The true purpose of propaganda | Hacker News Reader

The true purpose of propaganda

robkhenderson.substack.com

69 pointsjger1572 comments

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.

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?

I've often made this point to encourage people to vote even if they are indifferent to candidates or the races aren't competitive.

It signals that you're paying attention and expect your interests to be taken into consideration.

Yeah, only the most brazen and silly propaganda makes it into period TV and popular hisotries. Pop culture history forgets successful propaganda campaigns that

- got people to believe streets are exlusively for cars

- got people to accept public health

- convinced lots of people it was ok to persecute communists

- got people to buy awful 19th century railroad bonds

We tend to think of propganada as loudpeakers and silly posters. The most successful propaganda tool of all in most nations is the primary public school.

> 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.)

I wonder if bad liberal messaging is at all intentional.

Portrayals of liberals as righteous but set-upon underdogs helps feed persecution complexes.

> got people to accept public health

Uhh... As a life scientist, I can't help but roll my eyes here. Public health is not propaganda. If you have a narrow and specific example, then advance it.

It seems you believe that propaganda must intrinsically be nefarious or false. My point is that propaganda is anything which the state finds beneficial for people to believe and therefore promotes. As an example, if a turn of the century government produced flyers extolling the virtues of hand washing and simultaneously produced flyers extolling the virtues of eugenics, would one be propaganda of public health but not the other? Why?

Edit: To be clear, governments all over the world have executed massive public health information programs.

- sanitation in the U.S. ca. the 1910s-1950s

- toilet use in India (ongoing)

- evangelism of the public health post WWII in the U.K.

- Campaigns against AIDS misinformation on Africa from the 90s up to now

I accept different definitions of propaganda depending on the context, and indeed "propaganda" often takes a non-pejorative or non-judgmental sense in scholarly works, but I should point out that 1) this is not the most common use of the term, and 2) there were no examples in your previous comment that made it easy for me to guess that this was your working definition. The set of examples you chose in the other comment drove me to infer that you attributed nefarious intent or pejoration to the term.

By this definition however, we would have to also say that things like mathematics and physics education are propaganda.

Setting that aside, engaging with your question:

> if a turn of the century government produced flyers extolling the virtues of hand washing and simultaneously produced flyers extolling the virtues of eugenics, would one be propaganda of public health but not the other? Why?

First, I would be more inclined to question the ethics of State-sponsored pro-eugenic pamphlets (there are serious issues on the question of respect for individual autonomy when it comes to eugenics), and I would say that the State promoting hand-washing would be very much ethical.

I think the purpose of the material matters: the purpose of eugenics is... not easy to understand as an act of good faith, charitably speaking, whereas the purpose of hand-washing messaging is actually to promote individual autonomy. When individuals perform this action, they derive the most immediate benefit, and can go on to lead their life to their full potential.

Whether we qualify both or only one of the two as propaganda is a question of semantics, but either way, moral equivalence is inappropriate, and we should be clear about our working definition and whether there is a normative aspect to the discussion, or if it is purely descriptive.

Nowhere in any of my posts did I make a moral jusgement, much less an equivalence. The original article's premise is to attribute the "true" purpose of propaganda given that "propaganda doesn't work".

The OP who I responded to, pointed out that this was a falacy of "begging the question". I agreed and supoorted with examples of government propaganda campaigns that have worked, making no moral claims.

I am not entirely against propaganda. I think public health is a very good example of the positive power propaganda can have. But I am not one who will call anything the government promotes which I don't like propaganda while claiming the things which it proselatyzes that I do like are not.

I have things which I would like the government to propagandize and things I would like it to stop propagandizing. I participate in politics to promote those things I like and try to diminish the things I don't like. I'm comfortable making moral judgements about information but I'm fair enough to know others make their own as well. I endoctrinated my child with the germ theory of disease because I find it useful. I did not indoctrinate him with the baptist faith I was endoctrinated with because I feel differently about that information.

As to math and physics also being propaganda, yes to some extent I think so. The state is interested in having more rocket scientists as much as they are in having more grunts. There is a nationalism in our sciences that goes back to WWII and the Cold War. It's not as obvious as the cartoonish history and civics material the public schools promote but it's more there in how it is promoted.

The information the state wishes for us to internalize is massive and varied in appearance. Perhaps the most impressive feat of propaganda is our modern languages. Nation states have weaponized common language.

Government champaigns for standard language and common literature have spread cooperation across much larger geographic areas than was easy historically. It has the added bonus of erasing difference and replacing it with a national identity. And it even time travels. People now justify their national identity via a common language which the nation in fact invented. It's quite remarkable.

As you correctly pointed out in your first sentence, I did not accuse you of making a moral judgment or equivalence; I merely said that when there are multiple possible definitions of a word, the most common of which holding normative connotation, it is important to be precise about which meaning we give or do not give to the word. In other words, my unintentionally oblique answer was that "it depends on the definition we use".

As for the rest, under the definition of propaganda you specified in your earlier comment, I think we're essentially on the same page. (And here I make a very generous interpretation of your usage of "doctrine" and "germ theory of disease", because I don't think "doctrine" was the best word.)

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.

... in historical authoritarian regimes, perhaps that was the most explicit form. But the most effective propaganda is what is considered ideology by the mainstream -- i.e., defining the boundary of the Overton window. See as a simple example the claim that stimulus payouts will de facto lead to inflation, or the implications in the shares of coverage of Trump's various lawsuits vs that focused on Biden's family.

In all cases, there is something left unsaid: an assumed, placed perspective that undergirds the analysis of and conclusions from whatever facts are presented. There, the meme (anti-meme?) at the heart of the deception lies.

in historical authoritarian regimes

The paper is about China today.

See as a simple example the claim that stimulus payouts [...]

The paper is about propaganda in authoritarian regimes, the US is not an authoritarian regime.

Russian propaganda in Russia is not trying to shift overtone window. ISIS is not trying to subtly short it either.

Regimes are not just historical.

In this lecture on Moral Politics, George Lakoff addresses the “nonsensical” speech, metaphors, framing and more.

Changed how I listen to mass media and political speech.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5f9R9MtkpqM

Also highly recommend his Truth Samndwich methodology to defanging propaganda messages in the media.

https://twitter.com/georgelakoff/status/1068891959882846208?...

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.

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."

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).

I remember listening to someone point out (I think it was Sam Harris) that what all ideologies and religions have in common is that they must have, somewhere, a very strange idea that everyone in the religion must accept. One that clearly goes against common sense and experience.

Yeah consider me unconvinced. People have a tendency to perceive grand displays of incompetence as secret signs of vast competence. It rarely is.

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.

Same. The sad reality is that what the article calls "silly, unpersuasive propaganda" still works on a ton of people.

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

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.

That some individuals may occasionally be fooled does not change the fact that large subsets of the population just guzzle down whatever drivel their chosen political pundit makes up that day. It’s plenty useful to acknowledge the presence of collective brain rot.

sounds like it worked

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.

> "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.

Alternatively he is just trapping people psychologically: once you have agreed with someone you will later rationalise your agreement to avoid cognitive dissonance, and you keep doubling-down on that agreement . . . since confronting your false beliefs would be so psychologically difficult. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/talking-ourselves-into-it

Edit: to fight it, perhaps create a psychologically plausible excuse for why everyone fell for his shit? Give people an out.

Pretty much. Putin’s invasion as well. I’m also reminded of Netflix’s murder documentary, Evil Genius. This show covered the pizza bomber and made an effort to suggest the perpetrator’s were very intelligent. But they were clearly mentally I’ll and made many pathetically dumb blunders, including proactively telling the police that they weren’t behind the pizza bomber when they had no reason to be associated with it in the first place.

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.

> Real modern propaganda works not even 2nd or 3rd order effects, but 4th order, with a bit of reverse psychology.

Would you care to give some examples of that (4th order propaganda) ? I am genuinely curious.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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"

All my sources say that the earth is a geoid rather than flat, and that's not propaganda.

I really lament the fact that so many people have never moved past the "nothing is really knowable" stage of epistemology. That, and the middle-ground fallacy.

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

I was about to add this quotation.

In summary, propaganda is about conditioning the proletariat.

really? the proletariat? and your search engines decisipn to lower the ranking of dissenting views on Ukraine? and facebook decision to allow hate speech abput russians ("oh no.. we are not der sturmer.. you see, it is only about the military.. oh, in some states.." when it is all over your american controlled internet, and concerns all russians). it affects each one of you, exceptional nation.

> Search engines decision to lower the ranking of dissenting views on Ukraine?

Definite propaganda

https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgo-to-down-rank-sites-ass...

You see, the question is what you call "russian disonformation". From point of view of most of ypu, what I write here is " russoan disinformation", while actually I simply don't accept your state manufactured view of the events.

On a personal level, I:

(a) Don't have a substantive view on these events other than "beating up the neighbor is hard to justify".

(b) Am comfortable that what is publicly known has a terrible signal-to-noise ratio, while what is privately driving the whole situation is likely at odds with what's publicly known.

"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

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.

Unfortunately, propaganda is not reserved for authoritarian countries. The most common type of propaganda is used to motivate wars. The reason it is necessary is because soldiers won't engage in mass killing without some strong (supposed) moral basis. Propaganda is required for all wars, recent and distant past, including not only your least favorite but also your most favorite nation states.

One of the most detrimental false beliefs that people have is that propaganda is only used by "the bad guys". Nation-states count on this because it short-circuits critical thinking that might lead to closer analysis of the messages they are promulgating.

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.

with you it is always about others.. russiagate, Assange, Douma false flag, americans provoking the war in ukraine by encouraging ukraine not to implement Minsk agreements.. but it is always others who spread propaganda.

Not at all, plenty of people in the west will tell you the west spews a lot of crap too.

> Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist, ignore, or deride the messages?

Wrong premise. Authoritarian governments need less propaganda because they have authoritarian powers. It's a "nice to have" for them than a necissity.

The "free" countries who have to compete against authoritarian countries on the other hand need a lot of propaganda because they rely on it to maintain the shadow authorative structures required for their survival.

> Why do authoritarian governments engage in propaganda when citizens often know that their governments are propagandizing and therefore resist, ignore, or deride the messages?

Uhhh, allow me to challenge the premise here. Propaganda works (as in, it's effective in achieving its first-order purpose), and people aren't particularly great at correctly identifying propaganda: most people who do, do so mostly by chance.

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?

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.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/

hermeneutics is something else.

I think throwanem meant homiletics. Still I think an important principle in rhetoric is that your rhetorical devices should not be too obvious not to say annoying to the audience.

I did mean homiletics. Thanks! Been a while since I was close to that world, and the words are apparently similar enough at head and tail - same syllable count and stress pattern, too, for that matter - to get consolidated into the same long-term memory hash bucket.

While affirming power is one likely purpose, a complementary one is to sow confusion. I like this quote:

> Dictators don't do propaganda so you believe something. We do it so you believe nothing. And more importantly, do nothing.

https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/999220156147621888 https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1251573397265530880

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.

> 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.

"To sow confusion and reap inaction" - Willie Sutton, "Where the Money Was".

> but rather to confuse and disorient them, ultimately creating apathy and/or division

That was used to devastating effect with the Pandemic.

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.

IMVHO the author miss a point: there is no single actor, even in already developed and strong regimes. Any actor run it's own propaganda, sometime positive sometimes negative, sometimes both: yes, that's another commonly ignored point, sometimes there are campaigns apparently against those who pay the campaign.

People change slowly in general and there are many ways to force a change, sometimes the change have some positive aspects for all, not only negative etc the world is vast.

Another point is that we do not know really the mass of the population, we see and know a certain set of cohorts, but not the whole, PRs know better especially in surveillance capitalism era. So some campaigns are stupid but for a certain cohort distant from us and not necessary marginal such stupid campaign works.

Why making apparently negative campaigns? Because their target goes behind the campaign itself, for instance a government know of a looming crisis, simulating a political crisis now, a quick one, that put some expendable inside the actual government in a bad position, saving others, then bring up a new government by their adversaries that inevitably fell in the looming crisis is a classic. You wait few years and you opponent have a ruined reputation for far more years to come. Another is just play victim, sacrificing a subordinate sold as disloyal to avoid taking the fault, just saying "my very terribly fault was having trust a disloyal, criminal, evil man hidden in my staff".

Also people have no memory, most do not remember nothing longer than few years in the past, so repeating the same scheme means creating an illusion of a change while effectively something change but the rest remain absolutely the same.

A bit off-topic, but the topic of propaganda reminds me of the “propaganda” posters created by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid around 1980. Raised in the USSR and living in America, they made works of Soviet-style propaganda for the United States.

Some examples:

“Black and White Brothers Forever”

https://emuseum.nasher.duke.edu/objects/2354/black-and-white...

“Glory to the U.S. Armed Forces”

https://emuseum.nasher.duke.edu/objects/2352/glory-to-the-us...

“Onward to the Final Victory of Capitalism”

https://emuseum.nasher.duke.edu/objects/2350/onward-to-the-f...

> A bit off-topic, but the topic of propaganda reminds me of the “propaganda” posters created by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid around 1980. Raised in the USSR and living in America, they made works of Soviet-style propaganda for the United States.

Those are pretty fantastic. I like how they peeled away some of the "foreignness" layers to reveal the core concept.

"The main aim of propaganda is to dehumanize your enemy."

Covid pandemic being the biggest example in modern times

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

>propaganda has become one of the top threats to US national security, to democracy everywhere, and therefore to humanity

US national security -whatever that means; will be just fine.

Liberal democracy and the value of free speech -not so much.

Food for thought:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mitt-romney-american-democracy-...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/barack-oba...

https://www.ft.com/content/47144c85-519a-4e25-9035-c5f8977cf...

>Huang describes how China’s primetime news program, Xinwen Lianbo, is stilted, archaic, and is “a constant target of mockery among ordinary citizens.” Yet the Chinese government airs it every night at 7 pm sharp.

Sounds kinda like the nightly news in USA

Fox, CNN, MSNBC -yes.

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