Denial and Other Escapes Part IV: Propaganda in Capitalism and Politics

The Boil-Down: On November 5, in-person voters will head to the polls to cast ballots for their selected candidates, for President of the United States and other important, powerful offices. Will people's selections genuinely reflect whom they would have chosen had they been asked to hand-pick their own candidates? How do we come to decide? Does propaganda (a product of groupthink and narcissistic gravity) significantly affect our choices? For a top minority of wealthy capitalists, their freedom to operate relatively unregulated and untaxed is on the line. For millions of ordinary, often hard-working American humans, peace of mind (or more aptly, emotional well-being) hangs in the balance.

The Details:  In a small rural midwestern high school, my peers and I learned about business propaganda tactics from an intelligent, engaging English teacher. (The man doubled as a demanding, verbally abusive coach after school, and on weekends functioned as a misogynistic alcoholic.) The propaganda tactics of which we were taught to be wary were among the ones on this MotionCue webpage.  I was not surprised to find influential techniques common to modern politics on the list, including name-calling (within the broader category of mudslinging), card-stacking, and ad nauseum.  Sadly, I was not shocked to see MotionCue's inclusion of an appalling Thai beauty ad using an appeal to prejudice to promote "fairness" cream, suggesting the key to success was being white. The tactics of this year's political lobbies jump right out at you from MotionCue's list; Forbes uses slightly different nomenclature to identify some of the same appeals (blurring and othering as similar to card-stacking), also appropriately including lying among common tactics.

At ThoughtCo's website, Robert McNamara credits Edward Bernays with the birth of business propaganda. It is written that Bernays recognized the importance of changing public opinion to boost business. Identified as the son of Anna Freud (pioneering psychoanalyst and youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud), Edward Bernays was responsible for campaigns enhancing the image of the stoic, humorless Calvin Coolidge, and marketing cigarettes to women as "torches of freedom."

As many of us fully understand, persuasive propaganda has not been used benignly across history, and its malignant use has not been merely to sway consumers toward buying cars or bags of fries. The first major political propaganda campaign followed a 1917 executive order signed by Woodrow Wilson. The Wilson Administration, via George Creel, began a systematic onslaught to suppress details about events leading up to and through World War I, framed as protecting democracy but demanding loyalty and designed to attack anti-war "ethnic and socialist" think tanks. The appointed authority--the Committee on Public Information--restricted journalist access to government and military officials, replaced controversial news with official reports designed to look like real news releases, and is considered by the author to be one of the biggest threats to freedom of the press in U.S. History.  

Let's look at Nazi Germany and WWII-era Japan as examples of the devastation that can be caused by the malignant use of propaganda.  Entranced by the power and charisma of their leader, ordinary citizens in nineteen thirties Germany swiftly turned pro-pestilence in one of recorded history's most horrific mass movements of organized hate.  At a similar time in history, "the" Holocaust's ugliest cousin may be the events which unfolded from 1937-1945 during the second Sino-Japanese war, when Japanese citizens were indoctrinated to exact genocidal hate upon the people of China.   This propaganda-driven genocidal movement was punctuated by the "rape of Nanjing"--an unthinkable massacre of 300,000 Chinese adults, children and babies--and Unit 731, a detachment of the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for lethal military and scientific experimentation on human victims, primarily Chinese citizens which once again included children.

A 16-year-old girl who had been gang-raped and infected with a venereal disease by Japanese soldiers during the Nanking Massacre.

The words "War on Drugs" epitomize a grand-scale propagandic scheme to mislead the public about the intentions of officials in power. The results were the mobilization of local, state and federal law enforcement to catalyze racially biased mass incarceration of U.S. citizens.   Rutgers' then-Associate Professor of History, Donna Murch (2015, p. 162), highlights the propagandic angle taken by government officials: "In hindsight, it is clear that the state appropriated real anxieties from black urban areas (such as Harlem and South Los Angeles) that were experiencing rapid economic decline and used these concerns to rationalize its war(s) on drugs. Not only did this strategy appeal to racial antipathies among white voters but it also hindered political opposition to the drug war by African Americans who were desperately seeking solutions to the public health and social crises facing their neighborhoods."  

Among the tactics of the War on Drugs, the evils of marijuana were grossly exaggerated or purely confabulated. Government administrations further contextualized illegal drugs as evil and dangerous by militarizing police task forces ear-marked for the War on Drugs and legislating $1.7 billion in federal funding for initiatives such as the Comprehensive Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1984, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, and the Violent Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1994. The U.S. Supreme Court even declared that sentencing a human being to (mandatory) life in prison for a first drug offense was fair game.

Incidentally, have War-on-Drugs propagandists publicly acknowledged the well-documented reality that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) introduced Americans to LSD intoxication and abuse? They did so by atrociously violating the rights of our country's own citizens via MK Ultra, a series of studies on mind control which subjected human beings to drug intoxication (in many cases without their consent or knowledge) and psychological torture.   I offer this last example to illustrate the irony of our government's entitlement (I infer that they retain the right to control, interact with, and manipulate psychoactive substances under the guise of "national security" and other reassuring, patriotic frames.) According to trauma theory, entitlement of this nature is part and parcel of narcissistic gravity.

The above are predicted by the assumptions of the trauma theory set forth in Eyes Wide Open.  People hungry for power, or merely accustomed to power, will tactically abuse their power in order to keep their power and all the privileges it affords; all they have to do is live with contempt, live without empathy, and network with like-minded powermongers. I do not attempt to tackle the scope and depth of institutionalized racial and ethnic discrimination across America and worldwide in this article. However, for reasons that are not difficult to infer, the function of decades of legal decisions and action at all levels of government was to punish, control, diminish, imprison, and decimate the lives of citizens who have never been granted access to the rights, privileges, and resources of those in power ("those in power" being largely rich white men)--because of skin color and other variables which make such citizens different from those in power.

For instance, local, state, and federal officials, upon coming into awareness of the struggle South Central Los Angeles was having with the scourge of crack cocaine, were faced with an opportunity. They could have looked with empathy upon the humanity of a vast population (obviously not limited to South Central L.A.) wrestling with this social problem on top of the existing dearth of resources within that community. Since politicians were already in a mood to appropriate taxpayer funds, they could have put the money into humanitarian aid and support, treatment and recovery...expanded options for living breathing people representing ethnic or socioeconomic categories different from the ones the politicians fit into. They could have reached out to South Central L.A. with the regard we all might have for humans we consider equals. Instead, officials used the money to criminalize drug offenses, militarize police, and exact a campaign of violence upon citizens whose ancestors had already endured centuries of hardship--the kind of calculated persecution resulting from narcissistic gravity.  The "War on Drugs" was sold as necessary, systematic legislated aggression justified to keep America safe from the plague of dangerous, mind-altering chemicals and the dangerous, subhuman zombies who use them, as well as the additional unredeemable criminals who sell them. In reality, the War on Drugs was another systematic, violent suppression of a subculture of people who already held a status of "less than" due to contemptuous white power.

Another feature of toxic group and institutional functioning--an age-old installment of corporate life and politics, is deciding who's in and who's out. It's like group gerrymandering. The lines are redrawn to eject and replace anyone in non-support of the goals of narcissistic gravity. A few years after Chicago drug company GD Searle discovered the molecule that would become aspartame, Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of Searle. Having already served as Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford, Rumsfeld went back to Washington with the Ronald Reagan administration, just as the artificial sweetener saccharin was coming under fire. Searle was poised to replace saccharin with their aspartame, at massive profit. When the acting FDA director opposed approving aspartame, he was replaced. After convincing the National Toxicology Program to stop testing which might prove the dangers of aspartame (which have been demonstrated in numerous studies before and since, actually heightening the aspartame controversy in the scientific community), and after some serious restructuring of a key committee, the FDA approved the artificial sweetener. Monsanto bought Searle, Rumsfeld got a $12 million bonus, and his groupthink's successful propaganda that aspartame is safe can still be found sprinkled and stirred into the modern logic of science and politics.

The reason Eyes Wide Open has included this article in its Denial and Other Escapes series is this: escaping accountability is built into the reasoning behind a groupthink's decision to use propaganda in the first place. The idea is to maximize gain and minimize risk. That is an assumption of the trauma theory that I use in this blog. Narcissistic gravity consistently seeks/functions to maximize disproportionately inequitable gains while minimizing (or eliminating) loss, and to escape accountability. The most powerful players in any harmful groupthink desire to profit at the expense of others. Capitalize--by convincing people they need products they didn't even know they wanted. Say whatever you need to say in order to be elected or re-elected, regardless of the cost to others when you don't mean what you say and won't do what you promised. While most malignant propaganda is driven by greed, fear, and hate (and therefore contempt), all a powermonger really needs is a lack of empathy, which commonly accompanies pathologically self-centered living and its zealous goals.

What You Can Do: The first thing any of us can do is to conduct a searching, fearless moral inventory. Yes, I borrowed those words from Alcoholics Anonymous Step 4; however, I am not referring to an investigation of past "wrongs" so much as one's present existence as Terry Real's "functional adult" state. He has also referred to this state of being as "relational mindfulness." Do I purposefully live a life of full respect; that is, do I live without giving or receiving contempt, and without carrying strongholds of contempt in my mind? Do I acknowledge with my voice and actions the humanity of my adversaries as well as my loved ones and allies? Do I sit patiently and peacefully in space with another person while holding a goal of grateful acceptance and without judgment? And if I live that way, is that the manner in which I cast my vote? Is that my attitude when I conduct my activism? Consider how you would answer those questions. It's okay to involve people close to you in this investigation, but only choose confidants who would call it like they see it.

After you humbly submit to the results of the above relational health quiz, consider what you expect of the politicians for whom you vote. Then ask yourself whether you regularly think freely and therefore vote based upon what you believe, or whether your beliefs and decisions--including the way you cast a ballot--are heavily influenced by a group you want to keep fitting in with, or loved ones you don't want to disappoint.

Third, consider how closely you scrutinize the information you consume. If you source-checked the hot links I provided in this article for credibility, good for you! You're on the right track. (If you source-checked them to potentially disqualify them because they don't "lean" the way you do or confirm your currently held biases, that's a different situation altogether, and a possible triangulated threat to your social health and emotional well-being.) Arguably, it has never been healthy or low-risk to accept a sales pitch, testimonials, or statements by authority without examining and questioning accuracy, motives, and predisposition. Caveat emptor, which is Latin for "let the buyer beware," is a law doctrine which goes beyond encouraging buyers to be aware of the risks of making a purchase; it places responsibility on the consumer to keep themselves from being naive to the defects in whatever they're buying.  While I have a serious principled beef against deceptive sellers and want them held accountable for illegal or immoral tactics, I think the attitude behind caveat emptor makes good risk management sense. I think its main idea can be extended to the presence of propaganda tactics and the ulterior objectives behind them.

In short, it behooves us to scrutinize the information we have consumed about all levels of policy and politicians, in order to have a fuller understanding of what we believe and what it is based upon. Sources of information don't have to be a full-fledged Cambridge Analytica with an influential "secret sauce" of data points to deceive or sway us into voting decisions.  My hope is that practically everyone takes the opportunity to check their own awareness of the role of propaganda in their opinions and convictions, and that they vote--in a fearlessly investigated state of self-understanding.