The phenomenon of carefully, continuously engineered noise and distraction is neither new nor benign. Each year for the past quarter century, I’ve ended the last lecture of my Propaganda in the 20^th Century course with a reading from Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press, 1955).

Mayer, an American political scientist, traveled to Germany in the early 1950s to speak with German Nazis. He was dissatisfied by the existing analyses of how Nazism came to be, and hoped that intimate interviews with ten Germans who became Nazis might help him come to understand.

This excerpt comes from Chapter 13, a discussion by a university professor.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. . .

“The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being was, above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about — we were decent people – and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Unconsciously, I suppose, we were grateful. Who wants to think?

“To live in the process is absolutely not to be able to notice it – please try to believe me – unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. . .”

My students and I talk about the prospect that “bad stuff” – policies and the propaganda or media strategies that enable them – don’t just appear. They grow; they grow within us, fed by our uncertainty, tolerance and exhaustion. The essential tool, I argue, for confronting great injustice is to recognize and reject daily injustice: don’t tolerate demeaning comments, even when – perhaps especially when – they’re made by your friends. Don’t ignore the stranger in need. Don’t go for the cheap laugh. Don’t shake your heads and just walk away. Do today the things that will make you, fifty years hence, look back on with pride. Do today the things that will give you a decent answer to your child’s someday question, “oh, no! Well, what did you do about it, dad?”

Sussing out publications that cover investments in a fair-minded manner is no easy task. In that light I have been reading Mutual Fund Observer and prior that FundAlarm for as long as I can remember. A monthly publication is for the vast majority of investors as frequent as they need to be checking in on the world of investing. 

I also have the benefit of having read both Josh and David’s answers to the question. In that light I will simply agree with what they have both written. I am not sure quite how he does it but Josh has created for himself a process that provides him with what he needs to succeed in a number of different venues. David has correctly noted that a focus on books, not necessarily investment-related, is an important antidote to the daily din of the financial media.

I spend much of my day wading through the financial media and blogosphere looking for analysis and insight that has a half-life of more than a day or two. The recommended sources below do much the same thing with a very different focus.

Print: The Week. You can consume this weekly magazine online but I still rely on the US Mail to provide me with my copy. The Week is a curated look at the week’s, or more likely, the previous week’s news. It covers the gamut from domestic and international news, entertainment, finance and last but not least real estate. The elites may read The Economist every week. Someone with a busy schedule reads The Week.

Podcast: Science Friday. Science Friday is broadcast on many public radio stations but I consume it via podcast. It is already a cliche to say that the worlds of science and technology are changing at an increasingly rapid rate. For a lay audience Science Friday provides listeners with an accessible way of keeping up. For example last week’s show included segments on the science of sunscreen, cephalopod intelligence and 3-D mammography.

Online: The Browser, Longreads and Longform  One caveat I would have about reading non-fiction books is that many of them are magazine articles padded out to fill out the publisher’s idea of how long a book should be. If that is the case then reading original long form reporting and analysis should provide us with a good bang for the buck. The Browser is not focused explicitly on long form content, but I thought I would mention it here since it is so darn good.

Successful investing isn’t about making quick decisions in the moment. It is about sitting on your hands most of the time and making decisions after some thoughtful consideration. As I have written prior a multi-disciplinary approach to investing provides you with the perspective necessary to see the world as it is as opposed to how Wall Street would like you to see it.