What Propaganda Does to You

We all know that propaganda affects us. But how?

92. What Propaganda Does To You

Does a fish know that it is wet? If everything is propaganda, is nothing propaganda? Right? Is it possible for propaganda to be such an all encompassing experience that is nearly impossible for any of us who live in the modern west to distinguish our own thoughts from that which is produced by propaganda? What if you don’t have any thoughts of your own? Is the Matrix real, and are you living within it? Can you even be unplugged? What would happen to you if this were to come about?

For most of us, we only notice the most obvious forms of propaganda these days. In many ways, the propaganda that most stands out is bad propaganda. News where the biases are so obvious that you can’t not notice that someone is attempting to manipulate your opinions and actions. During the Covid lockdowns people began paying a lot more attention to the ways in which the narratives were being employed to shape their behaviours. But what about the myriad of ways, even now, that you are being pushed, nudged, shaped and modified of which you are unaware? How much propaganda do you not notice? So much of it is geared to simply maintaining the way things are, that we don’t see ourselves as manipulated.

Remember, the technological society breaks down grounded, organic community, normal human relationships and a living culture with its history, stories, belief system, and morals, taking all of this and either undermining it, re-writing, abstracting it or simply using is as the subject matter for entertainment. Culture itself stops being an organic product of a real people and becomes part of the propaganda system. The whole society is made to participate, even the churches, such that your ability to distinguish between what is real culture and what is propaganda diminishes. In the modern technological society, propaganda is your culture.

Everything participates in supporting and maintaining the myths, stories, images, narratives upon which the whole of your thoughts are formed. Your entire psyche has, pretty much since birth, has been subjected to no-stop propaganda. Whether it is mass-media entertainment — movies, television, radio, sports, the arts — the education system, or things like literature, and especially advertisements, all shape for you what your life should be, the beliefs you should have, the things towards which you aspire. The home in the “Home Alone” movie is presented as completely normal.

As is the one in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off.”

But both of these are the homes of people with significant means. They are hardly “average.” You simply absorb this as the “normal” home or a normal family. The narrative never stops to ask whether or not you should aspire to own and live in a home like this as a “normal” person who is a “normal” representative of mass society. Why would a home that requires you to be in the top 5% of income earners be presented as “normal?” Is everyone supposed to aspire to own and live in this home? What effect will this have on society when 95% of the population can’t achieve this, but are expected to be dutifully aspiring to own this home? And, the underlying egalitarianism of our society is reinforced with the idea that everyone “normal” can obtain a home like this if they dutifully participate in the system the way they are told.

What would happen to society if people stopped aspiring to own this home and pursued aspirations that were more spiritually satisfying? That you do want it, or there is a part of you that says you should want it, that believes that you can have it if you do all the right things, has been produced within you by this kind of ubiquitous propaganda. These images then tell you what kinds of career you should pursue, the education you will need to get into that profession, the hours you will have to work, the lifestyle you will then have to live. All provided for you by a series of images presented to you over and over and over again. You have been propagandized.

Everyone on television is beautiful. There is a certain unreality to the stories on television. Everything works out in 30 minutes or an hour. From the story lines on TV, to the scripts of movies, to the lyrics in songs, to following the lives of entertainment personalities, all of it has been shaping you. Advertisements project, offer and promise a certain outcome for your life if you buy their product or service. Additionally, they were shaping you into the kind of person who finds their life satisfaction by doing the things necessary in your life to achieve the kind of life presented to you on the television and in the advertisements.

Its more than that, everything from the the political solutions to problems, to the laws that are put in place, to what you expect from religion, from the training you get in school and university, all of it is geared towards the realization of a certain way of life. Why do we debate the goodness of “the meritocracy” or “diversity, equity and inclusion?” Well, we have been taught that there is a certain way of life towards which we should aspire and we are discussing how best to realize this societal vision, never stopping once to question the underlying vision over which we are having the, “How best to achieve it?” debate.

Do we ever stop to ask where these ideas come from? How would you know whether the are arising spontaneously or are the product of a consistent propaganda effort? Selling products in a mass market, requires that you create a people who are a mass people. A mass people is no longer an organic society. A mass society must be held together by propaganda because in order to create it, you must destroy the organic communities which ordinarily form a people and make them resistant to being part of a mass. Everything in this mass society from its history, to its art, to its religion, to its entertainments must be geared towards making this society a functioning reality. If it continues long enough, propaganda eventually becomes your culture. Potentially all of your thoughts, everything that makes you who you are, has been shaped by propaganda. There are small islands of resistance: insular, tight knit communities, like a church, which still generate organic cultural elements can act like a buffer, but they cannot protect you entirely.

So, how does this affect you?