Welcome to Fear Factor, the follow up to our Manhattan Project Project, exploring the Cold War and the importance of fear as a tool to shape society. This was a really interesting and fun project, and I created probably my favourite product of all of my time in PLP. Let’s get into it.

We started off with a quick review of our last project, and then we started reading the book, “Hiroshima,” by John Hersey. This book tells the story of the dropping of the atomic bomb from the point of view of six different Japanese survivors. When this book came out, it was a very novel, as it challenged the primary perspective of the time. It was commonly believed among the American public that the dropping of the atomic bomb was good, but the graphic depiction of such a horrific event from the perspective of those who experienced it firsthand and humanization of a group of people who were commonly seen as less than human shook the common American perspective. By walking the reader through the aftermath of the bombing through the eyes of those who lived it, “Hiroshima” emphasizes the horrors of nuclear war and urges a reflection on the responsibilities of having the ability to cause such immense destruction and suffering. 

Next, we started with another main component of this project. This was the Zettelkasten, which is a fancy German term meaning “note case”, but I tend to think of it as an organization system for my learning. It is essentially a way to capture information, take away the important meanings, store it, and make it easy to retrieve in the future. Another metaphors we used was thinking of it as building a second brain. We did this in the form of three different types of notes – Fleeting, Literature, and Permanent. 

Fleeting notes are essentially quick thoughts or big ideas from anything. I might take fleeting notes while in a lecture, or while watching a documentary, etc. Literature notes are the big takeaways from a text(book, movie, podcast, etc). They are written in full sentences that are short and to the point. They contain enough information that anybody could understand it looking back on it, but not more than is necessary for context. Permanent notes are universal big ideas. They are your thoughts and opinions, and are often merely a sentence long. For example, one of my permanent notes is as follows. “Fear is a powerful driving force behind decision making, no matter how rash that decision may be.” The rest of the note is where I got the idea from, related tags and topics, links to related material, maybe a brief explanation of what I mean, but nothing more than that. These three note types form the Zettelkasten 

After learning about how to use the Zettelkasten, we started developing our final product. This came in a few steps.

1. Come up with an inquiry question
2. Come up with a product that answers that question
3. Make the product

The inquiry question was as simple as something we were interested in that related to the topic of fear and the Cold War. My final inquiry question was, “how does human nature allow governments to use fear as a tool to shape society?” I thought this was a pretty interesting question, which definetly encouraged me to be engaged in this project. The idea of the product I came up with was simple, however the execution was not. My product was a song that would answer my inquiry question. I am pretty much obsessed with music, and I am pretty adept at songwriting, but this would be a challenge for sure. We had a bit over two weeks in total to complete this product, so I had my work cut out for me. Originally, I had wanted to start with the lyrics of the song, but as I continued trying to work on it, it became clear that I needed some sort of instrumental foundation first. I quickly whipped up a fairly simple alternating verse/chorus song structure, with an extra bridge thrown in for fun. Once I had the skeleton of the song and some harmonic context ready, I began to start writing the lyrics. This was the part of the project that was most important – at least as far as the learning goes – and as a result, the instrumentals of the song are not quite as clean as I would like them to be but oh well. Without further ado, I will let the song speak for itself. Here is a copy of the lyrics and an explanation of them, and here is the song!

So that was this project. The learning was very engaging and very interesting, my product was something that I am very passionate about, and as a result, this has been one of my favourite projects we have ever done. I hope you enjoyed learning about my learning, and have a great day