Propaganda: A History of Ideas

This is a short version covering only certain milestones in attitudes toward violence, and scientific reasoning, and the spread of these ideas.

Going back to prehistory, there was some kind of small scale tribal organization that was a reasonable balance of compassion and brutality, and a balance of superstition, and rational observations of nature and the world. At least to the point that people could figure out how plants grew, when the seasons came and went. And overlaid on that would be a certain amount of dancing and chanting that served no real purpose except to make people feel more in control when the rains didn't come, or the crops failed. There would have been some system of justice that did not involve sickening levels of cruelty, because in a small group, people knew each other. And since there was lots of land and few people, the wars would have been mild and on a small scale.

As populations grew, empires began to form, and the level of cruelty both in war and in justice would have become more extreme. Probably shocking even though the people were usually total strangers to each other in those huge empires.

When the Roman Empire reached it's peak of brutality, where entertainment consisted of seeing people kill each other for nothing more than sport, torture and slavery were standard, and a common execution was crucifixion, it's not surprising that the idea of people behaving decently toward each other might catch on like wildfire in the imagination of hundreds of thousand of ordinary people. It probably didn't matter who originated the idea, but out of the middle east came some particularly well stated and radical concepts of forgiveness, humility. That would have been early Christianity. The ideas spread quickly and took over the dominant empire of the time.

There was no really dramatic behavioural change in the short term, although without Christianity, the Roman Empire might have become even more cruel and violent in nature. At least the seed had been planted, the idea of tolerance and peace being a virtue. And the ideas were not just planted, but enshrined as a principle of the dominant religion. The idea was there, but the practice of the idea lagged far behind.

That idea, for better or worse, came with some baggage. As it came from a relatively undeveloped area in the middle east, it brought with it extremist religion in the form of miracles, superstition and concepts of the afterlife. So science, philosophy and democracy which had begun to take shape with the Greeks, received a setback. Kind of like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The stage was set for more than a thousand years of superstitious religion, based loosely on peace and love. In actual practice, people were still shockingly cruel and violent, even in the name of this religion. And also pretty extreme when it came to superstition and belief in miracles and the afterlife.

The population of the world continued to increase during this time, and some advances were made in the areas of ships and navigation, so ideas could spread over the oceans throughout the world for the first time. By the year 1600, the world was ready for another milestone in human thought. One that had actually been shelved a couple of thousand years earlier. It was scientific reasoning, to compete with magic and superstition for its place in the history of human thought. The steam engine was invented allowing humans to tap the vast reserves of power available in underground deposists of coal and oil. The industrial revolution began. Inventions multiplied, factories sprang up, starting in England, and gradually spreading around the world. This permitted slavery to come to an end, as machines could now do the work that hundreds of humans were previously required to do. Workers could now be rewarded in goods that came from factories that could mass produce anything from clothing to farm tractors.

Today, we have science and reason, and peace, tolerance and democracy. And mass consumerism. But these ideas exist side by side with old religions and primitive ideas of cruelty, violence, and superstition. Often within the same family group. That's because old ideas die out slowly.

Another revolution in human thought is under way now, and it is propaganda. It's not by accident that I have written over 20 blogs on propaganda alone. Propaganda is not just an idea, it is an idea about how to control the spread of ideas. These days many different interest groups are using propaganda to spread their own ideas, to motivate and grow their section of the population. The science of propaganda is developing rapidly and mostly under the radar, where it works best. We don't know yet how it's going to play out. We mostly don't even know there is a revolution going on with propaganda. Will there be one overall winner, or will the ideas polarize people into ever smaller and more fanatical groups? If one overall idea becomes dominant, what will it be? The idea of Liberal Democracy seems to have a lead now, with Communism and Fascism out of the race. But it is a lead that is shrinking, against fundamentalist religions - Christian Fundamentalism and Islamic Fundamentalism. Both of which seem to be growing fast. Of course the eventual winner could still be something else, or something we have never heard of before.