Propaganda has developed a negative connotation over the last several hundred years. At first, it was a way of propagating the Catholic faith or spreading seeds.
But when World War I began, propaganda became something the enemy did to you. It became a tool of the enemy to destroy you. It's a pack of lies meant to undermine your confidence in your own ability to discern the truth.
Propaganda can still be that. But propaganda has also been used for good and noble ends. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a "pack of lies."
"Modern democracy is a product of the printing press," says Nathan Crick, a professor of rhetoric and philosophy at Texas A&M University. Benjamin Franklin understood this, working as a printer and seeing the effects of the printed word on people. Indeed, the first example of mass market propaganda in the United States was the printing of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration fired the colonists' imaginations and spread like wildfire throughout the Eastern seaboard. In that sense, democracy is the product of propaganda.
Reading the Declaration of Independence, which gave the justifications for why the colonists wanted to separate from Great Britain, you're struck by the exaggerated nature of some of the grievances listed. In other words, the document was not meant as a rational argument for independence as much as it was a call to arms for the people to defend themselves.
"Good" propaganda for the Americans and, in hindsight, the world. The planet would be a much different place without the Declaration.
Propaganda is complex. Its effects can be felt far downstream of the initial efforts to persuade. In the 21st century, that means social media.
When Jimmy Kimmel creates satirical videos mocking conspiracy theories, this is also relying on the techniques of propaganda to debunk such claims. It was a global campaign of state propaganda that encouraged mask wearing and vaccinations during COVID-19. Pride parades and rainbow flags were once considered agitation propaganda. The recent “No Kings” rallies and subsequent coverage were organized propaganda on a mass scale. And every time a user reposts a news article or editorial on social media to “share widely” some important idea, they are functioning as a vehicle for the dissemination of propaganda.
Crick believes that the technology breakthroughs have emancipated most of us from relying on the government or big media corporations for news. This has created not only utopian myths about an "information revolution" but also dystopian ones.
"In this story, state and corporate interests realize that it is far more efficient to control populations through propaganda than through force," Crick says. "The same forces that promote democracy also allow carefully crafted messages to spread effortlessly through populations, provided they satisfy certain basic needs—the need to belong, to exert power, to feel superior, to place blame, to acquire resources."
This leads to unhealthy levels of distrust and divides us into tribes.
In a technological society, social, political, economic, and religious identities all gradually fuse together until one ends up with just two basic antagonistic groups: “us” and “them.” We call this “partisanship” but it is really “sectarianism” because it is all-encompassing. What makes this so inescapable today is the ease by which any event can be labeled and incorporated into this binary system. And it occurs quite naturally. The mistake is to think there is some Wizard of Oz behind the scenes making this all happen. It is usually quite the opposite.
For those (like me) who pine for "the good ole' days" of comity and bipartisanship in our government and civil disagreements with others, we're living in a fantasy. That world is gone for good — probably. What must happen to be able to recognize and resist propaganda is a return to having faith in our abilities as humans.
And the only hope that the answer we get from the propaganda of the future will be better than the answers we are given now is that very ancient faith that human beings do have an instinct for the truth, however long it might take to be realized. If we do not believe that people can learn from experience and have some sense of justice, then fascism is not something we pass through. Fascism becomes the culmination of human history and the end of civilization itself. I don’t believe this is the case.
I like to think that propaganda on the right helps empower people while propaganda on the left does not. I'm not including corporate propaganda because that's a separate issue.
Regardless, they're all modes of influence that have become ubiquitous in the 21st century. Whether we can overcome the constant bombardment of propaganda and challenges to our ideas of truth and facts is an open question.
