Swarthout’s Reviews > How Propaganda Works > Status Update

Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, wrote in his diary, “President emphasized that you have to face that the whole [welfare] problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this, while not appearing to…. Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.”

One characteristic effect of propaganda in a liberal democracy will be to erode empathy for the perspectives of a group in a population, while presenting itself as not so doing.

It may be, for example, that the real explanation of the effectiveness of fear for the decision to invade Iraq was the lack of the average American’s ability to imagine himself as a member of a population being invaded and heavily aerially bombed by a vastly more powerful military force, and that in turn was the consequence of stereotypes about Arab Muslims that robbed us of the capacity for empathy toward them.

Prisoners have become dehumanized as a consequence. They now serve as a strategic instrument in politics. A politician summons up crime to elicit fear, and then offers himself as the instrument to satisfy the desire for retribution (though the desire is for retribution of the fear caused by that very politician).

It is not reasonable to propose a policy that, from the perspective of another, is unreasonable. The normative ideal of reasonableness is the demand “to live politically with others in the light of reasons all might reasonably be expected to endorse.”

Advertising: A contribution to public discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, but in the service of a goal that is irrelevant to those very ideals.

Lying too is a betrayal of the rational will. But it is a different kind of betrayal of the rational will than propaganda. At least with lying, one purports to provide evidence. Propaganda is worse than that. It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all.