[HN Gopher] The true purpose of propaganda
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The true purpose of propaganda
Author : jger15
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-04-08 20:35 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (robkhenderson.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (robkhenderson.substack.com)
| igammarays wrote:
| Also see, the purpose of modern advertising. It's for the 2nd and
| 3rd order effects. Most modern mass advertising is not to
| convince you (directly) to buy the product, rather it's to
| convince you that *other* people are buying the product. If you
| see a message in a number of public places, you *know* that other
| people have seen that message, which in turn affects your
| behaviour (you know this brand is a "safe" choice and won't be
| seen as weird, for example).
|
| Real modern propaganda works not even 2nd or 3rd order effects,
| but 4th order, with a bit of reverse psychology.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Yeah consider me unconvinced. People have a tendency to perceive
| grand displays of incompetence as secret signs of vast
| competence. It rarely is.
| sicromoft wrote:
| Same. The sad reality is that what the article calls "silly,
| unpersuasive propaganda" still works on a ton of people.
| collaborative wrote:
| But it does work on the timid segment of the population. Some
| will repeat lies willfully, some will be convinced by lies,
| and some will be so afraid of lies as to not dare say the
| truth
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| It's really not useful to put people in categories of doing
| these things by their fundamental nature, or not.
|
| I think nearly everyone has lied at some point, most
| consequentially. Who hasn't been taken by a lie, or
| repeated something they knew they couldn't verify? I'm
| pretty confident in my positions and outspoken about them
| but I don't always speak up when I ought, and I often speak
| up when I shouldn't.
|
| There is no "timid segment of the population" there is only
| us. It's much more constructive to study the pressures,
| constraints, incentives, and conditions that lead
| individuals and groups into these actions.
| mzvkxlcvd wrote:
| sounds like it worked
| sturza wrote:
| I would argue that anything that can be on the magnitude of
| "vast" should be considered as powerful. Power is not in the
| message per se, but in its distribution.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is part of the reason, but not the whole of it.
| Different messages for different reasons/groups. They'd like to
|
| * Actually convince people of things, some of which will be
| unbelievable because there are plenty of incompetent evil
| regimes out there.
|
| * Just spew enough bullshit that people give up trying to
| figure out what's right.
|
| * Remind the population that of their power, as indicated here.
|
| * Provide their followers with permission -- even if propaganda
| is not really believable, they are implicitly telling their own
| followers that they won't be punished for behaving as if it is
| true.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "grand displays of incompetence as secret signs of vast
| competence"_
|
| This is the "Donald Trump is actually playing infinitely
| complex 4-dimensional chess" line of thought.
| jessaustin wrote:
| I don't see why "silly, unpersuasive propaganda" would be
| considered an oddity requiring explanation. Like anyone else in
| this modern world, I am constantly bombarded by obviously false
| propaganda. In order to keep somewhat stable, I must regularly
| stop and remind myself of events I remember which contradict the
| bullshit I'm told every day. Most commonly, propaganda tells a
| story which somewhat coheres when considered in each particular
| instant, and totally collapses when one remembers stories told
| last week or last decade.
|
| "Economic sanctions on other nations accomplish their stated
| goals."
|
| "This time, regime change really will turn out for the best."
|
| "Sometimes we win wars."
|
| "It's totally normal to spend a trillion dollars a year on the
| military."
|
| "It's fine that we incarcerate 0.7% of our population, even
| though no other nation in history has approached that rate."
|
| "We should fear people who've never done anything to us."
|
| "We have a functioning healthcare system, that is less than twice
| as expensive as that of any other nation."
|
| "Media coverage of international news sometimes has some other
| purpose beyond further enriching armaments manufacturers."
| robocat wrote:
| Another purpose of obviously false propaganda is for detecting
| conformance. If propaganda says that _2 + 2 = 5_ and a citizen
| states that _2 + 2 = 4_ then that citizen can be red-flagged by
| the state apparatus (or others within the in-group).
| psyc wrote:
| Reading this reminded me of PR speak. They know that we know it's
| insincere horseshit. They also know that doesn't make any
| difference to anything.
| quercusa wrote:
| In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that
| the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or
| convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the
| less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are
| forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious
| lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies
| themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To
| assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some
| small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist
| anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of
| emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine
| political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
|
| - 'Theodore Dalrymple' (Dr. Anthony Daniels)
|
| https://archive.ph/WBcUY#selection-787.0-799.1
| syngrog66 wrote:
| propaganda has become one of the top threats to US national
| security, to democracy everywhere, and therefore to humanity
|
| its a threat to our ability to enact big urgent action on the
| carbon climate crisis
| aaron695 wrote:
| oytis wrote:
| Is it just me or does this blog post just repeat the same simple
| idea multiple (5? 10?) times? Is it some kind of postmodernist
| play?
| throwanem wrote:
| There's a basic principle in hermeneutics, the study of
| effective sermonizing: "Tell them what you're going to tell
| them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them." It's
| good advice in any field of rhetoric; I don't know whether the
| author here intends to follow it, but the charitable
| interpretation probably would be that he does.
| lordnacho wrote:
| There's another reason.
|
| Propaganda that is obviously lies is saying to people "look
| everyone is full of shit, we can make it too, see? The West are
| also full of it, you just aren't used to their crap, but it's
| still crap. What you can rely on is that you're one of us and you
| should follow what our leaders say, because you at least know the
| culture you grew up in".
|
| Basically you create noise so that nobody can trust their own
| intelligence when deciding what to believe. Either they don't
| have the information or it takes too much work to get, so they
| are forced to fall back on some sort of group decision that's
| presented to them by above.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Taking the word at face value, propaganda is that which
| propagates. It may be true. It may be false. It may be spread
| with malice or benevolence. It's key characteristic is that it is
| intentional, has a source and a purpose in contrast to 'news'
| which may be be picked up on simultaneous fronts by independent
| observers of a matter of fact. It is 'conscious manipulation', in
| the words of Edward Bernays who effectively "wrote the book on
| it".
|
| A good model is congruent with malware and so may find resonance
| with hackers. There is the vehicle or mechanism (medium), the
| exploit, and the payload. The payload is the intended effect. The
| exploit is the reason it may have permeability with certain
| groups or predispositions. Bernays, and Chomsky's re-reading of
| him, focuses mostly on manufacturing consent or alignment.
|
| The now common, modern understanding, as other commentators point
| out, is the cultivation of fear uncertainty, doubt, anxiety,
| division, discombobulation and disarray. That is to say,
| Bernays's thesis (Shared with Walter Lippman's), that propaganda
| is a necessary tool to ensure stability and proper functioning of
| society, is failing.
|
| In that sense, dicombobulation and mischief making of the modern
| propaganda qua Surkov (see the Three pillars of Putinism) might
| be seen as "anti-propaganda" through Bernays's lens. It's end is
| destabilisation.
| mzvkxlcvd wrote:
| this article takes a very limited view of propaganda. the vast
| majority of material that the average human is exposed to on a
| daily basis could be considered to be propaganda.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| If all your sources say the same things, how would it be
| different from propaganda?
|
| "Believe half of what you see and nothing that you hear"
| sb057 wrote:
| "They lie to us, we know they are lying, they know they are
| lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we
| know they are lying, but they are still lying."
|
| --Elena Gorokhova
| codr7 wrote:
| Which is also why they mostly allow idiots into positions of
| power in any country; because they will make stupid, incompetent
| decisions that the people can't do anything about.
|
| The Covid drama is a brilliant example.
|
| Practical democracy is really just the next refinement of the
| same game, a tiny bit more subtle.
|
| And once you feel powerless, that is exactly what you are.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > He gives us an answer: Instilling pro-regime values and
| attitudes is one aim of authoritarian regimes. But it's not their
| only aim.
|
| This is true of another kind of propaganda: disinformation. The
| goal isn't to persuade anyone of anything; but rather to confuse
| and disorient them, ultimately creating apathy and/or division.
| Animats wrote:
| "To sow confusion and reap inaction" - Willie Sutton, "Where
| the Money Was".
| motohagiography wrote:
| The essential aspect is it signals the regime is not accountable
| to truth, reason, logic, or any other principle the populace can
| organize themselves around and offer any resistance to the
| planned agenda. Their war is on truth itself.
|
| "Narrative," is basically the opportunity to align to power, but
| absolutely decoupled from reality or truth, as it's by people who
| believe there is no truth and nothing to believe _except_
| narrative and alignment to power. The crazier it is, the more
| powerful it seems. Absurdity a kind of checksum or proxy for
| narrative power. Aspirants signal their alignment not by talking
| points, but by making hallucinatory claims that support the
| narrative. Writers like Bernays, Cialdini, Sharp, (to say nothing
| of the post-modernists) all indoctrinated generations of students
| in universities with this view.
|
| I suspect it's not even about political sides anymore, but
| fundamentally different theories of mind. It's the idea of self
| as the effect of language and narrative vs. some greater
| existential experience that language runs over top of. Propaganda
| is designed to operate on minds of that former type, as if you
| can sway enough of them, from the perspective of the person
| wielding it, it really doesn't matter what's physically or
| concretely, logically true if you have control of perception.
| That is - provided you can suppress humour, truth, and desire.
|
| Nation state politics for a few centuries were about an
| equillibrium of power within a domain, where now it's all this
| crazy metacognitive stuff. What a worthwhile description of the
| tactic, and what a weird world we live in.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| > In fact, Huang compares this to political campaigns in
| democratic countries. Political ads rarely contain new
| information. They almost never change anyone's mind. The function
| of political ads, though, isn't to persuade. It's to "burn money"
| in a public way. They are costly signals of the political
| campaign's willingness to expend resources which shows their
| commitment.
|
| This is hogwash. Ads may exist for reasons other than persuasion
| (though I have no doubt they are almost entirely for persuasion).
| But in no way do they largely exist for signaling.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| > Political ads rarely contain new information. They almost
| never change anyone's mind. The function of political ads,
| though, isn't to persuade. It's to "burn money" in a public
| way. They are costly signals of the political campaign's
| willingness to expend resources which shows their commitment.
|
| Rings true with me.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I don't buy the thesis. Some propaganda might seem dumb because
| it's meant to rile up particular bases, which might not include
| you. The propaganda that does target you will often be tangential
| to something you do believe in sincerely, and you might not see
| it as propaganda, and if you do, you might not see it as a
| problem in the same way you wouldn't see "common sense" as a
| problem.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's hardly a novel thesis - Orwell in _Nineteen Eighty-Four_
| makes the same point, I believe, with the "BIG BROTHER IS
| WATCHING" poster and the narratorial musings thereupon.
|
| Torchlight marches serve the same semiotic purpose. It's a
| demonstration of disciplined power, and implicitly therefore a
| threat: "this is what you'll face if you try to go against us."
| Whether the threat need be honored depends on many factors not
| all of which a march in itself can make evident. But the threat
| is _there._ Why go to all the trouble otherwise?
| pvg wrote:
| The paper is about propaganda in authoritarian regimes which is
| almost always fairly unsophisticated in terms of the style and
| directness of the message. Nobody really needs yet another
| reminder to complete the five year plan in four years or that
| Saddam is the wisest, greatest ruler of all time. Beside
| signaling the power and vitality of the regime it also tells
| people what kind of public expressions are and are not
| acceptable. It's not a subtle message or one whose primary aim
| is persuasion.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| bllguo wrote:
| > We tend to think of propaganda as loudspeakers and silly
| posters
|
| more generally, people fall in the trap of thinking of
| propaganda as "messaging that goes against my positions" or
| "propaganda is what my enemies use"
|
| which is 1. hilariously wrong (American propaganda is the
| best in the world, and far more widespread than Russian or
| whoever else is the boogeyman du jour) and 2. self-sabotaging
| (inability to play the game is why liberal messages that
| _should_ appeal to the majority of Americans fall on deaf
| ears, why health authorities have failed so spectacularly
| with COVID, etc.)
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