Propaganda: Controlling You with Your Own Myths and Stories

Propaganda does not work in a vacuum. It must have a foundation upon which to build. So it uses and reinforces the myths and stories of your own culture against you, to control your actions.

Propaganda: It's Not What You Think

83. Propaganda: Controlling You with Your Own Myths and Stories

Propaganda needs a foundation upon which and from which it can work. The messaging of the propagandist has to build on something familiar, something natural within you. He cannot try to move you in a direction that is contrary to that which already within you. Propaganda does not work in a vacuum. The work of pre-propaganda is to take what is within you and within the culture of which you are a part and use this to then direct your actions in the way that the propagandist desires. The propagandist will use all of your myths, your stories, your culture, your beliefs against you. He wants you to want to do the things he wants you to do.

“Such an image pushes man to action precisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just and true.”

This is what makes propaganda so pernicious, a form of violence against the person. He is using as his material things that already exist within you to control and manipulate you. By obeying the propagandist, you think you are doing something good. But you are being used. You are being alienated from any organic relationship to your owns stories, myths and beliefs. With that natural connection to your own stories now severed, they are returned to you abstracted, rationalized and technologized, part of the mass messaging system designed to motivate you to serve the technological society and the state apparatus which governs it. The thoughts you think are your own are not. They are being used against you. And once subjected to it long enough, you will no longer be able to tell which thoughts are organic and which are propaganda. You give yourself over to them because it is easier. And if done well, these are the stories you want to believe about yourself anyways. American propaganda, thus, has to be American in its formulation, evoking American myths and symbols.

“Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandists: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Führer, of the communist society, of productivity.”

By listing these things as “myth” he is not saying that they are not real, but that these stories have “mythic power.” They are archetypes buried within the collective psyche of the people that are then taken and manipulated by the propagandist, given a content and an application that will direct you towards the action chosen for you by the propagandist.

“Eventually the myth takes possession of a man’s mind so completely that his life is consecrated by it.”

This reliance on myth is a particular feature of American propaganda. In many ways, much of the narrative battle in the United States is over who interprets those myths and how they should be interpreted. But they are almost always, in the era of the technological society, being used for some propaganda objective, even when competing with each other. And even within the scope of this narrative competition, the various differing messages battling things out all must be seen to be capturing essential American values specifically, and western values more broadly.

All the work of myth building is done in the pre-propaganda “phase” — although it is not as if you ever pass from this stage to leave it behind: it is ongoing, all encompassing and ever-present — through the panoply of various means, media, methods and forms. Television. Movies. Radio. Schooling. Festivals and celebrations like Independence Day on the fourth of July. Official press releases. All of them together evoke a broad sense of “what it means to be an American.” The average person will be so inundated with propaganda messaging their entire life that their ability to sort out what is real, organic and grounded from what is a creation of the totalizing propaganda machine is almost impossible.

Coming to this awareness, you are probably safer to assume that most of the thoughts and feelings you have about yourself as an American are the result of propaganda. You were made into an American. The idea that one has a natural bond with 350,000,000 other people strains credulity. People will hate to admit this to themselves, but those who say that America is an idea are mostly correct. I wish it were otherwise, but I know how propaganda works, I know what the most likely scenario is: you are a product of propaganda. Yet another example of the woke being more correct.