Propagandism vs. Realism

1. Two Ideologies

Propagandism: An ideology that places great stock in the efficacy and importance of propaganda. It ascribes many problems in life and society to bad propaganda, and it looks to good propaganda to solve problems in life and society.

Realism: An alternative ideology that ascribes primary importance to the objective facts and relatively little import to the bullshit that people put out about them.

What I mean by “propaganda” is, roughly, persuasive content that is produced for some practical end, without regard to truth or evidence.

I have noticed that propagandism is a large and growing strain of contemporary leftism. Leftists think that bad propaganda is making other people disagree with leftism, and good propaganda is one of the keys to solving society’s problems.

I find this viewpoint utterly benighted.

2. Examples

There are many forms of “propaganda” that leftists place stock in (I’m using “propaganda” very broadly; nevermind whether this is a proper use of the word), which I generally find dumb. Let’s look at some examples of propagandist beliefs …

• Participation trophies: Children will feel bad if they lose a competition, and feelings are what really matter. Children will do better in the future if we make them feel good, which we can do by just giving everyone a trophy, or some kind of prize, regardless of their performance.

  • My comments: How stupid do you think your children are? They’re not going to think that they achieved something just because you gave them a trophy. If everyone gets it, they’re going to notice that everyone got it, and therefore that it means nothing.

  • They’ll also notice that you’re trying to deceive them, so they shouldn’t trust you, and at some point they might infer that they can’t trust any awards, honors, and compliments that adults give out, since adults are dishonest.

  • What really matters to your child’s future performance in any given endeavor is not how he feels at the moment, but things like his innate level of talent and the amount of work he puts in.

  • Telling people that they’re good at something they’re not is destructive and not compassionate. People need to know the actual facts about their abilities in order to rationally plan their futures. They don’t need patronizing lies or propaganda.

  • It doesn’t matter if someone momentarily feels slightly disappointed when they realize that they’re bad at something. Children are not babies. They’re not going to collapse into a gibbering puddle if they feel slight disappointment for a few seconds. (Even babies aren’t babies in this sense.) Growing up means accepting reality, even when it is mildly unpleasant. Why does it often seem like the kids are more grownup than the adults?

    

• Language policing: It’s of crucial importance that we use the right words for things. For instance, people are not “mentally retarded”; they are “mentally disabled”. Because the second one sounds better, and therefore it will avoid hurting people’s feelings.

  • Comment: “Mentally retarded” is not a slur, you idiots. It is the exact opposite of a slur: it is a euphemism. Because it sounded harsh to call these individuals “stupid”, we repurposed the word “retarded”, which means “slowed down” or “held back”, because it sounded better. There’s no point in switching to another euphemism.

  • Mentally retarded people know they’re mentally retarded. They’re not going to have a mental breakdown if they hear someone say that. Just because they’re retarded, does not mean they’re babies.

  • If you’re mentally retarded, your problem is your actual mental condition, not the word that other people are using to refer to it. Again, it is reality, not propaganda, that matters.

  • Similar remarks apply to calling people “unhoused” or “persons experiencing homelessness” rather than “homeless people”, calling people “differently abled” rather than “disabled”, etc. These things don’t improve anyone’s life; they just make you sound like a patronizing propagandist.

• Speech: If someone disagrees with you, you should just try to silence them, because audiences cannot be expected to evaluate evidence and figure out what’s true. A large portion of them will just swallow whatever propaganda the Bad Guys put out, regardless of the facts, which is why the only counter is to silence them. E.g., the reason why there is racism is that people are allowed to put out racist propaganda.

  Also, the way to communicate that someone is wrong is not by stating the reasons why they are wrong; it is by refusing to talk to them. Because debating them “gives them a platform” and “legitimizes” their perspective.

  • Comment: This is an increasingly common theme for woke leftists in recent years. Guess what? The rest of society does not accept you as the authorities on political truth. Academia and the mainstream media have already undermined their own credibility, to the point that no one cares if you say that X isn’t a legitimate perspective.

  • By refusing to debate, you’re not de-legitimizing the other side. You’re de-legitimizing yourself. The audience will assume that the reason you’re not debating is probably that you are unable to defend your views, because the other side in fact has better arguments.

  • This sort of behavior, where left-wing elites refuse to discuss certain people or ideas, is exactly why the rest of society doesn’t and shouldn’t trust them. Normal people can tell that the elites are trying to manipulate them.

• Stereotype threat: A favorite progressive theory is that the main reason why (e.g.) blacks underperform whites on standardized academic tests by about 1 standard deviation is “stereotype threat”: because black people know that there is a stereotype that they do worse on these tests, they experience more stress when taking them, which makes them perform worse. It is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s not their actual abilities; it’s just the bad, racist propaganda out there that is making them perform worse.

  • Comment: Of course that is false, and there never was any evidence for it. None of the studies claim that the entire black/white gap is due to stereotype threat. They claim that the gap can be increased (relative to the 1 SD gap that normally exists) by reminding the test-taker of their race before the test.

  • And experiments done using actual administrations of standardized tests find no effect.

  • Again, there’s a common theme: propagandists think that messaging matters more than reality. That even if A has just as much ability as B, if A merely gets exposed to messages that tell him, groundlessly, that he has lower ability, then suddenly he’ll act as if he has lower ability. Realists think that the person’s actual ability is more important than the messaging they receive.

• Education: Propagandists generally place great stock in education. E.g., they think an important solution to crime is to simply teach people to be pro-social. The solution to racism is to teach people that racism is bad. This could be through formal courses, but also through things like advertisements and movies. If people just get the right propaganda from the elites, they’ll accept the correct views.

  • Comment: No, they won’t. Criminals don’t commit crimes because nobody explained to them why it’s bad. Criminals don’t care what “the authorities” say. If you try to teach an anti-social person not to do X, Y, and Z, he’ll probably think, “Oh, sounds like X, Y, and Y are things I might want to do.”

  • Normal people resent being preached to about your ideology, and they can tell when you’re inserting ideology into movies and advertisements. That doesn’t make them agree with that ideology if they didn’t already; it just makes them distrust elites.

  • Again, most of society does not accept left-wing, intellectual elites as the authorities on truth. That’s just a complete delusion on the part of those elites.

• Affirmative action & role models: Women and minorities need role models, and those role models have to belong to their same identity group. Therefore, we should promote women and minorities (except Asians, since they’re already doing well) to visible, high-status positions, even if they are less qualified than some white male competitors. This will also help to reduce racism and sexism by showing everyone that people of all types can do those jobs.

  • Comment: How stupid do you think people are? People will not just think that everyone is equally good because you say that. E.g., students will not just think all their professors are equally good; they will notice that some of them are smarter or more accomplished than others.

  • Affirmative action means having higher standards for white men to get into a given position than for women and minorities. The inevitable result of that is that when people observe the people in those positions, they will notice that the white men are the best. So what ordinary people (including minorities and women) will naturally infer is that all groups are not equally good, and that white men (plus Asians) are better at those jobs. Example: I bet Claudine Gay’s students noticed that she was less impressive than most Harvard professors; they probably did not just believe she was a brilliant scholar because leftists said that. They probably figured out that she got her job because of her race and sex, plus personal connections.

3. General Lessons

Why propaganda fails

Propaganda can absolutely work in some conditions. If a single ideological group controls all or nearly all information, they may be able to deceive the population; think of the former Soviet Union or present-day China. People will know that they’re being misled, but they won’t recognize the full extent of it and will probably systematically underestimate the perfidy of the government.

But propaganda doesn’t work in a society like the U.S., where there is free access to information from a huge variety of sources with different perspectives. In that case, people will easily see your propaganda for what it is.

It doesn’t matter

All the lying and misleading is pretty much for nothing even if you manage to trick people into believing what you want. The supposed emotional benefits (like someone feeling slightly better for a few seconds) are trivial, and there’s no evidence of any downstream benefits. E.g., there’s no evidence that getting participation trophies makes your life go better, or that using different words for things makes any significant difference to anything, or that “anti-racist” propaganda reduces discrimination.

I don’t know where progressives got this idea about the amazing efficacy of messaging. Maybe they’re thinking that average citizens are basically like children who believe whatever the “adults” (the intellectual elites) say.

Propaganda backfires

When you’ve been engaging in propaganda for decades, at some point people are going to distrust everything you say. Thus, even when academics or government officials are telling the truth, a large contingent of Americans will refuse to believe them.

If academics scrupulously engaged in open and disinterested debate about politically-relevant facts, without constantly looking over their shoulders at “which side” their conclusions might support, then when they formed a consensus, we could believe it. But the fact is that academics deliberately censor themselves and each other for political reasons, and that’s no longer a secret. When the left decides that a particular message is politically useful, academics across the profession get on board with it, or at least avoid challenging it.

So we can’t trust academic consensus about politically relevant facts. This is a problem because sometimes, the academic world might actually discover important truths that the rest of society needs to know, and they won’t be believed.

Reality matters

We actually need to know the facts of external reality in order to figure out how to deal with them. We don’t need propaganda that is comforting to our tribe; we need the truth. Propagandists act as though discourse was just an insular strategy game where the only stakes are the feelings you feel while playing the game. But public discourse is part of how we decide what to actually do, in the real world. Our actions are going to fail, both on an individual level and on a societal level, if we’re basing our beliefs on what allegedly makes people feel better rather than on what is in fact true.