What is Truth? Narrative Control and Dissident Politics in the Age of Propaganda

It is for good reason that people hate philosophers and lawyers. Truth is not what it always seems, is an elusive concept and truth is not the goal when battling the propagandist.

59. What is Truth? Narrative Control and Dissident Politics in the Age of Propaganda

“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton

We all read Acton’s quote and implicitly we agree with him. Of course power corrupts. Lies. Deceit. Hypocrisy. Abuses. Graft. Corruption. Bribes. Oppression. Nepotism. Cronyism. Debauchery. There is a whole gamut of sins and abuses which always seem to circle around, infect and grip the powerful. At the same time we somehow see ourselves as immune. Or we think that when we oppose power, we are better. We will not fall victim to the same things. We are not corrupt like the powerful. We see ourselves as the righteous ones in the struggle. Everyone wants to see themselves as the hero of the story. But are the champions of the powerless immune to the corruptions of power in their fight against the powerful? This is one of the things I have always loved about the “Dark Knight” persona of Batman. He was an angry vigilante, driven by the murder of his parents in front of his eyes, showing no mercy to the criminal. Even in the old comic books, he dropped them from buildings rather than turning them in to the police. There is a tough, dark honesty to Batman. Hard problems. A hard response.

There is a reason that people hate philosophers and lawyers. They question too many things. They muddy the waters in regards to things like truth and falsehood, justice and injustice. As much as we want to be ruled by a mythic figure of unwavering character and nobility like Aragorn, the real world gives us figures like Pontius Pilate. For those not familiar with the exchange, during Jesus’ arrest and and trial, the Apostle John gives us this telling:

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”  “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

It is interesting to note, in the same gospel, John recounts that Jesus identifies himself as “the truth” in chapter 14, verse six. We must note that this declaration should be understood in the light of the Old Testament wisdom tradition, especially as we encounter it in Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes. He is the “Word,” he is “Wisdom,” he is “Understanding” who has become flesh and dwelt among us, drawing on echoes of not just Genesis one, but also passages like Job 28:

“Where does understanding dwell?

It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing,

concealed from the birds of the air.

Destruction and Death say,

'Only a rumor of it has reached our ears.'

God understands the way to it.”

[For those who are interested, John Ashton’s monograph, “Studying John: Approaches to the Fourth Gospel.” Oxford. 1994, is a good place to start learning about the connections between Jesus and the Old Testament wisdom tradition.]

This question, “What is truth?” was raised for me again in an interesting Twitter/X controversy over the verifiable veracity of a quote meme regarding the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. I made the observation that the changes which mass immigration have had on Canadian society were not an accident, not the result of a well intended policy that got out of hand; but rather, they are the fallout of an intentional attempt to remake Canadian society as the first post-national “nation.” The quote:

The meme took off and got some traction. As the view and like count were climbing, there were soon people in my replies telling me that the quote was a fake, demanding that I take it down. It hurts the cause when we fake quotes and tell lies, they told me. There was also a press conference video of Trudeau denying that he said such a thing. I also had reports from people whom I trust that the quote was spoken at a closed door fundraiser. The words were not meant for public consumption. They were leaked.

This got me thinking. I engaged the fray and doubled down. I had some thoughts that I could not quite put my finger on, things I was sensing and intuiting, but had never before been forced to articulate. Sometimes your really don’t know what you think until you say it or write it. I kept thinking this isn’t right. Why are some so autistically worried that everything we say be 100% “fact check” verified? After all, the quote captures the essence of his policy and intent of other things he has said, even if not exactly in these words.

In the Twitter/X dustup, I used the phrase, “spiritually true” even if they might not be “factually true.” “Spiritually true” might not be the right word. Think of it as that which captures and reveals the essence of something. Symbolically true. Metaphorically true. Essentially true —although this implies a proximity to the truth. I was arguing that when something is “spiritually true” it actually reveals the essence of things, its true being. If it happens to be “factually” true —we will discuss “the fact” more fully in a bit— that is great. But if it takes some license with “the facts” and still exposes the essential truth of the person or the situation, this is good as well. You can point out things which are “factually true” about a thing but do little or nothing to reveal the essence of that same thing.

The other factor that needs to be considered is that the point of propaganda is often misunderstood. Its purpose is not to make people believe lies. Rather, the goal of propaganda is to shape the narrative, to shape the story which people tell themselves about the world. It is about manipulating their feelings and more importantly, their actions. The point of shaping the narrative is not merely to try to tell people how to think. Propaganda is about manipulating people so as to make them serve your agenda. Here is Ellul from his seminal work on the subject:

“Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in actions of a mass of individuals , psychologically unified through psychological manipulations.”

Further:

“Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.”

The goal of propaganda is not convincing you of things which are not true. This is how many think of it. But this is the wrong way to think about it. Propaganda, correctly understood, is first of all about getting you to act in the way the propagandist desires. Whether that action is something as simple as fearing the thing he wants you to fear, hating the person or thing he wants you to hate, or doing the thing he wants you to do. Why do you think that in schools they want kids doing mock protests long before they understand a tenth of the thing they are actually protesting. Because once the behavior is set, the propagandist has you. That child participating in the mock protest is now already becoming a activist. Adding content, a narrative, to that action established in childhood is simple once the habit of action has been established. If you put on that mask, even if you tell yourself you are doing it for the “right” reasons —you are making the decision for yourself and not because they are telling you what you do— once you have put on that mask, the propagandist has you. It becomes relatively easy to convince you about the rightness of mask wearing. It becomes easy to teach you the narrative that makes you a convinced and ideological masker. The goal is getting you to participate in a mass action of the propagandist’s choosing.

How often does the regime publish a story on page one. It is out there, doing its work. Soon the story is questioned. There is some controversy. Then days later just as the newscaster is signing off or buried somewhere in the middle to the end of the paper is a retraction or correction to the original page one story. But the damage is done. The narrative has been shaped.

But, you argue, we lack the power of the mainstream media. We cannot do this sort of thing. Really? Some are already recoiling. Should we do this thing? Shouldn’t we always be striving to tell the truth?

What is the truth?

Let me highlight a story from my youth. The year is 1974 and Robert Stanfield was running for Prime Minister as the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party (sic) against the incumbent Pierre Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party. While on campaign, Stanfield, an otherwise competent and confident leader, a man of some athletic skill, was tossing a football around to relax and connect with people informally. While there are numerous pictures of him throwing and catching and looking pretty good doing so in suit and tie, there was this one throw where he bobbled the ball. The moment was captured on film. It made him look awkward and bumbling. The papers printed the picture. The picture was credited with derailing his campaign. This moment in time, was completely factual. This one moment became a “fact” when it was fixated upon and elevated into public consciousness by the newspapers of the day. But this one moment while “factually true” was at the same time a vicious lie. The picture evokes the feeling of an awkward bumbling man. Now that the propaganda has made you feel a certain way, it is not a big step for you then to embrace the narrative that this is the essence of Robert Stanfield, the “spiritual truth” of who he is. But this is not who he is. This “truth” was used to evoke a false narrative about him. So again, we ask, “What is truth?”

Part of the problem we have in dealing with the difficult and many layered concept that is “truth,” is that we have been deeply influenced by the Enlightenment and Modernism and its battle with Christianity as well as the embrace of science and especially scientism. In a nutshell, during the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific thinking, focus was directed towards those things which could be observed and verified, those things which could be expressed through rational abstractions. There was real emphasis on “objectivity” and “universality.” If it can’t be seen or measured, it can’t be verified it thus can’t be seen as “true.” “Truths” are those things which are true everywhere and in every time and are not tainted by human subjectivity. Objectivity. Facts. Verification. These are the things which matter. For many, many of us, this is the frame out of which we operate. Because we think of propaganda as the attempts of the powerful to make us believe lies, we believe that the best way to counter the “lies” of the media is to confront these “lies” with objective, verified “facts.”

But this is a mistaken way of thinking about the world, about truth, about propaganda and most of all about the fight that we are in. The main problem is that the understanding of truth popularized by the Enlightenment and science is itself an illusion, a myth that would soon be exposed by the acid of postmodernism. Unfortunately, and many of the right will not want to hear this, but the postmodernists were, in many ways, right about the Enlightenment. In today’s political battles over “wokeness” with its deep roots in postmodern critical theory, saying that their critiques have validity is something akin to devil worship. But as is often said today, “The only way out is through.” To find our footing again we must take the bull by the horns and grapple with postmodern critiques.

To begin, we must understand the foundations of propaganda. What is a “fact.” For many, they think of a “fact” along the lines of “true things which happened.” Facts are the data, the evidence, that grounds a particular position or understanding of the world. Our common parlance speaks to this common understanding: “He has the facts on his side.” It is roughly equivalent with saying that his statement is true because it coheres with reality. The problem is that this is a misunderstanding. The actual apprehension of reality does not work this way, especially in regards to propaganda. The saying, “He has the facts on his side” is itself a form of propaganda, a tool for shaping narrative.

Let’s begin with raw sensory information. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch. There are things we see and hear and measure. Raw sensory data is utterly useless. We have to filter and select things out of the mass of data to fixate upon. If we don’t do this as human beings, we would make ourselves crazy. We begin by differentiation. We notice some things. Other things go un-noticed so that we can notice and process the things we do notice. Once noticed, we then fixate upon this particular slice of raw experience and we attach significance and meaning to it, integrating it into our memory, our collection of noticed experiences.

From a propaganda point of view, a similar process takes place. A particular slice of reality is noticed and fixated upon. The propagandist then elevates this slice of reality to popular consciousness. It is at this point, once it is noticed and accepted by the general population that it becomes a “fact.” This “fact” is then integrated into the broader understanding through framing and narrative. The “fact” is given a story that explains why it should be noticed. This “framing” can often be very intentional. Think of the narratives around the relationship between blacks and the police and the “fact” of police shootings. What happens if the only police shootings that get noticed and elevated to public consciousness are those shootings where a white officer shoots a black man? What if the framing that we are given is that these white officers are shooting them because of racist biases that they may not even themselves be aware of? Now you have created a narrative through which every shooting is seen and understood. This is the story. This becomes “the truth.”

But what about the other “facts” of the other kinds of police shootings? What about “fact” that black on black violence is far more deadly than police shootings? They don’t matter from a propaganda perspective. If they have not been fixated upon and elevated into public consciousness, it is as if they have not happened at all. They don’t exist. They are not facts. They are like the things you tune out every day with your own consciousness just to not go crazy. Unless something is fixated upon and elevated into public consciousness, seizing the awareness of the people, it simply doesn’t exist from a propaganda perspective. You can call “facts” which are presented by mainstream media outlets “lies” and “distortions” until you are blue in the face but it does not matter. Your “facts” are not “facts.” They just don’t exist. Only those pieces of information that are fixated upon and elevated to public consciousness are the “facts” of the narrative which shapes the actions and thinking of the people. This is the real power of the mainstream media: to dictate the terms of the narrative. It is the power to choose which slices of reality are fixated upon and elevated into public consciousness.

The real battle in the fight over messaging and control of the narrative is not the battle over truth and falsehood, but who is able to dictate the terms of the narrative. Who establishes the “facts” in the minds of the people, and can thus dictate the terms of what is true and false, what is fact or lie, what has meaning and what does not have meaning is the decisive question. Controlling and dictating the narrative through the process of selecting and elevating “facts” and framing them into a coherent story is what really matters. This is why you drop page one bombshells and bury the corrections or retractions in the middle of the paper. Things become fact when the masses seize upon them as fact. Can this backfire? Sure. But more often than not it is successful.

There have been notable wins for the opposition in this regard, take for example the “grooming” debate in schools in regards to transgenderism and homosexuality. Are ALL teachers groomers? Probably not. But by dictating the terms of the debate, public consciousness, the regime has been on its backfoot with this issue of transgenderism in the schools. The regime was not used to playing the role of reacting to opposition propaganda and it showed. They are usually quite deft at redirecting, choosing new facts to fixate upon and elevate to consciousness. In this case they struggled. A common redirection tactic is the “Rebublicans pounce!” counter-messaging story. The original controversy gets dropped as a new fact is fixated upon, the reaction and demagoguery of the Republicans who are “mean” for politicizing a very serious issue. Another related one. Middle Eastern immigrants involved in a attack of some sort? The “fact” of the event is not the attack itself, but the potential for the attack to spark a response of “Islamophobia.”

A “fact” is that thing which is fixated upon and elevated to public consciousness and framed so as to incorporate it into “the narrative.” The real political battle is not over true or false, but rather over who shapes the narrative.

We struggle with this because of the way that Enlightenment rationalism and science has taught us how to think. We quest for truths which can be verified and tested scientifically and thus be deemed true for all times and in all situations. We want to remove the vagaries of subjectivity or belief from our knowledge. Seeing is believing. This desire for “verified” truth leads us to take the position that we should only say things which can be verified as true. While accuracy and precision in our reporting and language is a good thing and should be valued, they are not the only thing. They may not even be the main thing. As we saw with the example of Robert Stanfield, sometimes accurate reporting can be used to propagate destructive false narratives which are believed to be true.

The problem is that there is no such thing as “objectivity.” There are no “objective facts.” They don’t exist. Period. You cannot cleanse subjectivity from knowing, either in your own subjectivity or that of others. Even so called “scientific laws,” regardless of how powerful they are in helping you understand, manipulate and control the world are still bound up within western culture. They are an artifact of the western way of thinking about the world. There are whole swaths of knowledge which western science ignores because it does not fit into its narrative. Thomas Kuhn noted this phenomena in his “Structures of Scientific Revolutions.” The very choice to study one thing over another thing and to study it scientifically as opposed to doing so in some other manner all affect the shape of what is known. The kinds of questions you ask and the design of the study affect the answers. Heisenberg, in dealing with quantum particles, noted that in the act of measuring a particle, you determine its being. It can either have position or a vector, but not both. You, as the so-called “objective” measurer, have determined the nature of thing you wish to study. In this sense, all knowledge is in some ways a form of propaganda.

As conservatives and dissidents, we often get caught up in the battles of centuries ago and these have conditioned us in our response to those who form and shape the dominant narrative. Take for example the battles over the biblical accounts of creation, the flood, Adam and Eve and all the rest of it. Modernists put Christians on the defensive saying that these stories could not be verified scientifically and so they must be just myths. They are fake. They are made up. Because of the optimism of that time period, many Christians were embracing the quest for rational and scientific truth, and they accepted the framing of the argument in rationalist, scientific terms to devastating effects. “Did God create the world in six days?” “Did God flood the world to punish man for his sins?” If you operate out of a scientific and rationalist frame, these can be very troubling questions. But they are the wrong questions.

Of course God created the world in six days. Why? Because this is the narrative which I accept in faith. And frankly, it is no more or less verifiable than the scientist who begins with the notion that there is no God and then tries to come up with a story for the beginning of things. Progress! I mean evolution, which is just the ideology of human progress applied cosmologically. And it has math! And fossilized bones! Woo hoo! Proof! Not, really, but they like to believe the story. Did it happen exactly the way the story says it happened in terms of some notion of “scientific” history? This is the wrong question. The right question is: “What is the narrative which shapes your life?” “What is the narrative that helps you understand the world we live in?” “What is the narrative that gives you a true understanding of the essence of things?” That story, that narrative, declares that God created the world in six days.

We press on.

This notion of fighting the right battle was impressed upon me again by a recent piece by

eugyppius

, in which he argued that we get very wrapped up in trying to expose and disprove “the lies” about SARS-CoV-2 or the “lies” about global warming. He is correct in drawing this conclusion:

“It’s totally appropriate to scrutinise the empirical assertions of the climateers, but it’s equally important to recognise that the force we’re confronting here is political more than it is scientific. We can’t just argue that climate policies are bad because anthropogenic global warming isn’t real; in this universe we don’t get to determine what is considered real. We have to insist that climate policies are bad whether or not anthropogenic global warming is a thing, just like pandemic restrictions were bad whether or not they had any prospect of stopping Covid.”

On the curious schemes of various activists, ideologues and politicians to minimise the emission of certain atmospheric gases by restructuring our energy supply and thereby our entire civilisation

In this world of propaganda and of the power of the technical administrative state, proving the truth or falsehood of the regime narratives is in fact a distraction from the real battle. The primary question we should be asking is something along the lines of, “Does it expose the power networks of the administrative state in all its forms in government, business, think tanks, NGOs and non-profits?” “Does it advance our cause of dismantling the administrative state in all its forms?” It might make you feel good to discover and make attempts to promulgate “the truth,” but this does little to expose or dismantle the regime. To that end, can the regime even be comprehended? Can it actually be exposed? Really. Is it actually possible to expose the regime? I am not convinced such a thing is even possible anymore. Increasingly the state in all its forms renders us ever more legible through bureaucratic mandates, census data (which you cannot opt out from providing), the hoovering up of our digital footprint, through AI technology (this is the real danger of AI: aiding the surveillance apparatus), and so forth. But you in turn cannot render the state legible to you. This is why Ellul makes the case that in this situation perhaps political violence is the prophetic tool which forces these networks into the open. The real question is not, “Is it true.” The real question is, “Does this help us bring down the regime?”

We press on.

Jacques Ellul made the argument in “The Political Illusion” that one of the common illusions we have about the political is that we possess real political choices. In a technological world, he argues, most of the choices which we face become technical choices. Most governments continue the policies of their predecessors out of technical necessity. Most governments shape their policies in reaction to the policies of other nations who threaten them. If your country is next to a nation that is making tanks on assembly lines, you might believe you have a choice to not make tanks. You might see industrialization as an evil. You might see tanks as evil. Not for your people. No tanks for us. You could make that choice. Soon, though, the tanks rolling off the assembly line of your rival will be running over your country. If you and your people wish to survive, you had better learn how to make tanks. Or at least, you need to figure out how to defend yourself from them. Your choices are limited. You must deal with the “tank problem” whether you want to or not. Yes, it means that you are compelled to become your enemy in order to survive. But, if in the process of fighting your enemy, you become your enemy, can you said to be winning? This is a good question with no easy answer.

In regards to propaganda, we must understand that propaganda is a necessary part of the technical system and is a set of techniques and technologies as much as is the mass industrial production of tanks. This means that if you want to survive as a people, if you want to defend yourself from the regime, if you want to defeat the regime, you must find a way to grapple with propaganda. You must learn how to defend yourself from it. But necessity will most likely force upon you the decision that you yourself must become a propagandist. This necessity means understanding that the most important goal is not first of all truth telling, saying accurate, verified things; but rather, it is to shape the narrative towards the acquisition of power. If verified facts help with that goal, then good. But if not, you need tanks. You need to shape the narrative. The narrative is a weapon that you must wield against the regime. You must dictate the narrative and control it. This is not easy when the regime has such a large megaphone and so many willing sycophants who will dutifully carry their message out. But as the whole school grooming issue demonstrates, it is possible.

Am I telling you to lie? Perhaps. Yes. At some point you will have to lie if you want to build a political movement capable of challenging the regime. The lies may or may not be in the messaging, but necessity will dictate that sooner or later they will have to be. There are several exigencies that make lying necessary. First is the necessity of protecting secrets. You simply cannot be open as a leadership with your people or with your rivals. Then there is the need for strategic misdirection. The other is in espionage. The whole business of intelligence gathering requires the ugly reality of getting people to betray their country or placing people into situations where they can, usually under the cover of a false identity, observe, report and influence your enemies or rivals. You cannot run a state without it. And I would venture that you cannot oppose a state as a dissident without falsehoods. Lies, misdirection and espionage are essential and necessary aspects of governance and government opposition.

As we process the world, we do to ourselves what the propagandist does to us. We sift, sort and ignore a lot of incoming sensory data. We have to or we would go crazy. But how does it happen? We don’t do it consciously. Preconsciously, our mind, without us being aware of it, is selectively seeing and hearing, sorting out for us what will and won’t reach our consciousness. If you grow up in a strict religious environment, for example, ingrained prohibitions about sex and sexuality may cause your eyes to actually dance around a scantily clad woman, such that you quite literally cannot see her. Some of this is focus and attention. Some of this is how we have programmed our mind to see, often without being aware of the basic programming. We see something like this happen with the gorilla test. People are throwing a ball around and we are asked to count how many times the ball is thrown back and forth. While we are attending to this, a man in a gorilla suit walks across the scene. Most people never see the gorilla. This is selective attention at work. Often it requires others to see the things about ourselves that we cannot see. This same phenomenon occurs for groups as well as for individuals. We construct narratives for ourselves based on sensory data that has been subconsciously preselected for us by our own minds either individually or collectively. Often we are doing our propaganda against ourselves.

So what is the truth? It certainly isn’t found in strict Enlightenment or scientific rationalism. In many ways, truth is something you intuit. You know it when you see it. But what do you see? Often it cannot be put into words. We tend to think that in making declarative rational statements we can say true things which are true in all times and in all places. But the problem, even with so-called universals, is that words and their meanings are separate. I say the word “dog” and one person thinks of a loving relationship with a family pet, while another person thinks about getting bit by a dog when they were little. The same word with two very different meanings. And there are times where the use of a word can reveal a truth but be used in a deceptive manner, such as in sarcasm, to convey the opposite of its “official” meaning. So how does communication happen if words and their meanings are separate? With difficulty sometimes. The closer people are to each other “spiritually” the easier it is to communicate. When people are close, much of what is “said” is conveyed non-verbally through gesture and intonation. Sometimes things don’t even have to be said. There is a closeness that allows people to finish each other’s sentences.

We have all told stories. We all know the person whose desire to give a factual account of some happening renders it dull and boring. You cannot cannot connect with the event. It is hard to get a sense of its importance. Another person tells the same story, embellishes things, leaves some stuff out and maybe even makes up details out of whole cloth, yet they are able make the story connect. They are able to give the story meaning and fit it into a larger narrative. Then there is the person who just makes stuff up, and his falsehoods just turn you off. How much license with the details is too much? How much is not enough? There is an art to it and not everyone can do it. But the best storytellers help you to live into events. They can turn even mundane occurrences into a fascinating and engaging tale. It is all about knowing, having a feel for what details to hold onto and emphasize, what to leave out, where you need to punch things up a little and where you need to give the truth wings.

Narratives are like maps. What is a map? A map is a kind of truth, like storytelling. It is reductionist. There are lots of details left off the map. This is the point. Some things are exaggerated. Some things are added that are not there in reality. Color coding. Names and labels. Grids. Scale. The point of the map is not to be a hyper-accurate rendition of reality. That would be useless to you. That would be reality itself. You are lost in reality. Reality in its fullness is actually the enemy. What you need is story told with an image. It has just enough details to help you realize where you are and to get you from where you are to where you want to go.

All narratives are like a map. A map is a mixture of things noticed and unnoticed. There are details highlighted and some left off. There at details added that are not there in real life. The map creates a picture of the world to help you get where you are going. All learning is the process of map formation. As we grow, discover and learn, we add pieces to our map, filling in portion of the map that were blank. We add details. Sometimes we get lost and have to make wholesale changes to the map so that it might cohere better to reality than it did before. The question of the map is not first of all, “is it true?” because we know that it is always only selectively and partially true. Sometimes there are things added and embellished. The real question of the map is, “Will it get me where I am going?”

This brings us to the complex of techniques that is propaganda. Propaganda is much easier to do from a position of power when one has the media megaphone at one’s disposal. Just because it is harder, does not mean it is impossible. But we must be asking the right questions and seeking the right goals. You have to use the right map. We must remind ourselves that the goal of countering regime propaganda is not about countering the “lies” of the regime so as to give people the “truth.” The propagandist looks to make you serve by shaping a narrative. Propaganda is about obedience and manipulation. The map being created by the propagandist or the counter-propagandist only has to be good enough to get you where you where he wants you to go. Like a map, the degree of reduction, the items chosen to be highlighted, the things left out, the information added all have to work together towards the end of making people serve. The map, that is, the narrative created, has to point people towards the actions you wish them to take, the place you wish them to go. This is why you can run a splashy front page story of dubious veracity or provenance that can be very effective in shaping the narrative. When it comes to light, the retraction or correction can be made. But by the time of the correction, people are already where you want them to be.

So back to our example of the Justin Trudeau quote, it may seem to us that if we don’t verify the quote, or even if it is made up, that this will harm the propaganda, harm our messaging. Now this might be the case. But in reality, its utility in getting people to where we want them to go likely outweighs that risk. Remember, the goal is not to say true things about Justin Trudeau. The goal is to make people dislike Trudeau for desiring to change the demographics of the country intentionally, marginalizing “old stock” Canadians of Anglo and European descent. If you can get 100,000 people to view your meme, generating a 1000+ likes, this can be seen as a success. Even if it is merely the work of reinforcing existing dislikes, it is a win. This is the intent of his policies. Even if he has not said the exact words, it is close enough to point people to the conclusions you want them to have. Even attempts to say, “You can’t verify that he said that!” are largely irrelevant because it gives you opportunity to say, “It doesn’t matter, this quote reveals the essence of the man, the way he thinks and the intent of his and his party’s policies.” Remember the goal is not truth or falsehood. The point of the meme is for you to be angry at Trudeau for what he has done to the country. If the meme generates or reinforces your anger, it is a success.

What does this mean for Christians? A few things. First, we must recognize that the political is an ugly game. We might think that we have a choice to do ethical politics or not, but we don’t. Politics involves power and power is inherently corrupting, even when you want to do it right. This is more so in a technological society that demands the use of propaganda. This is why democracy, which will inevitably draw the whole society into the political, will have a deleterious effect on the population. But a majoritarian Christian society will demand that Christians step into the political in spite of the dangers. Sometimes people are called into politics. Sometimes political leaders come to Christ. So we must enter in knowing that it is a realm that will corrupt. The demands of power necessitate it. There is an importance to the political that necessitate the risks to soul.

Secondly, as Christians we must remember and understand that “truth” is a person, Jesus Christ. What does this mean? It means a certain humility when it comes to attempts to rationalize Christian teaching. Everything cannot be explained. There are things that can be grasped but not explained. Even the creeds are not really an explanation of Jesus or the Trinity. They are more of a fence around the language. The creeds are a map that keep us on the right road. This is why the Bible emphasizes much more the notion of “wisdom” over that of “truth.” The point of drawing close to God in fear is not that you will understand all things, but that you will see rightly and make wise decision in the moment.

Even the scriptures themselves recognize that hard things must be done. God does them himself. Let’s do a quick overview of the story of Samuel’s anointing of David in 1 Samuel 16:

The Lord said to Samuel, “How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him as king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and be on your way; I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I have chosen one of his sons to be king.”

But Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears about it, he will kill me.”

The Lord said, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.’ Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what to do. You are to anoint for me the one I indicate.”

Samuel did what the Lord said. When he arrived at Bethlehem, the elders of the town trembled when they met him. They asked, “Do you come in peace?”

Samuel replied, “Yes, in peace; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord. Consecrate yourselves and come to the sacrifice with me.” Then he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

The first thing to note is that Samuel is not mourning because King Saul is dead. Rather, Samuel grieves because God had withdrawn his favor from Saul. Saul is still very much alive and still very much the king. The anointing of a king is a very political act. There is still a king on the throne, but God tells Samuel to go and anoint another king. From Saul’s perspective, this would be viewed as an act of rebellion and treason. Samuel would be giving God’s blessing to a rival for the throne. It is a declaration that Saul’s rule lacks legitimacy. Samuel sees rightly what God is asking of him. “Lord, you are asking me to sign a death warrant, for me and the man I anoint.” So the Lord engages in a little political misdirection. He tells Samuel to pretend that he is going there simply to offer a sacrifice, nothing more. Under the cover of this story, this lie, this narrative, you will anoint a new king. But won’t this deception undermine God’s anointing of David? God did not think so.

What does this mean? Does this means its ok to lie and use deception? Maybe. But you will still have to give account before God for what you have done, so you want to be fairly sure before you make the claim that God wants you to use political deception. But in the spirit of the “times and seasons” poem in Ecclesiastes 3, just as there are times that call for violence, death and destruction, so too there will be times which call for political deception. Wisdom will dictate the path we should take, allowing us to see clearly and act rightly. Wisdom gives us the map for right action, even if that map does not reveal itself until the moment of decision.

There are plenty of other things that could be said in this regard, but this piece has grown too large already. To reiterate, the goal of opposition propaganda and messaging is not to counter the “lies” of the regime with “truth.” This might be the right tool to use, but it is not the end, the goal, the purpose of counter-propaganda. Truth and lies are mere tools to be wielded towards specific ends. The goal is not to say true things. The goal is to shape the narrative towards bringing down the administrative state regime so that we might be able to claim and wield power. In a similar manner, the point of acquiring power is not to gain it for its own sake. To what end, then, are we fighting?

I would argue that what we strive for is “space.” We want the space to shape our own reality free from the messaging, the propaganda, the threats and the rewards of the administrative state in all its forms. We want to shape our own reality. Better, we want space to allow our reality to be shaped by the living metaphysical and supernatural reality of our God, the living God of the scriptures. We are also looking to create space for our people, space from the political. One of the reasons we desire a return to a hierarchical society is so that the burden (and the rewards) of leadership can be given to a few persons of wisdom and nobility who can be trusted to grapple with the corrupting demands of the political so that the bulk of society does not have involve itself in this form of corruption. A few sacrifice themselves and bear this burden so that rest of the community can live free from the political. Ultimately the goal is to create a space where people can connect to reality, to each other and to God so as to free themselves from the demands, the burden and the shaping power of propaganda. We use the tools of propaganda to attack the administrative state so as to create spaces for our people which will hopefully be free from the need for propaganda. It seems a lofty goal, maybe an impossible goal. But as we get into the fray of narrative combat, the point of all this combat is not the combat itself, but the goal of building parallel societies established on different foundation from the current regime and the culture which sustains it.

It is a different view of “nobility” than we might want to imagine. Acton is right. Great men are almost always bad men. Even our Christian great men. The demands of the political and of power are corrupting. The ring of power cannot be used without its effects poisoning you. This is part of the price that must be paid to free the people and allow them the space to establish new communities built on a new foundation.