The Sixth Filter, and the three questions every leader should ask before fear decides
Oct 1, 2026
The question came from the back of the room, and I did not have an answer.
It was the mid-1990s, in Chatswood, one of Sydney's more comfortable suburbs. I was running a course for people who had lost their work, and the room told you something the headlines did not: unemployment had reached the leafy streets too. No postcode was immune.
One participant was a young man in his mid-twenties. Quiet. The kind of thinker who waits until he has something worth saying. Over the weeks we had fallen into a running exchange about language: how a word is chosen, where a phrase comes from, what it does to the person who hears it.
One afternoon he asked, "Have you read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent?"
He assumed I had. Something in what I was teaching sounded to him like that book.
I told him the truth… No.
So I went and found it, and it was hard going. I had spent my reading life on business, and here was a book that joined behaviour, psychology and the origins of the words people are handed. I read whole pages twice. Some I sat with for an evening.
What stayed with me was not a political position. It was the strange fact of that afternoon: my teaching sounded like a book I had never read. Ideas travel. They shape how we speak and think long before anyone traces where they came from.
Back then, I believed the people in those rooms were suffering from a meaning deficit. Today I see a second deficit alongside it, one I have called Scrolling Deficit Syndrome. We skim instead of going deep, and a thin carrier of truth brings whatever has been laid on top of it straight into our heads.
Three voices, one machine
The phrase is older than Chomsky. In 1922 the American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote about "the manufacture of consent" in Public Opinion. Lippmann was no radical. He was an establishment liberal who believed the world had grown too complex for ordinary citizens to follow unaided, so consent had to be shaped by those who could see further. He meant it as a job description.
Twenty-four years later, the same idea was described from inside a prison cell.
On 18 April 1946, during the Nuremberg trials, the American army psychologist Gustave Gilbert visited Hermann Göring in his cell. Gilbert remarked that ordinary people would hardly thank leaders who brought them war and ruin. Göring shrugged. "Why, of course, the people don't want war," he said. But it was the leaders who set policy, and "it is always a simple matter to drag the people along."
Gilbert objected. In a democracy, he said, the people have a say through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare war.
Göring was unmoved. "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
Gilbert published the exchange in Nuremberg Diary in 1947. It is worth reading slowly, and worth reading with care. Göring had every reason to claim that everyone does it: it spread his guilt across the whole world. His description of the mechanism is sharp. His claim that democracy is helpless is self-serving. Free societies have resisted war fever, and they have also been swept into it. The honest conclusion is not that we are defenceless. It is that we are vulnerable.
Then, in 1988, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky published the book my Chatswood participant asked me about. Their argument did not depend on anyone lying. They showed how a free press can filter itself through five structural pressures: who owns the outlet, who advertises in it, which sources it relies on, the flak that punishes reporting the wrong thing, and the common enemy that makes every story easier to tell.
A liberal who thought consent should be managed. A Nazi who boasted it could be engineered anywhere. Two scholars of the left who showed it could happen without a single conspirator. Three very different voices, describing the same machine. That is exactly why it deserves our attention, whichever way we lean.
The Sixth Filter
Herman and Chomsky named five filters. They could not have named the sixth, because it had not been built yet.
The Sixth Filter is the loop that shows you more of what you already react to: first in the feed, and now in the AI you ask for advice.
In the feed, it rewards the fast reaction over the considered one. Outrage travels further than nuance, so outrage is what arrives. Nobody has to lie to you. The feed only has to learn what makes you stop scrolling, and give you more of it. That is how Scrolling Deficit Syndrome takes hold: not through censorship, but through abundance, sorted by your own reflexes.
The same filter runs inside organisations, and this is where it stops being about politics and starts being about management.
I watched it recently, in an organisation I will not name. In a meeting, a team member raised a problem that mattered to the business. Leadership agreed it deserved a written follow-up, and one was sent: specific, practical, addressed to everyone who needed it. Most of the people it was written for never opened it. A few days later, in another meeting, the person who had first raised the problem took the heat for it.
No one lied. No one conspired. The urgent story in the room was simply louder than the inconvenient fact in the inbox, and the messenger paid the price. Herman and Chomsky had a word for that price. They called it flak.
And now the filter has a new layer. An AI model tends to build on the frame it is given. Ask it to confirm your direction and it will do so fluently, with reasons you had not thought of. The machine does not manufacture consent… it does something subtler. It makes self-persuasion effortless.
So the danger for leaders is not, mostly, a liar in the building. It is a system (a feed, a meeting culture, an AI tool) that makes it easy to stop checking.
This is why I keep saying that formation matters more than information. We have never had more information. What we are short of is the formed judgement to test it, and the habit of using AI to sharpen that judgement rather than replace it.
The Consent Check
If the machine is this easy to run, the defence has to be just as easy. Before any decision made under urgency, I suggest a leader run what I call the Consent Check. Three questions. Two minutes.
- What am I being told to fear, and who benefits if I act on that fear?
This answers Göring directly. Fear is not always false; sometimes the threat is real. The question is whether it has been checked. If you cannot say who gains from your acting quickly, you have not checked it yet.
- Who raised an inconvenient fact, and how was it received?
This answers the flak. Every organisation has someone who sees the problem early. If that person paid a price for saying so, the fact has not really been heard, and the next person who sees one will stay quiet.
- Did I ask my AI to test my direction or to confirm it, and did I ask it to argue the other side?
This answers the Sixth Filter. The same tool that will polish your frame will challenge it, if you ask. Most of us never ask.
The Consent Check does not tell you what to decide… It tells you whether you are still the one deciding.
What to do on Monday
None of this needs a new system. It needs four small habits.
- Read before you react. Before your next meeting, open the one document someone sent you that you skipped. Ask its author one question about it.
- Protect the messenger. The next time someone brings you bad news, thank them in front of others. What you reward is what you will hear more of.
- Prompt for dissent. The next time you use AI on a real decision, add one line: "Argue the strongest case against this." Then read the answer to the end.
- Put the Consent Check on the agenda. Three questions, two minutes, before any decision made in a hurry.
The question from the back of the room
I still think about that quiet young man in Chatswood. He asked me about a book I had not read, and it sent me on the slowest, most useful reading of my working life.
His question is now everyone's question, only faster, and in our pockets. Who shaped the words I am using? Who benefits from the fear I am feeling? Did I think this, or was it handed to me?
Göring believed consent was an engineering problem. He was half right. Consent can be manufactured… but judgement can be formed, and forming it is the work: in ourselves, in the people we lead, and in the way we choose to use the most persuasive tools ever built.
That is the work I care about most.
If this resonates, start here: thecreatrepreneur.com/start
Coined in this edition: The Sixth Filter · The Consent Check
Sources: Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922); G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (1947); Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988).