Just finished reading an article from Caitlin Johnstone that I thought was quite interesting with the same name as this thread, and thought others here might also find it interesting and perhaps offer a constructive comment or 2. Below, I'll quote the introduction to the article, but if you're not in the mood for reading so much text, you may want to "skip ahead", as it were, to a video Caitlin links to in her article. It's here:
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June 28, 2023
The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.
It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.
Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.
Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.
It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.
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Full article:
Caitlin Johnstone: Why Propaganda Works | Consortium News
**
June 28, 2023
The primary reason people tend to remain committed to their propaganda-installed perspectives has a simple, well-documented explanation.
It’s not really deniable that Western civilization is saturated with domestic propaganda geared toward manipulating the way the public thinks, acts, works, shops and votes.
Mass media employees have attested to the fact that they experience constant pressure to administer narratives which are favorable to the political status quo of the U.S. empire. The managers of empire have publicly acknowledged that they have a vested interest in manipulating public thought.
Casual naked-eye observation of the way the mass media reliably support every U.S. war, rally behind the U.S. foreign policy objective of the day and display overwhelming bias against empire-targeted governments makes it abundantly obvious that this is happening when viewed with any degree of critical thought.
To deny that these mass-scale manipulations have an effect would be as absurd as denying that advertising — a near trillion-dollar industry — has an effect.
It’s just an uncomfortable fact that as much as we like to think of ourselves as free-thinking sovereign agents immune to outside influence, human minds are very hackable. Manipulators understand this, and the science of modern propaganda which has been advancing for over a century understands this with acute lucidity.
By continually hammering our minds with simple, repeated messaging about the nature of the world we live in, propagandists are able to exploit glitches in human cognition like the illusory truth effect, which causes our minds to mistake the experience of having heard something before with the experience of having heard something that is true.
Our indoctrination into the mainstream imperial worldview begins when we are very young, largely because schooling is intertwined with the same power structures whose information interests are served by that worldview and because powerful plutocrats such as John D. Rockefeller actively inserted themselves into the formation of modern schooling systems.
Our worldview is formed when we are young in the interests of our rulers, and from there cognitive biases take over which protect and reinforce that worldview, typically preserving them in more or less the same form for the rest of our lives.
This is what makes it so hard to convince someone that their beliefs about an issue are falsehoods born of propaganda.
**
Full article:
Caitlin Johnstone: Why Propaganda Works | Consortium News