Tag: Propaganda

The Ideological Assault on Society

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

Helpful information leaflets distributed by the Ad Council in their 1976 campaign to educate the average American.

“-isms” are dangerous things. Weighty ideologies with wide sweeping narratives packed into a neat little bundle, whose slogans are repeated ad-nauseam until the word itself becomes the message and any empirical weight the narrative may have had recedes into the background. Capitalism, Marxism, Constitutional Originalism, Fascism, Liberalism, Socialism, Anarchism, Statism or Nihilism. Thinking in such terms, or worse self-identifying with them, is often the death knell of actual thought. Much more ominously: action in defense of the ideology gains a higher moral prerogative than the consequences of the action itself. The only reasonable course in drawing inspiration from such streams of thought is to choose to consciously grapple with the inherent messiness of the fact that no fixed system of beliefs will ever offer permanent solutions in a human society living on an exponential technological slope. Looking at population growth from a Malthusian perspective, an English lord who died almost a hundred years before the discovery of penicillin, seems almost as daft as criticizing labor relations in China for being Communist, where it doesn’t seem like the workers have much control over the means of production.

A striking aspect of very strong “-ism” people is how they tend to consciously or unconsciously mirror their supposed ideological rivals. For example, one of the best sources of quantitative Marxist analysis on wealth and power in society is the leading business newspaper the Financial Times (FT); with the caveat that all the values are reversed. This point is repeatedly brought up by the hosts of the alternative media outlet Novara Media who alternate between self-identifying as either Socialist or Communist, yet whose diverse roster of guests on their Downstream podcast from across the political spectrum almost all concur that FT is the world’s leading source of news. For college students, maybe these “-isms” are not so dangerous, unless they happen to hold green-cards and their “-isms” run afoul of the present US administration. The real danger to society at large is when people wielding inordinate amounts of power and influence and who, crucially, are unaccountable to the public, are true believers in one “-ism” or another. Read more »

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Saying ‘No’: On Power And Reality

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Sharpie-altered map showing a falsified projection of hurricane Dorian’s projected landfall in 2019. Image credit: The White House/public domain

Politics does not come naturally to me. Part of it is because I have a tendency to be interested mostly in the view sub specie aeternitatis, in the deep truths of the world, what it is, what we are, and how it all hangs together, rather than in the accidents of human squabbling. I like to uphold an idealized image of myself as engaged in the pursuit of Truth and Beauty, and there seems to be little of either in politics.

Yet this is a stance of luxury. An ideal world may permit the secluded scholar in the ivory tower to disengage from worldly affairs, safe in the certainty that everyone’s base needs are met. But we very much do not live in this world: people suffer needlessly because of bad politics. To disengage is to be complicit in this suffering, in the last consequence. So while, with the late, great Daniel Dennett, I begrudge every hour spent worrying about politics, I find it rarely leaves my mind these days, romantic pursuit of capital-T Truth notwithstanding.

The other reason I prefer to avoid politics is that I’m not very good at it. The mode of thought that unravels complex interpersonal alliances, social scheming and behind-the-scenes maneuvering is difficult for me. Even in social settings, I often find myself having missed some subtext entirely obvious to others. This is self-reinforcing: my lack of interest feeds my lack of ability, due to not engaging with it enough to get better, and my lack of ability makes developing an interest difficult.

But there is an opportunity in being bad at things: it means you get to go slow. If you don’t grasp a mechanism in the large, break it down into its components; if you lack the intuition for great leaps, be explicit along every searching step. That way, sometimes, the outsider looking in might even notice something buried beneath the implicit assumptions just obvious to the seasoned practitioner (or expose themselves as a know-nothing out of their lane).

Thus I write about politics only with some trepidation and in the hopes that my own halting explorations might be of use to others who, like me, have been left dumbfounded by recent events. Read more »