelle Stiles
Michelle Stiles is the author of One Idea to Rule Them All: Reverse Engineering American Propaganda. Her work examines the history of mass persuasion and how money, media, language, and institutions influence public belief. She writes about these subjects through @Smartsheepe.
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