Propaganda Topics 1&2

Here is a quote, which if you think of propaganda as fairy tales, makes some sense: "Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist, they already know dragons exist. Fairy tells tell children dragons can be killed." G.K. Chesterton

The second topic in my outline is the one I will deal with first, as it appears to be the most controversial. Not only did I get a comment in my blog about it, but I was talking to some people today, same reaction!

The topic was: are educated people more susceptible to propaganda than uneducated people?

This was also a point made in the book "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" by Jacques Ellul, written back in the sixties.

I agree with his point because of my definitions of "educated" and of "propaganda". I realize there is a big problem with calling uneducated people unintelligent. So let me restate in a less dramatic way. Instead of "educated", I should have said people who are interested in politics and current events, know something about history, and consider themselves thinkers. Whether or not they have a higher education is not really important. It is these people I am saying are susceptible to propaganda. Maybe I should call them high information instead of educated.

If people are not interested in the news, geography, history, they can barely remember the name of the person who runs their country, then they are not targets of propaganda. To win over this type of person you do it by lowering prices, lowering taxes, winning wars, sending checks in the mail, cancelling their debts. Not by any type of argument. There is a level of propaganda that you can direct at such people, but it is generally the type that goes on bumper stickers and t-shirts. I could call that a low level of propaganda.

And as for propaganda, we have a tendency to think that the "other" side uses propaganda, ours does not. That is completely false, as no matter what issue you can come up with, I assure you both sides are using propaganda, though one may be better at it than the other. That means if you or I have an opinion on say, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, no matter which side we are on, we have consumed some propaganda, and very likely without knowing it. So we have to set aside the idea that only the enemy uses propaganda or we will never be able to understand what we are being influenced by.

Now the next point, and it is merely a logical extension of the first. The most vulnerable people are those who absorb the news and who think they are too well educated to fall prey to propaganda. And that is because good propaganda is one step ahead of them. It is not a bunch of lies (although Wikipedia does characterize it that way). It is most often the truth, but selective and using a lot of more advanced techniques. And furthermore, propaganda is not trying to change your mind, it is reinforcing your beliefs that coincide with the government's (or whoever is providing the propaganda, and increasingly that is not the government - another topic). That is a much easier job than trying to argue against what you believe.

To restate the point, people who consider themselves intelligent and take an interest in the news are the ones targeted by propaganda. And people who think that by their very intelligence and education, that they are immune to propaganda are actually most at risk of falling for it. Especially if they think that propaganda can be detected by fact checking.

And low information people don't succumb to propaganda directly, but simply get on the bandwagon once the high information people have been spurred into action by propaganda.