Illusion of Choice – the weakness of the West to see propaganda

Short disclaimer.  Chomsky’s work on media and persuasion obviously stand as great analysis of our culture, regardless his recent comments and opinions such as ‘the unvaccinated should do the right thing and isolate themselves from society’.  The argument to cancel or nullify someone’s past work based on current events on either side is wrong.

(A similar side-note disclaimer - I hadn’t heard of this.  This even applies to the themes set out in The Matrix that so many use to describe the new normal – ‘red pill or blue bill’ etc.  The concept of the movies does not change even though the Wachowski brothers are now trans sisters and claim the series is about the trans movement.)

A few months ago, I meant to revisit this topic in relation to my previous notes on recognizing propaganda.  Over the past two years I kept getting the question ‘why can’t more people see there’s something else going on?’  My short response is that people in (mainly) Western nations haven’t seen or experienced propaganda used on them in such a negative way.  By ‘negative’ I mean the opposite of what figures like Bernays and Chomsky have documented – the ‘necessary’ or ‘noble’ lies and illusions needed to guide the masses to behave and vote ‘the right way’ in Western democracies.  Western nations, especially the ‘winners’ of the previous world order (the USA, Britain etc.) have for decades lived under a propaganda system that lets them ‘spread democracies’ around the undeveloped world.  The spreading of democracy is the euphemism or ‘noble lie’ for what they are really doing – installing ‘western values’ and profiting while doing it (oil control) in order to keep nations from ‘going the wrong way’.  Their ‘right way’ is the materialist consumption society – the petrodollar dependency system.  The propaganda campaigns in the Western nations had to be aimed at the domestic population so as not to confuse the public.  For example, Westerners were never to question wars or deaths in Nicaragua, Philippines, El Salvador, Iraq or Palestine due to Western aggression – ‘we’re spreading democracy’.  People in the West generally had very good livelihoods, albeit based on empty consumption and materialism, and so were content to listen to the 30 second news clips and never piece together the big picture of global affairs.

Back around 2001 to about 2006, when I was jarred awake by the ‘let’s invade Iraq due to 9/11’ script, I was inhaling history books and books on social control, propaganda, and ‘public relations’.  (I still like how ‘propaganda’ only changed to ‘public relations’ since they not only needed to sell wars to the masses, but wars AND materialist consumption.  That and the German leadership of the 1930s and 40s used “Propaganda” as their guide book and so a nicer name was needed).  The “9/11 = Iraq” narrative for me was the first time the propaganda machine looked so blatant.  Up till then, propaganda in the West was usually quite soft and subtle, keeping people compliant with consumption so they wouldn’t care about what their leaders and country was doing abroad.  This propaganda system in a democratic society was necessary according to Bernays, who describes public relations:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.”

In ‘Manufacturing Consent’ and ‘Necessary Illusions’, Chomsky (and Herman) showed extensively how media and government together formed public opinion and guided the masses, per Bernays above.  The decades-long manipulation mainly involved television and print media, which helped reduce the attention spans of viewers, ensuring that big-pictures of world events would never be pieced together.  ‘Manufacturing Consent’ also outlines the extensive government ownership and control of the entire media landscape.  It took a generation or two, but by the 1980s or so, a sufficiently-large majority of the population trusted and got their opinions from mainstream media via television.  The adherence to the internet and the social media age also took almost a full generation.  From full public internet access and mobile phone uptake around the late 1990s to where we are in the 2010s and 20s – almost all people over the age of 12 or 13 are socially-pressured to have 24/7 online connections upon which full narratives can be fed.

As with the parallels in cultural reset comparing the 1970s to the 2020s, the massive shift in ‘democracy’ during this ‘reset’ is similar to the crisis of democracy Chomsky describes in the 1970s. He describes a Trilateral Commission study in the 70s named ‘governability of democracies’.  This study noted the new source of national power by way of the media:

“The Trilateral Commission study reflects the perceptions and values of liberal elites from the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the leading figures of the Carter administration. On the right, the perception is that democracy is threatened by the organizing efforts of those called the "special interests," a concept of contemporary political rhetoric that refers to workers, farmers, women, youth, the elderly, the handicapped, ethnic minorities, and so on-in short, the general population. In the U.S. presidential campaigns of the 1980s, the Democrats were accused of being the instrument of these special interests and thus undermining "the national interest," tacitly assumed to be represented by the one sector notably omitted from the list of special interests: corporations, financial institutions, and other business elites.”

and

“In accordance with the prevailing conceptions in the U.S., there is no infringement on democracy if a few corporations control the information system: in fact, that is the essence of democracy. In the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the leading figure of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays, explains that ‘the very essence of the democratic process’ is ‘the freedom to persuade and suggest,’ what he calls ‘the engineering of consent.’ ‘A leader,’ he continues, ‘frequently cannot wait for the people to arrive at even general understanding...Democratic leaders must play their part in engineering consent to socially-constructive goals and values,’ applying ‘scientific principles and tried practices to the task of getting people to support ideas and programs’; and although it remains unsaid, it is evident enough that those who control resources will be in a position to judge what is ‘socially constructive,’ to engineer consent through the media, and to implement policy through the mechanisms of the state. If the freedom to persuade happens to be concentrated in a few hands, we must recognize that such is the nature of a free society. The public relations industry expends vast resources ‘educating the American people about the economic facts of life’ to ensure a favorable climate for business. Its task is to control ‘the public mind’ ...”

The reason I parallel thoughts from Illusions and Consent is that those works highlighted how the Western (mostly American) democracies were coerced to behave the correct way, usually in supporting wars overseas in places like Nicaragua, Vietnam, Chile, etc.  It highlighted that a sufficient proportion of any and all people in any society can be swayed via propaganda.  Throughout the 1900s it was the West being propagandized to in order to support Western world dominance.  The main push from print to television media was perfected in time for the shift in the 1970s to move the masses on to the petrodollar/fiat debt-based economy.  The internet and social media shifted behaviors sharply in the 2010’s via ‘wokeness’ persuasion.  And now, this perfected, two-way system of propaganda has been used to shift the West to the point of destroying itself – a main goal of the ‘reset’.

From Illusions:

“Senator William Fulbright observed in Senate hearings on government and the media in 1966

‘It is very interesting, that so many of our prominent newspapers have become almost agents or adjuncts of the government; that they do not contest or even raise questions about government policy.’"

John Stuart Mill: "Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil. There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides."

“The propaganda model does not assert that the media parrot the line of the current state managers in the manner of a totalitarian regime; rather, that the media reflect the consensus of powerful elites of the state-corporate nexus generally.”

You have to ask, if all this persuasion was so perfected and easy for them all these decades with print, television and radio before the internet, how much more targeted and effective has the internet and social media made this?  For decades now the internet and wireless access has been pushed as a ‘fundamental’ human right.  And the continuous upgrades of wireless from the original analog cell phone to 2G/3G/4G and past 5G have always lured the masses for more and faster connectivity.  Having worked on all these platforms, including sharing them with China, I clearly saw governments owning, controlling, and promoting these systems to people in the name of convenience, security, and safety.  All the while these systems replace these with fear, propaganda, dependency, and coercion.

A good analysis on the propaganda of these recent systems is described by Propaganda in Focus.  (Also in Technocracy.news).  The article aims to provide ‘an overview of technology as the claimed saviour of humanity and offer critical analysis of the propaganda that seeks to integrate humankind into this global project of everlasting technological development. We see technocratic tyranny as a state of existence maintained by the captains of “Big Digital” — as Michael Rectenwald observes: “the mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, apps, and the developing … monopolies … [that] will either … be incorporated by the state, or become elements of a new corporate state power.”’

It is a long article that summarizes the same types of propaganda tools used throughout history only now applied with so much more precision due to the two-way nature of AI and algorithms (e.g. the Social Dilemna).  The concentration of ownership and control of print and television MSM throughout the 1900’s continued even more concentrated in the online and social media world.  The façade is maintained as in the government ‘investigates’ or ‘steps in’ to mediate or regulate the platforms, but all the while these entities are one in the same.

Bernays, Chomsky, and others revealed so much of how we have no chance to avoid being persuaded to act in a way ‘they’ want us to.  Even if 10 or 15% of people see it, the majority push them along to the ‘new normal’.  Of course, the major difference today (to put it mildly), is that this same persuadable portion of the West is being noble-lied to in order to push them down socially, financially, spiritually and educationally.  Just like in past mass-propaganda campaigns, this may seem blatantly-obvious to some, and even necessary to some (for our own good).  The huge portion in the middle will just go along so as not to jeopardize their material conveniences.  The long-held notion that Western democratic societies are the only true ones where government has the best interest of its citizens in mind makes us much easier targets.

In the 2001-2006 period when American and British propaganda was so blatant to many people, I found myself at my tech-job surrounded by a fairly substantial majority who saw this.  In our lab of about 15 engineers, many from overseas, about 12 of us discussed how simple and persuasive the ‘let’s invade Iraq – 9/11’ mantra was.  But we all agreed it was an obvious propaganda campaign to sway public opinion in support of ‘spreading democracy’.  The minority, Western-born engineers disagreed and held the ‘West is Best’ default position. A good portion of my colleagues were from countries whose governments regularly lied to them via crude propaganda in an outright totalitarian or autocratic form (Eastern EU, Iran, etc.)  They all knew their governments lied and had a distrust for the official narrative, and knew that all governments use persuasion in some form.  It's just that the typical Westerner has lived with the long-held assumption that propaganda “only happens in other countries”, not in our robust, free democracies.  Due to this default assumption, it makes us all the more susceptible and blind to our own leaders using the same tactics as always.  For many, the anchor of sanity in their views on society is locked to the position that our governments and systems should always be trusted.  With social media, cancellations, and ‘silo-ing’ of online opinion, the age-old aim of propaganda – to make one feel they are alone in their opinion – is easily-reinforced.

As an ending example, for us here in Canada specifically, it is almost impossible to believe we have been coerced and manipulated for most people.  Similar to many other countries, we have been soaking in ‘nudge’ coercion, as outsourced by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT).  In her book ‘State of Fear’, Laura Dodsworth outlines the many groups and teams used to heighten the level of threat and fear throughout the ‘pandemic’.  Usually when there’s a true pandemic, people are sufficiently-frightened without ad campaigns.  From an article on Dodsworth:

“In Britain, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), unofficially known as the Nudge Unit, was set up in 2010 under Prime Minister David Cameron. BIT is now a profit-making company with offices in the US, France, Australia, and Canada.  Canada not only hosts a BIT office in Toronto; it has its very own unit. A Toronto Star article in February 2021 noted that Dr Teresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, had referenced a behavioural insight team located within the Privy Council Office. It is called the Impact and Innovation Unit and was set up in 2017. The Star’s Susan Delacourt remarks that the role the Impact Unit played in Canada’s Covid messaging is a “social-science experiment” one that “may have given government clues on how to modify citizen’s behaviour for other big global issues – such as climate change, for instance.”

In her book, Dodsworth documents many aspects of propaganda that the public was soaking in via MSM and social media.  Every aspect of the theatre is planned: the jarring yellow-red colored borders around ads and signs; the wording and delivery of government speeches and decrees (even the body language of the speaker); the constant droning of danger and fear all around. Today, how blatant do these pictures appear? Okay trick question - this applies to C19 and Chimpanzee-Pox equally.

Since Westerners for the last few generations have been soaking in consumption and materialism propaganda, combined with the virtuous ‘we’re spreading democracy’ propaganda, the majority of citizens feel as if ‘bad’ propaganda only happens in other backwards countries, not ours.  This complacency and naivete made our societies ripe for propaganda targeting for the ‘pandemic’ and its true long-term goals.  The tools outlined in Necessary Illusions have been amplified and sharpened via the last 20 years of online life.  Young people in the 1990s had access to works such as Chomsky’s and others almost as common knowledge.  You could tune out of television and remove your brain from soaking in the propaganda.  The same can be done for our young today – recognize the history of propaganda and behavior control, and realize the same (only worse) is constantly being done to you via social media and technology.  Life in the real world remains key even if we need to use technology to participate.