The Problem with Propaganda

[alcibiades_mystery]

There was a funny line in Judd Apatow's Funny People; Adam Sandler's character was talking about different kinds of views of the world, and he broke it down like this: "In your 20's, you're like 'Fuck my parents and all their old shit. Fuck them! I don't need them.' In your 30's you're like 'Fuck the government! Fuck the President, man, fuck that guy!' In your 40's you're like 'I'm hungry. I wonder what's in the fridge." OK. I know a lot of people 40 and over are going to do the Shit-fit Dance now and tell me that's bullshit, probably in all caps, but I'm not citing it because I think it's accurate. It's more interesting in the way it posits a kind of development in one's comportment towards the world. I like to think of these moments when one's comportment toward the world turns over, shifts, breaks with a previous way of being and slides or jumps into another. What is the moment when we shift from "Fuck the Government!" to "I wonder what's in the fridge?"

One of these important moments for me came when I was in my early 20's. My uncle was up for my grandmother's funeral, and we were all sitting around drinking beer and watching the news. I don't remember the news story, but it was something that just set me off on what was - at that time - my usual ranting and raving: "It's propaganda! We're all being duped! Can't everybody see what's behind the screen here! What's behind the story? What the REAL story is!" No doubt, I had some theory or other that justified and fed my usual anger about what THEY were really up to, and felt free, in a kin d of sophomoric moment, to offer it to all. Ranting and raving. Raving and ranting. My uncle's a calm guy. He was drafted into the Army and went over to Vietnam in, I think, the summer of 1967. He was there a year, mostly on the ground in II Corps. I'd never really seen anything faze the guy, and this may have been part his personality, and part of the way he decided to deal with us, his sister's kids, especially in light of the fact that my father was (and is) known mainly for blowing his top and gulping down too many Manhattans. So he's this calm guy, and he lets me finish my rant, and he says the only thing I've ever heard him say about the war, like, ever. He says:

"You know the one thing I really learned in Vietnam?"

Everyone kind of gets quiet. My mother, who's also never heard him say jack shit about the war, looks stunned.

"The problem with propaganda," he says, "is not that people believe it. The problem is that once people get wise to a little bit of it, you never believe anything."

Two little sentences, but a giant leap in my thinking. I was trained in the best liberal arts tradition of critical thinking and critical inquiry, and I thought, in my radical, ranting way, that that meant "exposing" the action behind some screen. We're so sophisticated: we can see what the others cannot - oh yes indeed it takes VISION, you see, to cut through the smokescreen. And as, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, when you conceive of critical thinking only as some process of "deciphering the real event behind the screen" (note the utterly Platonic sense of the notion here), your only manner of engagement is some debunking operation, or childish ranting. That both also soothe the sense of one's own intelligence (at the expense of the "fooled ones," the ones who DON'T SEE) plays no small part in the PLEASURE of this way of being. For it is pleasurable, being the One Who Knows What's Really Going On. But that's not what critical thinking means at all, or that's not all that it means. Of course my uncle wasn't saying that there's NOT propaganda, or that hidden agendas don't exist, or shouldn't be exposed. What he was saying, rather, is that seeing everything this way is an impoverished way of being, and a poor substitute for thought.

It's a lesson that's never been more clear than in what I've seen on these boards in the last several days.

[emulatorloo]

1. Great Story -- Interesting thinker, that uncle of yours.

(Self deleting my longish post -- will post it later elsewhere)

[The Magistrate]

2. Very Sound Man, Your Uncle, Sir....

[awnobles]

3. Read Books

Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" is a history of the CIA. After reading it it seems they have been behind many, many illegal things. Gates was an Iran-Contra participant who broke the law and believes "It is legal as long as it is secret." Eric Prince of Blackwater come out as a CIA asset. Our "Intelligence" and contracting have overlapped to create covert death squads. It seems some conspiracy theories are well founded.

[alcibiades_mystery]

6. Well

"It seems some conspiracy theories are well founded."

I already dealt with this argument in the original post.

[arcadian]

4. Yo Teach! ...thanks.

Word.

[alcibiades_mystery]

7. Oh geez

Not that guy!

;-)

[Beetwasher]

5. Excellent Post! This Was A Key Element Of Repub Strategy BTW Over The Last 30 Years Or So

It's called poisoning the well and it's easy to do. It's very easy to destroy things. To pass destructive legislation like tax cut tax cut tax cut deregulate deregulate deregulate! It's simple. It's black and white and it's destructive.

It's much harder to build and to progress. To actually listen to various ideas and try to create something meaningful and beneficial. And once the well is poisoned, it's difficult to get people to ever drink from it again or convince them it's safe to do so, no matter who did the poisoning.