Build Your Own Crap Detector!
The one thing you have control over is your decisions. But we are susceptible to misinformation, deception, and emotional triggers. Imagine how much better your life will be when you make better decisions! Better lifestyle choices make for better health, better purchase decisions save money and give you better products and services, and better civic decisions make a better world for all of us.
Build Your Own Crap Detector is a free four-lesson course from The Public Square Academy delivered weekly to help you avoid manipulation and improve your lives on all levels. It takes some work, but like life, you get out of it what you put into it.
In a world of information overload, disinformation, and outright lying, we owe it to ourselves and our communities to make good decisions in our personal lives, for our economic well-being, and for better social outcomes.
This short course has four lessons:
Our Hubris Moment
Have we waited too long to rescue democracy? Our values and institutions are under fire; faith in our leaders, journalists, and institutions is deteriorating.
The choice is plain: assert the primacy of the individual citizen over special interests and power-seekers or be condemned to tests of loyalty, fealty payments, and perpetual fear.
Discovering Truth
Our wild and wooly world of information overload, marketing slogans, titillating memes, and dopamine triggers keeps us mollified. To rescue democracy, we must abandon our one-dimensional social media streams and rekindle a love of the truth.
Learn about various forms of truth and develop tools and skills to determine truth. Discovering the truth is surprisingly satisfying!
Recognizing Deception
The upside of our freedoms is that we can feel relatively safe holding and expressing our views and opinions. The downside is that some people and organizations try to pull the wool over our eyes and make us make decisions against our own – and society’s – interests.
There is a science to deception, and it is well-advanced. The bottom line is that some folks are out to get your money or your vote for their own selfish interests. Learn how to read an offer, judge someone, and make better decisions.
Freedom Calls!
In a very real sense, our freedoms are lost when we succumb to manipulation and ideological and self-serving actors. It is human nature to act selfishly, which is why we have checks and balances in a democracy.
When people attack our institutions – rather than make them stronger- and when people sell us products that hurt our health and the environment, we all pay in the long run. Hear the call, bring out your home-grown crap detectors, and cry bullshit of the liars and cheaters of the world.
