Propaganda 101: An introduction
Part one of a series identifying the structures and workings of Western propaganda.
“The totalitarian system of thought control is far less effective than the democratic one, since the official doctrine parroted by the intellectuals at the service of the state is readily identifiable as pure propaganda, and this helps free the mind …. the democratic system seeks to determine and limit the entire spectrum of thought by leaving the fundamental assumptions unexpressed. They are presupposed but not asserted.” - C.P. Otero, Preface to Radical Priorities
Propaganda is not a dirty word. It’s a practical term derived from propagate, the way one would to a plant. It’s that which propagates ideas, narratives, and lanes in which thought can flow towards a pre-determined set of conclusions and real-world outcomes.
This series outlines the way Western propaganda works by dissecting current examples and identifying key linguistic and psychological techniques employed (both wittingly and unwittingly) across the media landscape. I will also look at the political economy of media production to help readers understand the interest groups behind propaganda production and its role in national and international politics.
It will look at the way the validity of information is “authorised” or isn’t, and most importantly why modern Western society is particularly dependent on propaganda to function.
I focus on Western propaganda for several reasons. First, as a Western national who believes strongly in the logic of democracy - that citizens are responsible for determining what their governments do - I believe in holding our private sector and political elites to account. Other nations and other governing systems are not my responsibility to attack or seek to change.
Secondly, I focus on Western propaganda because it is the most highly sophisticated, well-funded and effective model in operation (see above quote). Thirdly, as a result of this, it is Westerners who need the most education about how they are propagandised.
It is ever more critical that Westerners become aware of their own propagandised understanding of the world. The economic, social and political fractures in Western society are driving governments towards increasing censorship of anything deemed to be unacceptable to the official narrative and labelled as (mis), (dis), and (mal) information.
Part one below begins by exploring the psychological foundations and roles of storytelling in society, and how they shape the way we live as individuals and collectives. I then explore why Western society had to develop its particular approach to propaganda.
The Storytelling Ape
Daniel Quinn’s seminal 1993 novel Ishmael can be most simply described as ‘a story about a Gorilla, that tells a story to a man, about a story’. Most readers leave the novel with a sombre headline message about the self-destructive exploitation of the earth’s resources which emerged from settled agrarian cultures. However, the novel is just as useful for understanding the foundations of propaganda.
Quinn’s novel opens with a discussion of the ways all cultures are built upon stories or narratives, and how these narratives are no different from creation mythologies. For the purpose of this series, I use the terms propaganda and narratives interchangeably.
“Naturally, you wouldn’t consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It’s just the story.”
Scrutinising the premise and results of the meta-narrative of agrarian cultures – that the world is made for humans, and that humans are somehow different from other creatures – Quinn shows how each culture lives in a set of foundational stories so often repeated and taken for granted as truth that they are never questioned. Quinn terms these stories ‘Mother Culture’.
“Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way. But this explanation wasn’t given to you all at once… Rather you assembled this explanation like a mosaic … from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday school lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons … [it] is ambient in your culture. Everyone accepts it without questioning.”
For the purpose of propaganda and narrative analysis the key takeaway is that each story is built upon an underlying, but often unspoken premise, which justifies the actions taken to enact that story. For agrarian societies, the premise underlying their behavior was that the world was made for humans. This justifies action taken to dominate and subvert nature to suit humanity’s needs.
Quinn defines a story as a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods. Storytelling as such developed in the early stages of human consciousness as necessary and deliberate simplifications of experience which threaded together subjective truths to help audiences understand levels of complexity beyond their grasp.
It must be stressed that the development of storytelling in these pre-rational periods characterise it (and propaganda) as emotive tools, not rational ones. Its purpose is not to stimulate rational analysis but to stir emotions towards ingrained tendencies and suggest emotionally justified outcomes.
Since the late 19th Century, developmental psychologists, sociologists and philosophers have mapped the stages of consciousness that both individuals and societies as a whole can develop within. Prominent models of these stages were developed by James Fowler, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Abraham Maslow, and Thomas Piaget among others. The most prolific advancer of this field of research at present is Canadian philosopher Ken Wilber.
Developmental psychology has shown that for the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of individuals have operated at levels of consciousness which all claim a single true way of understanding the world, and which trusts exclusively in its belief system. Paraphrasing Quinn in Ishmael – ‘the ancient Greeks did not see their narratives as mythology, just as we do not see Darwinian evolution or scientific rationalism as mythology.’
These stages encompass the most basic instinctive survival consciousness, through magic animism and up to rational individualism and relativist stages. Summary here. Wilber and others label these stages as tier one stages.
Societies within the same stage can produce many multiple competing narratives- such as two tribes with different magical-animistic beliefs, or two scientific rationalist societies like the Soviet Union and the United States. All societies however enact the narratives enabled by their premises about the world.
Because audiences in tier one stages of consciousness mostly struggle to or are totally incapable of holding multiple perspectives of truth – the narratives they inhabit are necessarily simplified to exclude higher levels of complexity, nuance or multiple sides to a story.
Not only do tier one stages of consciousness struggle to compute complexity and nuance in their understanding of truth, they are also largely characterised by differing levels of ego- and ethnocentrism in their moral horizons. This has manifested throughout human evolution as societies largely based on different scales of tribalism.
Tribalism lingers in today’s individualised West in a wide variety of fragmented and overlapping identities available for individuals to adopt, consume, and lay claim to for a sense of belonging.
“The continued proclivity to engage in group identification is according to [Edward] Bernays ‘a function of the enlarged sense of self-importance that individuals derive from identifying with a potentially powerful mass’...” - Academy of Ideas
This explains the psycho-social origins of oversimplified narratives in human society.
This leaves aside however the domain of weaponised propaganda. Quinn reminds us that the rise of Nazi Germany was not due to force, but due to the story the German people were told about their place in history and who to blame for their felt grievances.
”It may seem incredible to you now that any people could have been captivated by such nonsense '[Hitler’s enunciation of the arch of the Aryan race and it’s triumphal vengeance upon the world], but after nearly two decades of degradation and suffering following World War I, it had an almost overwhelming appeal to the people of Germany, and it was reinforced not only through the ordinary means of propaganda but by an intensive program of education of the young and re-education of the old.”
Quinn hints at, but does not go deeply into the psychological reasons why stories are such powerful captive devices for social change. What is at play here are some of the common psychological phenomena individuals and groups are susceptible to as a result of trauma, resource scarcity, and external attack.
These phenomena include: victimhood narratives; a retreat toward in-group solidification at lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; and the temptation toward radically simple solutions to complex problems — also a manifestation of the inability to process nuance. I will return to these psychological phenomena later in the series.
The weaponisation of propaganda in the first half of the 20th Century drove an acceleration in the refinement of modern Western propaganda techniques, and drew heavily from the advances in psychoanalysis achieved in that era.
One of Sigmund Freud’s major contributions was to clearly identify the characteristics of group psychology, and it is no accident that Western intelligence agencies have since spent considerable amounts of money and time covertly researching techniques in mind control and psychological operations (MK Ultra and Mockingbird are the most well-known).
One figure who emerged in this time and pioneered the modern Western model of propaganda was Edward Bernays. Bernays played a leading role in The United States’ first state propaganda agency - The Committee on Public Information — and was unabashed in his excitement for newfound techniques for mass population control. We will return to his work later in this series. For now, we must address the fundamental question of why propaganda is necessary in modern Western societies.
Why We Must Be Lied To
One fundamental principle to keep in mind when looking at any form of propaganda is that the forms it takes are designed to meet the values and symbolism that the target population responds to. It is no mistake that this sounds like a marketing principle — Western propaganda developed in in confluence with the drives and hunger of consumerism.
Western audiences thus respond to psychological, social, political, and economic values and symbols embedded in Western culture that date back thousands of years.
Despite popular narratives that the West is a secular society, there is no evidence to show that the foundational Christian missionary values and attitudes of Western Europe have somehow vanished from society. Their on-paper separation from power makes little difference if Western elites and popular masses carry the seeds of these values deep in their psychological imprinting.
At best, psychoanalysis of the West could in a generous interpretation look at the West’s collective consciousness as having fragmented and repressed its Christian foundations as a Jungian shadow. This however ignores the reality that the cultural leader of the West, the United States, remains a strongly Christian country, with its founding ideology built upon relatively extreme Protestant Christian ethics — primarily individualism, God’s grace being represented through material success, and a divine right to private property and profiteering.
Deeper than the Protestant ethic however, lies the remnants of Manichean dualism — a Christian theological splinter obsessed with the concept of good and evil as the primary axis of energy in the world. These remnants bubble up through the West’s collective pathologies and shadows, through the distortions of institutionalised religion, and have found ‘secular’ re-expression in scientific rationalism.
The key to Mani's system is his cosmogony. Once this is known there is little else to learn. In this sense Mani was a true Gnostic, as he brought salvation by knowledge. Manichæism professed to be a religion of pure reason as opposed to Christian credulity; it professed to explain the origin, the composition, and the future of the universe; it had an answer for everything and despised Christianity, which was full of mysteries. - New Advent
This insight into Manicheanism shows us the avenues for its flourishing today, its compatibility with tier one thinking unable to comprehend nuance, and the West’s repression of its moral shadow through the scientific-rationalist mind’s disgust of religious beliefs developed at earlier stages of development.
Manicheanism is thus incapable of seeing the world through anything other than good vs. evil narratives. This establishes the most basic level for the West’s dualistic us vs. them attitude to the world, which Alastair Crooke expertly identifies in today’s geopolitical landscape.
While all populations are susceptible to xenophobia due to the prevalence of ethnocentric morality in human society, Western dualism produces radically different psycho-social outlooks to non-dual traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and the mystical trends in Abrahamic monotheism. Dualism inherently entails a concept of superiority. Good is better than evil. We believers are better than you non-believers.
Western dualism was combined with a missionary proselytising spirit that reached its peak in the colonial era and is only approaching real closure in the 21st Century. It compels those who believe in their own righteousness to go out and force the rest of the world to also be ‘good’ — or ‘democratic’.
Indirectly referencing Quinn’s model of stories as self-sown premises justifying a desired outcome, Alon Mizrahi has written clearly about the parallels between the self-justifying colonial narratives of Hebrew mythology and those of European colonial mythology.
Colonial Western societies seeing themselves as a new iteration of ancient Israel is a big and meaningful element of their psychology and attachment to Jewish narratives. The colonial West was founded, essentially, around Jewish mythology….
In reality, Hebrews wrote the Bible about themselves over centuries. This means that this whole story about God promising them lands is just fables, fabrications, and after-the-fact justifications, alongside, probably, a desire to look capable of unusual cruelty, which some see as proof of strength and fierceness - Alon Mizrahi
To understand the different outcomes these psycho-social phenomena can produce, consider the behaviours of the medieval global powers and empires.
It is well recognised that before European monarchic Christendom set out on its colonial conquests, China was a global sea power, trading as far as East Africa and potentially northern Australia. Yet Chinese traders did not seek to settle, dominate and exploit the populations they encountered.
Even with a larger population base and more advanced technology, Chinese emperors did not see any need to settle new kingdoms in far away lands. Instead they stuck to trade in order to meet their needs. Western rulers however chose theft, exploitation, and murder over trade.
And just as Osama bin Laden believed that his mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s had been responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union, so too was the dualistic moral superiority of the West buoyed by its successes.
The need to convince a population of the necessity of waging wars of conquest on behalf of the ruling class has been a consistent element of social contracts throughout history. To differing degrees depending on the time period, rarely could rulers could rarely simply demand their subjects go off to fight their wars. They had to convince the population it was in their best interest.
The development of electoral democracy in Western countries thus delivered a huge advance in the level of popular support needed for Western elites to justify colonial expansion and capitalist exploitation domestically and abroad. Correspondingly this required far more sophisticated propaganda mechanisms to maintain popular compliance with elite intentions.
Further, expansion of civil rights posed a conundrum in the dynamics of Western social contracts. As societies blended remnants of the fundamental humanism of Christianity with new societies built on migration (both forced and voluntary) they were pushed to expand their moral horizons towards being more worldcentric. This was broadly seen in the enunciation of concepts of universal human rights and expanded civil rights in the mid-20th Century.
While the extent of actual psychological integration of these concepts in practice was extremely limited, this movement towards greater individual and community freedoms represented some legitimate movement toward worldcentric morality.
The ruling elites of Western democracy recognised the risks of a population driven by a human-first sense of justice and rights, especially when they nominally had the voting power to determine government policy. Indeed, the founders of Western democracy explicitly recognised that an empowered populous was an inherent risk to the entrenched economic order.
“The system that was consciously and deliberately constructed by the founders who framed the constitution … [recognised] that democracy was the enemy. That was rooted in historical realities. … [democracy] would jeopardise any ruling groups they believed were necessary for civilised order.” - Sheldon Wolin
For more on this I recommend Chris Hedges’ explorations on the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy from several angles with Sheldon Wolin, Michael Parenti, and George Monbiot.
To balance its overt proclamations about freedom for individuals in speech, association, and belief, with the need to contain that speech within limits that did not jeopardise the ruling elites’ positions, Western propaganda thus developed a system that relied heavily on appealing to repressed elements of collective consciousness. These repressed elements include the barely concealed sense of moral superiority, dualistic morality, and elements of group conformism which the West had claimed to shed as it moved into more individualistic consciousness.
“What Freud suggested is that often there is a divorce between ones conscious thoughts and feelings and desires which do not fit one’s self image and which are therefore suppressed. … what it implies is that if one can design propaganda or psychological operations …. targeting instead the repressed emotions and hidden desires it is possible to move people to adopt beliefs and behaviours without them being aware of the underlying motivations leading them on.” - Academy of Ideas
With this last element we see that it is fundamental human psychology, combined with the West’s organically developed complexes of moral superiority, individual rights, and economic ideology (capitalism) that necessitate the form its modern propaganda takes.
In the next instalment of the series I will look more closely at the fundamental forms, strategists, institutions, and interest-groups that shaped Western propaganda in the 20th Century.
the mind becomes "western" because it was first warped by the abrahamic dominator religions. they are not the natural ethnic religions of the west.
Decolonizing my brain has been a challenge. It takes real time and effort to seek out the truth.