The Paul Krugmans, Huffington Posts, Michael Moores have no real effect on belief. Nobody reads a Krugman post or watches a Michael Moore movie and screams, “Revelation!” People like to be told what they already agree with to feel supported. Opponents like to be told what they disagree with to have something to opine on for its own sake. Political “supporter” is a misnomer. The “supporter” is really the supported. Propaganda is properly categorized as entertainment.
I thank George Carlin for making this obvious to me.
This just simply isn’t true. There are people out there who don’t have strong convictions, who watch Sicko, and say “wow, now I totally support socialized medicine.” Plenty of people who were indifferent about Iraq or Afghanistan get sent an article from HuffPo and say “whoah, this is whats happening over there?” Its not a matter of libertarians becoming democratic socialists and neocons becoming anti-war protesters, its about the people who were on the fence.
Also, if you were correct, it would have to apply to people like Ron Paul or Ayn Rand as well.
I disagree. It depends on how convicted people are. Mikachusetts is right that propaganda appeals to people who are on the fence and aren’t familiar with the arguments (basically it deals with the unengaged). I would never have become a libertarian if I didn’t understand the idea behind taxation, which no political movement besides libertarianism admits amounts to extortion. I’d have more respect for liberals and conservatives in general if they said, “yeah, it’s extortion, and it’s unfortunate, but it has to be done for X, Y, and Z” rather than have to listen to this democracy and social contract B.S.
There does come a point where you won’t change your mind after a while. Anybody who reads Krugman talk about specific policy proposals and data regarding those proposals I don’t think would shift from being an Austrian to a Neo-Keynesian overnight.
There are such things as ‘viewquakes’ that shatter your previous opinions. In fact if you took this to its logical extreme then no opinion would have ever changed. Any variation in opinions would have been due to our genes, we would simply be born with our opinions and no argument or proof by our parents or peers would change this. I think its safe to say that opinions can be persuaded by any form of media but it may be true that media like documentaries carries less persuasion than other media.
“Only a large-scale popular movement toward decentralization and self-help can arrest the present tendency toward statism… A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.”
Quote by: Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Author
Source: Forward to ‘Brave New World’, 1932
I have to agree with all the previous assessments. The idea that propaganda is nothing more than something to make people feel better about the way they already think, is just nonsense. Propaganda certainly has plenty of uses in recruiting new members to a cause or line of thinking. Sure people like reassurance, but what’s more reassuring than a lot more people agreeing with you?
I guarantee there are plenty of people who watch Michael Moore films or random news reports or even random HuffPost columns and do basically exactly what you said no one does. (Of course no one actually says “revelation!”, but they do say “wow…I had no idea” and their feelings and thinking change, even if only slightly.) Have these people get enough of these exposures and you’ve got a new indoctrinated Leftist. That’s where most of these people come from. It’s not like people are just born to think a certain way…as in that guy is predestined to be a Marxist and this guy is predestined to be a party line Republican, like that person is born a male and another is born a female, and then they go through life doing everything they do just to make themselves feel good and supported in their inborn ideology.
I have no idea why you would think that was the case.
I didn’t expect that to be taken quite so literally. My wording was trollishly exaggerative. So, defining the rule by the exception is not an argument against my point. Which is that propaganda is ineffective entertainment. People that believe they are propagandists are largely mistaken about the category of their expertise.
People that are “disengaged” don’t count because they are not switching positions and are already fundamentally biased in such a way that makes it natural to reach the suggested conclusions. I’m not surprised at that being the only argument against my assertion.
Bbnet, try to come up with something better than begging the question in a quote. Speaking of that quote, schoolteachers are categorically different from propagandists. They are behavioural trainers in prisons. That is a whole other level apart from the freely consumed arts about which I mean.
That makes absolutely no sense. If what you are saying were true—if entertainment was the rule of propaganda and not the exception, and propaganda was so ineffective as entertainment—it would not exist in such large quantities. Obviously it’s effective for something.
So I noticed. Perhaps you should pay more attention to your own posting if you’re going to be a dick to other people and insinuate they do what in fact you were doing.
On this forum in addition to others I see in general the same characteristic. A large chunk of the posts are self-satisfying and self-congratulatory. People like to make arguments that seem to them convincing from their own already convinced position. My reference to George Carlin was due to Carlin acting under the auspices of comedy shows as a forum for his uncomical ravings. So, my thesis here is what I have concluded ever more strongly after years of observation of what now looks to me like fixed sides tirelessly firing self-satisfying blanks at each other. Many people have become rich from it selling media, heading think tanks, etc. I can hardly see how anything else has changed.
I’ll set the record straight right now. I don’t make posts just to be banal and I’m not interested in interpersonal feud. The issue is, I don’t appreciate potshots in a conversation. The question was not rhetorical.
I tend to agree somewhat with Caley’s conclusion. I see the biggest use of most propaganda to serve as emotionally reinforcing pre-existing beliefs that people use heavily for their own self-identification.
Would that mean propaganda can’t be used to change beliefs? No of course people can be influenced. But perhaps people reach certain points of identification with a belief that unless they go through a very powerful catharthis, propaganda that goes against their belief is pre-judged instantly(and usually discarded).
I know a few people that won’t bother hearing anything from a Walter block lecture because they’ve already decided he’s an evil free-market fascist corporate leech before its began. Its why I’ve always been of the belief that although intellectual arguments are an excellelent and necessary foundation- emotional power is the most effective when it comes to showing people a different perspective and changing their beliefs. I would say that its the one weakness of most Libertarian propaganda compaerd to others- the arguments shown are very appealing to people who already understand them, but ignored by most because they don’t do much to capture their feelings.
Political propaganda, defined as communication created to affect policy, comes in many forms from subtle subconcious appeals to in your face orders.
While schoolteachers may be behavioral trainers in prisons, they too are agents of propaganda instilling beliefs in children which help perpetuate and support the state.
Regarding the talking heads and freely consumed arts, this is both entertainment and propaganda with varying degrees of effectiveness in both categories.
Most of the people acting as propagandist, as well as the consumers of the propaganda, are not aware of it, thanks to a good schooling, it just comes naturaly for them.
In summary, I believe the entertaining propaganda is much more effective than you realize. afterall nothing has changed and people still enjoy consuming it.
I partially agree with you. For example all the Global Warming hysteria failed to make an impression on the average Joe and Jane on the street. They didn’t care for it to begin with and may even have counterproductive from a certain point of view when the words “carbon tax” were first uttered. Joe and Jane don’t like new taxes, not one bit. But people already upholding those views got huge kicks out of the massive propaganda apparatus, seeing their belief on the main newspapers and even schoolchildren being forced to suffer through endless and boring Global Warming presentations.
But propaganda does indeed work, when it appeals to an emotional level. For example the recent earthquake in Japan provided an immense bonus for the anti-nuclear power movement which was beginning to stagnate. By playing on underlying fears the propaganda machine was able to achieve stunning successes. It was the same during the Great War. To “sell” an unpopular war to the American public Woodrow Wilson and his cronies employed every dirty trick in the book and finally succeed by presenting the Germans as a bunch of psychotic barbarians who must be stopped no matter the cost.
Caley, I agree in full. People do want to be told what they already believe. Now, this does not mean that no one ever changes his mind. People do, but they either a)go toward what they already believed but had no proof of, or 2) change their minds due to other factors.
I myself have always suspected of the fishiness of the state, but I’d never encountered any articulated proof, thus my ‘conversion’ to “austrianism” was not realy a conversion, but a ‘discovery’. On the other hand, if someone changes his mind, say form libertarian to conservative, I suspect there are underlying causes. So what the LvMI does is valuable because it allows those who’re already libertarians to discover their position, but it would be illusory to think that we can convince other people through argumentation. Molineux is probably right after all.