It’s not really deniable that western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes. Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the US empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought. Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every US war, rally behind the US foreign policy objective of the day, and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.

To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect. It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.

By continually hammering our minds with simple repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.

Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview, and because powerful plutocrats like John D Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems. 

Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.

This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda. I see a lot of people blame this problem on the fact that critical thinking isn’t taught in schools, and I’ve seen some strains of Marxist thought arguing that westerners choose to espouse propaganda narratives because they know it advances their own class interests, and I’m sure both of these factor into the equation to some extent. But the primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives actually has a much simpler, well-documented explanation.

Modern psychology tells us that people don’t just tend to hold onto their propaganda-induced belief systems; people tend to hold onto any belief system. Belief perseverance, as the name suggests, describes the way people tend to cling to their beliefs even when presented with evidence disproving them. The theory goes that back when humans lived in tribes that were often hostile to each other, our tribal cohesion and knowing who we can trust mattered more to our survival than taking the time to figure out what’s objectively true, so now we’ve got these brains that tend to prioritize loyalty to our modern “tribes” like our nation, our religion, our ideological factions and our pet causes.

This tendency can take the form of motivated reasoning, where our emotional interests and “tribal” loyalties color the way we take in new information. It can also give rise to the backfire effect, where being confronted with evidence which conflicts with one’s worldview will not only fail to change their beliefs but actually strengthen them.

So the simple answer to why people cling to beliefs instilled by imperial propaganda is because that’s just how minds work. If you can consistently and forcefully indoctrinate someone from an early age and then give them a mainstream ideological “tribe” with which to identify in their indoctrination, the cognitive glitches in these newly-evolved brains of ours act as sentries which protect those worldviews you implanted. Which is exactly what modern propaganda, and our modern political systems, are set up to do.

I often see people expressing bewilderment about the way the smartest people they know subscribe to the most ridiculous propaganda narratives out there. This is why. A smart person who has been effectively indoctrinated by propaganda will just be more clever than someone of average intelligence in defending their beliefs. Some of the most foam-brained foreign policy think pieces you’ll ever read come from PhDs and Ivy League graduates, because all their intelligence gives them is the ability to make intelligent-sounding arguments for why it would be good and smart for the US military to do something evil and stupid.

The Oatmeal has a great comic about this (which someone also made into a video if you prefer). Importantly, the author correctly notes that the mind’s tendency to forcefully protect its worldview does not mean it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs in light of new evidence, only that it is more difficult than accepting beliefs which confirm one’s biases. It takes some work, and it takes sincerity and self-honesty, but it can be done. Which is happy news for those of us who have an interest in convincing people to abandon their propaganda-constructed worldviews for reality-based ones.

Sometimes just being patient with someone, showing empathy, treating them how we’d like to be treated, and working to establish things in common to overcome the primitive psychology which screams we’re from a hostile tribe can accomplish a lot more than just laying out tons of objective facts disproving their believed narrative about Russia or China or their own government or what have you. 

And above all we can just keep telling the truth, in as many fresh, engaging and creative ways as we can come up with. The more we do this, the more opportunities there are for someone to catch a glimmer of something beyond the veil of their propaganda-installed worldview and the cognitive biases which protect it. The more such opportunities we create, the greater a chance the truth has of getting a word in edgewise.

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

 

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via B Rosen (CC BY-ND 2.0), formatted for size.

The End Will Not Come Easily

by Ryan on February 4, 2022

The end of the pandemic will not come easily.

These words, from Danish political scientist Michael Bang Petersen in today’s New York Times, state what is self-evident to many, particularly here in Canada where the so-called “Freedom Convoy” has dominated the news over the past week or so. For many, relinquishing the emotional urgency that this pandemic has thrust upon us has the feel of a bitter concession. “The End of the Pandemic May Tear Us Apart,” warns Petersen’s ominous headline, and after the two years we have all endured, few would doubt this is true.

The article is refreshingly sane, measured, and wise and is well worth reading in its entirety. But I was particularly struck by Dr. Petersen’s succinct and, to my mind at least, accurate portrayal of what’s going on in so much of what passes itself off as public debate these days:

For two years people have debated the value of masks, vaccine passports and more, to the point that they are no longer opinions but identities. And when opinions become identities, they warp our understanding and make it harder to change one’s mind as the situation changes. The truth is that we are all biased.

Well, yes. This seems painfully obvious here in Alberta these days with road blockades and protests and fiery responses dominating the news and everyday conversation daily. The situation might not be as acute where you are, but I suspect you would only have to stick a toe in the shallow end of the social media pool to be afforded rich confirmation of Petersen’s assessment. We live in a world where increasingly opinion = identity, and identity is all. This is not good, to put it mildly.

Two years into this thing, some of us have so thoroughly made our opinions about Covid a key piece of our identities that it almost defines us. For many, Covid has become the grand narrative that gives life meaning and purpose (even, sadly, many Christians). When this is the case, dialing back the intensity becomes extremely difficult. We cannot concede that we may have been wrong or at least less right than we imagined. We can’t acknowledge that in a fluid situation where things change rapidly, and in a media context that incentivizes polarization and hostility, we have all misread, misinterpreted, prioritized wrongly, spoke out of ignorance, etc. Going back to “normal,” however gradually, could seem to lay all of this bare. Indeed, some may not even want things to go back to normal. Chris Hedges wrote a book with the memorable title, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. It certainly is and does. And for many, that meaning will be difficult to give up.

Well, what to do about all this. I have no idea how to solve the macro problems, but on a micro level I can only believe that if we are to in any way make the end of this pandemic come easier, we will have to at least try to reach across the divides we have created (or accelerated) and try to inhabit the experience of those who do not think like us, however odious we find their views, however threatening to the identities we have spent the last two years constructing and fortifying this might be. I wish there were some easier path that didn’t involve enmeshing ourselves in the stew of ugliness and complexity and self-interested signalling and half-truths and partial information and identity posturing. But there is no other way. We will have to reach across and attempt to genuinely understand those who are different from us. We will have to come to re-imagine one another as human beings instead of avatars of this or that ideology or political perspective.

When I was in graduate school, one of my theology professors made us do an interesting exercise on our final exam. We were given three statements that were currently generating theological controversy in the church. We had one hour to write on each one (and were told that if we didn’t use the full hour we should not expect an A!). We were instructed to marshal all of the course reading and lectures in our response, to make the best theological case possible for how and why we had arrived at our conclusions. But there was a catch. No matter how strongly we disagreed or agreed with the statement we were attempting to refute or defend, we had to start by laying out the position we disagreed with in the best possible terms. We were to affirm everything that could be affirmed, even if it wasn’t much. Most importantly, we were to describe the viewpoint that we were opposed to in terms that would be acceptable to someone who held that particular view.

I have never forgotten this exercise. I have returned to it often in my writing and pastoral ministry more broadly. Is how I am talking to or about this person or position something that they would recognize and affirm? It’s a vitally important question to ask. Nothing is easier than taking cheap shots at a caricature. Nothing is easier than labelling all protesting truckers as white supremacists bent on spreading “hate.” Nothing is easier than labelling all Black Lives Matters or Defund the Police protesters as anarchists or mindless rioters. This is a very easy path to take, and many take it.

We need to do better. In how we stagger out of this pandemic and in our discourse more broadly. We need—somehow—to recover a view of those we disagree with as neighbours instead of enemies.