June
01, 2023:
Information Clearing House--When most people in the English-speaking
world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to
think of something that’s done by foreign
nations who have governments that are so
totalitarian they won’t even let people know
what’s true or think for themselves.
Others understand that propaganda is
something that happens in their own nation, but
think it only happens to other people
in other political parties. If they
think of themselves as left-leaning they see
those to their right as propagandized by right
wing media, and if they think of themselves as
right-leaning they see those to their left as
propagandized by left wing media.
A few understand that propaganda is
administered in their own nation by their own
media, and understand that it’s administered
across partisan lines, but they think of it in
terms of really egregious lies like weapons of
mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken
from incubators in Kuwait.
In reality, all are inaccurate understandings
of what propaganda is and how it works in
western society. Propaganda
is
administered in western nations,
by western nations, across the political
spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known
examples of its existence make up only a small
sliver of the propaganda that our civilization
is continuously marinating in.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
The most common articles of propaganda — and
by far the most consequential — are not the
glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy
among the critically minded. They’re the mundane
messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that
people are fed day in and day out to normalize
the status quo and lay the foundation for more
propaganda to be administered in the future.
One of the forms this takes is the way the
western political/media class manipulates the
Overton window of acceptable political
opinion.
Have you ever noticed how when you look at
any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news
website, you never see views from those who
oppose the existence of the US-centralized
empire? Or those who want to close all foreign
US military bases? Or those who want to
dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a
thorough rollback of the creeping
authoritarianism our civilization is being
subjected to? You might see some quibbling about
different aspects of the empire, some debate
over whether we should de-escalate against
Russia so we can better escalate against China,
but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the
complete end of the empire and its abuses
altogether.
That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in
multiple ways: it excludes voices that are
critical of the established status quo from
being heard and influencing people, it amplifies
voices (many of whom have packing foam for
brains) which support the status quo, and, most
importantly, it creates the
illusion that the range of political opinions
presented are the only reasonable political
opinions to have.
The creation of that illusion is propaganda.
It’s not something solid that you can point to
easily because it’s comprised of an omission
of something rather than a concrete thing, but
it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have
immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s
something that doesn’t stand out too sharply
against the background, but because people are
exposed to it continuously day in and day out,
it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.
Another related method of manipulation is
agenda-setting — the way the press shapes
public thinking by emphasising some subjects and
not others. In placing importance on some
matters over others simply by giving
disproportionate coverage to them, the mass
media (who
are propagandists first and
news reporters second) give the false
impression that those topics are more important
and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As
political scientist Bernard Cohen famously
observed way back in 1963, the press “may
not be successful much of the time in telling
people what to think, but it is stunningly
successful in telling its readers what to think about.
The world will look different to different
people depending on the map that is drawn for
them by writers, editors, and publishers of the
paper they read.”
Ever noticed how the fact that our
governments are increasingly
tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to
be a front-page story pretty much every day of
the week, but instead the news is full of stuff
like the US presidential race and people arguing
over what products Target should sell during
Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.
The press could easily have spent the entire
Trump administration screaming about the
dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing
against Russia instead of calling him a Putin
puppet, and mainstream liberals would have
fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead
of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that
wouldn’t have served the interests of the
empire, which
had been planning to ramp up aggressions
against Russia
for years. They set the agenda, and the
public fell in line.
Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways
the public is propagandized from day to day is
described in a recent video by Second Thought
titled “You’re
Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually
fed messages by the capitalist machine that we
must work hard for employers and accept whatever
standards and compensation they see fit to
offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in
this unjust system the fault lies with us and
not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault.
Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault.
Overworked? Your fault.
The continual message we’re fed every day is
that there’s nothing to rebel against and
nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re
perceiving are our own fault and not the fault
of an abusive, exploitative system which is
built to extract profit from the working class
and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The
system cannot be a failure, it can only be
failed.
Then there’s the
ideological herding funnel we discussed
recently, which herds the population into two
mainstream factions of equal size which both
prevent all meaningful change and serve the
interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be
herded into either of these mainstream factions
is instead herded into fake “populist” factions,
which eventually corral them back into the
mainstream factions. Those few politically
engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of
these groups are so small in number that they
can simply be marginalized and denied any
sizeable platform from which to spread their
ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the
majority are supporting the status quo.
Maybe the most consequential of all the
mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the
way the mass media
manufacture the illusion of normality in a
dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream
our lungs out if we could see it with fresh
eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters
will
talk about the Biden administration
surrounding China with war machinery without
also talking about how freakish and horrifying
it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating
brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries.
The way American cities are full of homeless
people and it’s just treated as a normal and
acceptable thing to simply let them stay
homeless and push them out of wherever they try
to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter
who we vote for but we’re still herded into the
voting booths and told to vote better.
As a character in the movie Waking Life
puts it, “We all know the function of the
media has never been to eliminate the evils of
the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to
accept those evils and get used to living with
them. The powers that be want us to be
passive observers. And they haven’t given us any
other options outside the occasional purely
symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet
on the right or the puppet on the left?”
They don’t just tell us what to believe about
the world, they tell us what to believe about
ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon
which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our
success, and we build psychological identities
out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I
am unemployed. My life is about making money. My
life is about disappointing people. I am a
success. I am a failure. They invent the test of
our adequacy, and they invent the system by
which we are graded on that test.
Over and over and over again, day after day,
we are fed seemingly small messages which add up
over time. Messages like,
The world works more or less the way we
were taught in school.
The media have some problems but
basically tell the truth.
The status quo is working basically
fine.
Democracy is real and voting is
effective.
This is the only way things can be.
Our government might have its problems,
but it’s basically good.
You can earn your way into happiness by
working harder.
You can consume your way into happiness
with more spending.
If you think the system is
dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
Those who oppose the status quo are
weird and untrustworthy.
Things might get better after the next
election cycle.
Any attempt to change things is a silly
waste of time.
By feeding us all these simple, foundational
lies day after day, year after year from the
time we are very young, they lay the groundwork
for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be
told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc
is a real problem and its government needs to be
stopped,” or “People are struggling financially
right now, but it’s just because times are hard
and it can’t be helped.”
All the mundane lies serve as a primer for
the lies we’ll be told later, because once our
worldview has been shaped by them, our basic
human
cognitive biases and predisposition to
reject information which conflicts with our
worldview will ensure that we’ll take on
board the information which confirms our biases
and reject any evidence against it. They
construct our worldviews for us, then let our
normal cognitive defense systems protect it.
Their messages don’t even need to be
well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to
be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human
cognition known as the
illusory truth effect which causes us to
mistake the feeling of having heard something
before with the feeling of something being true.
Add to
all this the recent development of things like
Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation
and the deck becomes stacked against truth even
further, because someone’s odds of stumbling
across information which conflicts with the
propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically
down. Even if they’re actively searching for
information which conflicts the mainstream
worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned
YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.
So
that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure
to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful
the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among
those who are very critical of empire, because
propaganda in our society is like water for
fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we
don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and
begin examining our situation from its most
basic foundations to get any perspective on how
all-encompassing it really is.
Finding
your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a
lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the
humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong
about everything, and more than a little plain
dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it
eventually you get there, and then you can help
others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if
our chains are psychological that means they’re
ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that
needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.
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