Post truth (part 8) - persuasion or propaganda

In the last post, I explored the motivations of those involved in the social agreement for truth, with a focus on how marketing and lobbying work to influence that agreement for their own aims. 

While this influence can be sinister, my main point was that we are rather cavalier about overt manipulation of truth, even as it infiltrates our minds and shapes our actions. The strategies of marketing and lobbying reveal so much about the social construction of truth. 

And yet, still we prefer to think about truth as objective and absolute, and advertising as inconsequential or irrelevant to truth. Many disagree, including the insightful Daniel Boorstin. 

This series began in November 2020 with my puzzlement about the word post-truth and what it means about the word truth. I had no idea then how hard it would be to explore these concepts.

In parts 1 and 2, I pointed out that the false journey metaphor for truth has allowed the emergence of post-truth to be laughed off as a problem of some 'stupid', misinformed or misguided individuals, or decried as the lies of narcissistic or sociopathic political figures to stay in power. 'Objective truth still exists', we say to ourselves: 'They are just wrong'. 

I don't feel so disdainful. I speculated in that post that post-truth is a symptom of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign to control truth. But I didn't really understand how anyone could succeed in controlling truth. 

To explore this idea, I created a new metaphor, the house construction metaphor for truth. 

In this post I use the house metaphor to think about propaganda, the final word to explore before I can come back to where I started and ponder what we mean by truth and post-truth.

Defining propaganda

Propaganda is a modern Latin word, a form of propagare, meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate', thus propaganda means that which is to be spread around. 

It was originally used in Catholic circles referring to spreading religious beliefs, to persuade the non-believers. From the 1790s, the term was also used in non-religious arenas, encompassing politics and ideology. When Bernays published his book Propaganda in 1928 (see the last post), the word was still fairly neutral - to spread ideas, to persuade. It only became a pejorative in the middle of the last century as it became associated with manipulation and deceit.

So what exactly is propaganda? Here's a few common and accessible sources. (So much has been written about propaganda I can't hope to touch on it all; my focus is what the word means and why we think it is problematic.) 

Propaganda is: 

♦️ From Merriam Webster dictionary: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.

♦️ From Wikipedia: Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence an audience and further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. 

♦️ From American political scientist, Harold Lasswell: the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations.

♦️  From propaganda researcher, Emma Briant: the deliberate manipulation of representations (including text, pictures, video, speech etc.) with the intention of producing any effect in the audience (e.g. action or inaction; reinforcement or transformation of feelings, ideas, attitudes or behaviours) that is desired by the propagandist.

♦️ From author of Munitions of the mind: a history of propaganda, Phillip Taylor: essentially, propaganda is really no more than the communication of ideas designed to persuade people to think and behave in a desired way. 

Based on these definitions from dictionaries to propaganda experts, any effort to persuade others could be called propaganda. The word manipulation is occasionally included, but overall, these definitions don't provide a distinction between an anti-slavery speech, a public health campaign, a state of the nation address, an appeal to donate to a charity, this blog, the spin of advertising, climate denialists' distortion of climate science, and a fascist rally.

These definitions suggest that anything people say to persuade others could be described as propaganda… and anyone can deride an idea as propaganda if they don't like it? I don't find that a helpful definition at all.

Isn't the social construction of truth a form of persuasion then? 

Being part of a family, peer group, community, political party, society, etc., means we accept the ideas about reality and sense of truth propagated within those groups.  

Education, religion, popular culture, ideology, political rhetoric, and of course advertising and lobbying all 'propagate' information and stories through which we each develop an idea of 'how the world is' - they construct and reinforce the explanatory stories we grow up with, explore and refine as we grow older, and combat if they don’t fit into our existing world view. 

They are all also efforts to persuade people to accept certain ideas about the world and to behave in certain ways. We don't acknowledge that truth is socially constructed, so we fail to see that's what we do all the time. 

The social construction of truth involves other people, and everyone is motivated to bolster and 'propagate' their own sense of truth, to persuade us that they know how the world is. However, no one describes their own beliefs, arguments or attempts at persuasion as propaganda.  

Source: Quote Fancy

On one hand, we could call it 'socialisation', on the other, we could call it 'indoctrination'. If you agree, it is truth; if you disagree, it is propaganda. 

Does that make truth the same kind of thing as propaganda? 

Does the distinction rest only in the 'eye' - the world view - of the beholder? 

Propaganda is persuasion, but there is something 'bad' about it

When we describe something as propaganda these days it is clearly negative. There must be something - more than attempts to persuade us to accept something we don't agree with - that creates the negative connotation. 

What exactly is 'bad' about propaganda?

The labeling of something as propaganda often comes from those who say it is made up of lies, half-truths and distortions - so their focus is on the content or the detail of the explanatory story. For them, the key is the disconnect from the social agreement on physical and social reality. This means that propaganda is defined by its lack of truth. But that's not firm ground for a definition as this entire series has shown - it would require the concept of an objective truth, and we tossed out the window a long time ago. 

Others define propaganda by the high use of appeals to emotion over reason, and tapping into people's vulnerabilities and thinking biases. But inducing certain attitudes and emotions in an audience is something that we all do - not just political leaders, but poets, priests, TV personalities, punsters, and people like you and me. We all use and aim to induce attitudes and feelings in others in our communication - that's why we interact.

Others focus more on the subtle (or not so subtle) psychological manipulation used in persuasion to define it as propaganda. But that would have to include all of advertising, health promotion, political rhetoric, and lots of parenting, so that's too broad as a core definitional component. (Although I'm happy to put advertising in the same basket as propaganda!)

Finally, others think the 'bad' in propaganda rests in intention - when someone tries to persuade other people to do something wrong or immoral. But that is subjective too. We say Nazi propaganda was bad because of the murderous agenda, but we don't see, for example, the American government's rationale to go to war against Iraq as propaganda when it is remarkably similar. If you agree, etc...  

Propaganda - whether defined by the content of its message, the veracity or alignment with physical reality, its subjectivity, appeals to emotion (rather than logic), the manipulation methods of the persuasion, or the intention of the person delivering the message - does not seem that different from the network of sometimes dubious, irrational, ungrounded explanatory stories that people happily life with and call truth. 

We can agree that propaganda is 'wrong', but we can't quite pinpoint why. It has to be more than simply disagreeing with it. These definitions are missing something.

Totalitarianism and propaganda 

For many people, the negativity of the word propaganda is exemplified by Nazi Germany or contemporary totalitarian regimes like North Korea. 

Source: SMBC

According to historian Robert Ensor, Hitler had a lot of faith in propaganda and thought that 'people will believe anything, provided they are told it often enough and emphatically enough, and that contradicters are either silenced or smothered in calumny'. 

Did the German people really 'believe anything'? The Nazi's propaganda was backed up by an army at the service of an authoritarian power determined to crush 'contradicters'. People may or may not have accepted the propaganda, but few would have questioned it openly. They knew the consequences of contradiction or questioning. The historical records show many in Germany did not accept what was going on.   

The threat of state violence, including against families as providers of alternative explanatory stories (and the replacement of them with youth camps) all together created the 'appearance' of a shared belief in the 'truth' of Arian supremacy. 

However, if we only think of propaganda when it is backed up by state violence, we don't get an insight into what it actually is, and how it relates to our ideas about truth. 

More revealing is the way that Hitler's Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, defined propaganda:

♦️ the art of listening to the soul of the people and speaking to a person in a language this person can understand.

'The soul of the people' means the fears and aspirations of the people, and 'a language this person can understand' means the shared stories that arouse the emotions of fear and hope, plus words and symbols that evoke fear of enemies and suffering and represent aspiration for liberty, justice, devotion to country. 

Goebbels had homed in on the social construction of truth: the personal and interpersonal aspects of our sense of truth, our limited direct engagement with 'objective' facts as much as we can determine them, and the importance of shared explanatory stories to calm our fears, explain why things suck, and indicate a better future through action. All the aspects of constructing truth that this series has explored. 

When you understand this is how truth works, you can see it is extremely easy to manipulate people - and to touch 'the soul of the people'. (And there's always violence if that doesn't work.)

Give me truth; I must HAVE it

I think the missing aspect in defining what propaganda is and why it works is humanity's deep need to HAVE truth. 

Because of our flawed metaphor underpinning how we think about truth, we are captive to the image of travelling on a perilous journey to an objective and absolute truth. We are dissatisfied or terrified by suggestions there is no absolute truth. 

When someone instigates a campaign to unsettle our sense of reality and our sense of truth, we don't see it for what it is. We don't really know HOW we know truth, so we're not at all good at withstanding the techniques of propagandists. When our ideas about facts and reality are blurry, when the methods by which we determine truth are undermined, we are ripe for manipulation. 

Because, when we are unsettled in this way, the most common human response is to seek someone else who might just have that REAL objective truth we are so desperately seeking.

Propaganda aims to supplant the social construction of truth

In terms of the house construction metaphor, propaganda sets out to destroy most of the house.

One attack involves jackhammering the foundations and the floor - a campaign of lies and distortions aims to blur our sense of reality and our trust in personal perception and experience. Propagandists deride the physical and social sciences, they question 'facts', the misrepresent the ideas of post-modernism to justify saying whatever suits them best. They provide an alternative sense of reality. 

Another flank of the attack is to the wall of explanatory stories we have constructed with others over our lives. Propaganda delivers new explanatory stories with a simple answer to why life sucks and a clearly identifiable person/group to blame. It dismantles our complex web of stories, and replaces them with simplified formulaic stories of goodies and baddies (and the propagandist is always a 'goodie'). It also severs the relationships within which truth as originally built, which serves to divide and isolate people. Propaganda's explanatory stories construct simple pictures of 'us against them' to fill the sense of belonging that is central to our sense of truth.

But the most serious assault is to the building code for truth. Propaganda works to undermine the agreement on how to determine truth. Standards of thought, standards of evidence, reputable sources of information, how to mediate differences, etc., all these guidelines are torn up in a relentless attack on the social agreement process. 

Propaganda is a campaign to screw up people's sense of how they know truth. Propaganda works to supplant the 'social' aspect of the construction of truth. 

It destroys the foundations, floors and walls built up over time through the shared social processes. It derides the processes and structures for establishing, testing, and reaching a consensus on truth, like science, journalism, courts and whistle-blowers. It damages the processes and relationships that meet our fundamental human needs for belonging, agency, and feeling safe. 

Propaganda is the deliberate destruction of our social agreement for truth, with the aim of supplanting it by the propagandist. 

You must have truth? I am the source of truth

Through gradually and insidiously damaging all the aspects of the social construction process, the propagandist places him or herself as the only source of truth.

The roof in the house construction metaphor - our feeling of safety in knowing the truth - is no longer build upon any clear foundations or floor, and it doesn't not have any attachment or tie-downs to the walls built in the normal social construction process. 

Metaphorically, propaganda is a set of Acrow props that keeps the roof over your head, so you can feel safe in knowing truth (any truth). To others, it does not appear that these props can really provide shelter. However, it is the propagandist, as the source of truth, that provides an overall sense of coherence and safety - an 'alternative' roof. 

So, to my own definition: Propaganda is a campaign to establish one person (or small group) as the only one who can determine truth - as the source of truth. 

The truth of the propagandist is a 'higher truth' that only the true believers can attain, and that justifies the disconnect with physical reality. 'Higher truth' is simply code for ideology. 

My definition of propaganda distinguishes it from other types of persuasion which focus on what we think is truth. It also distinguishes rigid and doctrinaire religious institutions or cults (which declare themselves as THE only source of truth) from other expressions of human spirituality. 

The core concept of my definition is that one person (or group) controls how we can know truth.

The 'bad' in propaganda is that one person controls how we know truth

The propagandist knows that providing an answer to humans' deep need to know absolute truth will grant them power. Propaganda is a tool for controlling truth in order to achieve power over a group or population. 

It is disturbingly easy to manipulate humans' inability to articulate how we know what we know, our lack of acknowledgement that truth is constructed based on (but not equal with) facts, the complexities of the collaborative construction of truth, and the unavoidably provisional nature of truth. You don't necessarily need the threat of violence if you take a bit more time about it (as I explore in the next post.) 

We can’t function as individuals or as a society unless we construct shared explanatory stories that provide a shared sense of reality – our truth. Propaganda provides these stories, and provides a truth to believe in, but destroys the collaborative social process of the construction of truth to do so - and thus, damages the community or society itself.

The social construction of truth may not provide something absolute and objective, but it is normally beyond the control of any one person. 

And that is its value. 

Images credits 

• Boorstin quote created by the author from text from The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1962
• Bernays quote created by the author from text from Propaganda, 1928, as outlined in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays  
• Bernays quote: Quote Fancy https://quotefancy.com/quote/1091708/Edward-L-Bernays-The-only-difference-between-propaganda-and-education-really-is-in-the [Used within terms]
• Ponsonby quote created by the author from text from Munitions of the mind: A history of propaganda by Philip M. Taylor, 2003
• Fascist magician cartoon: the wonderful SMBC owns this cartoon, see it here https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/powerful-magic [No terms of use]
• Arendt quote created by the author from text at Brain Pickings review of Origins of Totalitarianism
• Acrow props by Keith Williamson https://www.flickr.com/photos/34673186@N03/32774892926 [CC BY-NC-ND]