Hello Dear Friend,
Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier (TIWIKE), Sunday!
Shout out to the 22 brave souls set to begin the beta cohort for the Big Bad Plan Challenge tomorrow! I’m excited to share their results with you once I have them.
Here are three ideas on how to turn propaganda to your advantage for you to ponder in the coming week.
TIWIKE #1: Propaganda is made of narratives that aren’t true
I just started reading Yuval Harari’s hot-off-the-press, new book Nexus: a Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.
It is an expansion of a 19-page section tucked away in Harari’s first book that swept the world in 2016 called Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, which is the best history book I’ve ever read. In 2017, I read it three times. The central insight inside these 19 pages stuck with me ever since.
We live inside stories.
Reality itself is infinitely complex.
No matter how much we learn, we can never understand every aspect of it. How do we make choices to navigate life when we can never possess all the information we need to consistently make the best choices? We tell each other and ourselves cause-and-effect stories about reality that guide our decision making.
Since we can’t know the Original Cause and we can never know everything there is to know, our stories can only aspire to approximate reality itself.
They can never fully-encompass reality.
A few examples of the stories we tell ourselves, according to Harari:
- Nation-states (USA, Ancient Rome, the Mongolian Empire)
- Money (USD, Gold, cigarettes if you are in prison)
- Businesses (corporations, restaurants, real estate brokerages)
- Religions (Christianity, Taoism, Hinduism)
There are only two kinds of stories.
The first kind of story accurately reflects the underlying reality.
The second kind of story does not reflect the underlying reality.
The only narratives that aren’t propaganda are completely true, true in every important way. True as in “the arrow flies true to the target.” True stories function; they work in the world; they enable you to hit your mark in whatever you are trying to do.
Propaganda, on the other hand, is a story pushed by someone who knows it isn’t true but stands to benefit from others believing it.
The Nazi regime in World-War-2-era Germany told the story of Aryan racial superiority, claiming that minorities were inferior and responsible for Germany’s economic struggles and societal problems. None of that was true, of course. But it had to be true for the Nazi propaganda story to continue to justify war and human atrocity.
The Soviet regime in the World-War-2-era Soviet Union (Russia) told the story that the Communist Party was the protector of the working class and painted the western capitalist nations as greedy imperialists who oppressed workers. Meanwhile the Soviet Regime oppressed its own people through totalitarian rule, purges, forced labor camps, and economic mismanagement that led to widespread starvation and death.
Our modern American regime tells us the story that Putin is evil and we have to support Ukraine to save their democracy. Meanwhile, the same leadership instigated Putin’s aggressions in the first place. Why? Because American leadership wants all the government funding to continue pouring through the defense contracting and munitions manufacturing companies they all own. War is big money.
True stories accurately represent reality.
Propagandistic stories intentionally misrepresent reality to further the agendas of some people at the expense of others.
Propaganda is made of narratives that aren’t true.
TIWIKE #2: Propaganda is part of our life as Americans now
I grew up in an era when people were proud to be American citizens.
We were taught that America is the great protector of freedom across the world. Other evil regimes pump out false stories to manipulate their populations and corrupt election outcomes. But not here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That has completely changed in the 15 years since I graduated high school.
Now we live awash in a sea of propaganda.
Propaganda pounds us from all points and perspectives. It is inescapable. False stories from the Left; false stories from the Right; false stories from corporations; false stories from lobbyists.
The mainstream media outlets, on both the left and the right, are captured by corporate interests.
They are no more than megaphones for spreading propaganda.
Throughout most of human history, empires maintained control of their populations by limiting access to information. Now the opposite is true. Empires maintain control of their populations these days by flooding communication channels with propaganda in an effort to make finding the truth so hard that giving in to tyranny is easier.
I suspect propaganda has always been in our world more or less.
The internet is just magnifying it like it does everything else.
But truth is still possible to find. In fact, propaganda, the very tool wielded by oppressors, might be the secret key to tracking down truth in the modern era.
Propaganda is part of our life as Americans now.
TIWIKE #3: Propaganda is a portal for finding truth
Since propaganda is baked into our new reality, we have to learn to see the information coming at us each day through the lens of propaganda, with the understanding that it likely is propaganda and with a strategy for sorting fact from fiction.
But this new world might not be so bad.
There are lots of “alternative media sources” that are attempting to spread unbiased information, even though those sources are under assault by the establishment. And if we ask ourselves the right questions, then we can turn even the propaganda narratives into tools for revealing truth. The first question is simple.
Who benefits if the story were true?
When you encounter a story that seems fishy or counter intuitive, ask yourself who stands to gain from it being true.
Don’t ask whether the story is true or not. Ask yourself who benefits if that story were true. Trace that back far enough and you’ll run into the root.
Truth lives at the root of propagandistic narratives.
When you are told fossil fuels are evil and we have to switch to “green” alternatives before the apocalypse comes, ask yourself who owns the “green” companies that will benefit from that being true. Do the people pushing the narrative also own those same companies?
When you are told you are unconscious of your racism and need unconscious bias training, ask yourself who owns the companies that administer that training. Do the people pushing the narrative own those same companies?
When you are told that kids need to transition from their biological sex observed at birth into the sex they feel they are at that time by sterilizing them forever, ask yourself who owns the companies that administer the transition surgeries. Do the people pushing the narrative own those same companies?
This little exercise can be done with every kind of story you come across.
If you learn to think in these terms, then you can turn propaganda into your advantage.
Propaganda is a portal for finding truth.