“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9
The term propaganda has the potential to evoke a handful of iconic images. One might visualize the agitprop of 20th century communist regimes, or perhaps a poster deifying a political leader. Maybe one would be compelled to laugh at the visual of a paranoiac, locked in their apartment and buried under a tinfoil hat. Either way, the term has a way of presenting itself as singularly historical or eccentric and therefore alien and irrelevant for the modern Westerner—after all, it is the current year, and therefore we are all enlightened and thus immune to such machinations.
But as the teacher of Ecclesiastes suggests, there is nothing new under the sun.
In contemporary democratic society, governments do not usually employ force to reach their political goals; such behaviour tends to grate against the public consciousness. Forceful methods, however explicit or implicit, are more the hallmark of a totalitarian state, where obedience is manifest in a subjugated populace to the degree that what they think is of comparatively little concern to what they do.
In a democracy, however, the thoughts and feelings of the public is key: hence the use of the ‘necessary illusions’, as Chomsky describes in his book of the same name. These artifices act as the invisible cudgel of democracy, as Bernays claims in his book Propaganda. This tool—the manipulations that we are all exposed to daily—shapes the minds of the populace and guides them towards certain ends. Instead of coercing a group by force, you convince them to make the choice themselves—usually by convincing them that it is for their own good, and perhaps for the good of society as well.
From the vantage point of an ivory tower, the use of these illusions is instrumental in the maintenance of a functioning democratic society. Independent thought is a root that can grow into dangerous political action—leading to what Herbert Spencer called a “crisis of democracy”, where the established order breaks down. These illusions can come in a variety of forms in the corporate media, including biased reporting that casts government interventionism in a positive light, or a myopic focus on a particular threat; our assessment of an appropriate response to a particular risk is often mediated by its portrayal in the media and culture.
Propaganda, then, is a necessary evil orchestrated by those who are cognizant of what they see as the latent stupidity of the common person and their “need to be led to the better world that his superiors plan for him”, as suggested by Noam Chomsky in Necessary Illusions. Unfortunately, the better world tends to favour some more than others.
It is correct to think that it would be too on-the-nose for politicians to stand loftily above and subject us to Orwellian levels of propaganda, where the walls closed around us to the degree that we could not help but see the injustice of it. So to quell debate entirely would be a mistake: the appearance of an open discussion on the matter reinforces the illusory system. The set field of debate is itself a form of propaganda, where the boundaries are set by the elite intelligentsia to establish a “safe” space for discussion—all outside the confines of the established intellectual order become the ramblings of the uneducated conspiracists. Thus, as Bernays would suggest, crystallizing the public opinion within the walls of a reasonable and self-serving system of “open” debate.
This propaganda model is buttressed primarily by the news media and perhaps more so by the range of expressible opinion on the most popular media such as Twitter and YouTube. You can think for yourself, sure—provided you come to the same conclusions. Such a schematic provides people with the illusion of rational participation, as Erich Fromm suggests in On Disobedience.
It seems as if the popular media of contemporary communication have become adjuncts of the government (read: fascism), only challenging it within the accepted boundaries of discussion. The borders of approved dialogue are clearly delineated by the softball questions asked of our leaders during Q&A sessions, where challenging questions are immediately shut down or disparaged.
However, it should be noted that the use of propaganda has its limits—when a certain subset of the population resists the tacit influence of the State beyond the point of acceptance, it seems that there are some governing bodies that are willing to become more explicit in their approach to break the wills of the non-compliant. Western power the world over is beginning to use force—in the form of coercion and increasingly draconian regulations and policing—to achieve whatever goals they have, which have proven to be like gossamer.
It is difficult to know with any degree of certainty the telos—the ultimate aim—of the current propagandist measures. But we can speculate based on historical narratives. In the very least, it will most likely result in the further centralization of power in both corporation and state, with the consequent reduction in individual liberty and the potential that lies therein. How does that look in the digital age? We can probably look to countries like China for inspiration.
During the days of the mass arrests and population of the gulags in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, there was a manifest culture of disbelief and ambivalence that dominated the hearts and minds of those living during that time, regardless of the arrests that happened during the day, in the public square. Witnesses would justify the arrests, convincing themselves that the person must have done something wrong—otherwise, why would any arrest be made? Those being arrested would remain quiet, assuming their obvious innocence would come out in the trial they were certain to get; the writing was on the wall, but all kept their heads down and their mouths shut.
This assumption that such things simply “don’t happen to us”, suggests Jung in The Undiscovered Self, leaves us psychically defenseless on a “broad belt of unconsciousness.” These undefended gaps in our thinking remain immune to criticism because they are assumptions, unchallenged beliefs about ourselves and our world that lead us to false conclusions.
Solzhenitsyn, along with those in the gulags with him, reflected bitterly on the situation, wondering if the people had resisted more explicitly, more openly, would things have been different? Would the arrests have ceased, could they have stopped this before it happened?
All of this is idle chatter, naturally; it is the current year therefore such resistance is not necessary. We live under the umbrella of a rational, benevolent governmental system that has—like us—evolved beyond such manipulations.
“We didn’t love freedom enough… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The Gulag Archipelago