amidwesterndoctor | One of my favorite fables is The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs, which concludes with the owner deciding he wants more gold than the goose can produce by laying eggs and cuts it open to get the rest, only to discover nothing is there and losing everything as a consequence of his greed. The nature of many industries are to voraciously expand as much as possible, and since the pharmaceutical industry has established a monopoly on the practice of medicine (and thus “life or death”), this “growth” can be gotten away with to the point the ever-growing healthcare spending now accounts for one-fifth of our GDP.
My sincere hope with COVID-19 was that the flagrant greed of the pharmaceutical companies would finally awaken the populace to their conduct and end pharma’s Golden Goose (a few signs of which are now emerging as childhood vaccine uptake has dropped). A critical reason why this awakening is possible now is because the traditional form of propaganda, regardless of how much further developed it becomes, is no longer able to function in the modern environment created by the internet.
A fascinating article (by a multidisciplinary collaboration aiming to reform propaganda) I read on this subject makes the case that since anyone can now create their own evidence for competing narratives, the vertical advantage previously held by those with the resources to monopolize the airways with a tailored message has evaporated. For example, with no cost except my own time, I can take a day out of my life to put together a well-thought-out rebuttal to the media’s current propaganda campaign which is seen and believed by thousands upon thousands of people. If it was just me, it probably would not matter, but there are many, many, many, more people doing the exact same thing as we speak and it is my belief that they have played a large role in shaping the direction of history over the last seven years.
Because of this, the old models of propaganda simply don’t work anymore, and each media platform has been trying to combat this reality with stricter and stricter censorship (especially online) alongside more and more audacious lies. Each time they do it, however, it simply leaves the public with the side effects of excessive propaganda: being more confused, fragmented, polarized, and less trusting of authoritative sources than they were before, exactly what every propaganda campaign for a national interest strives to avoid.
At this point, the article’s authors see three paths forward. Continue our current path (which will likely prove disastrous), adopt a Chinese-style system of complete internet censorship (which many in Big Tech and likely other industries are pushing for but many are effectively resisting), or adopt the alternative to mass propaganda originally proposed when all of this started a century ago (Elon Musk through his conduct at Twitter and elsewhere appears to endorse this option).
A central debate that waged since the early days of propaganda was if it was acceptable in a Democracy. Its proponents argued that society had become too complex for the average citizen to be able to make decisions of importance, that propaganda was remarkably effective in meeting the needs of the nation (e.g. winning the world wars), and if the government did not use it, others like the Nazis would use it against us and take over the world. Its opponents however were adamant a Democracy could not exist if it was run by propaganda and argued the solution to all of this was to improve the educational standards so the masses could understand and actively participate in the complex decisions of the modern era.
These two sides vied for control (e.g. America used propaganda throughout World War 2 on its citizens, but after the war, doing so was banned by the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948). In tandem with increasing corruption in our government, in 2012 Obama signed the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, essentially repealing the 1948 law under the need to support the war on terror. This rapidly accelerated the glut of government propaganda citizens were fed and I suspect that glut played a key role in killing the government’s Golden Goose of propaganda.
In many ways, it appears the tables have reversed from how they were a century ago, as it is now the propagandists rather than the crowds that lack the sophistication to keep up with the complexity of the current era (e.g. message boards at the periphery of the internet can produce meme campaigns that run circles around institutional sources of propaganda like the CIA or CNN).
For all of these reasons, as the authors of the aforementioned article mentioned it may be in everyone’s interest, including those in power, to take the third choice and switch to the model originally advocated for by John Dewey. Focus on creating an educational system that creates critically thinking citizens who actively participate in the decision-making process in order to arrive at the best result for society (e.g. not sacrificing citizens is secret for the “greater good”) and design internet platforms that foster an open discourse rather than aggressively promoting specific narratives while censoring dissenting opinions or incentivizing inflammatory and polarizing content.
With everyday citizens empowered by the Internet now seeking and gaining access to databases for themselves, we face a choice. Either drop the pretense of being an open society, close off access, and solidify the gap between “the masses” and the “expert class,” or build the education and information infrastructure necessary to become a more open society.
I am very hopeful for this future but simultaneously recognize that power is one of the hardest things to let go of, so we will likely see a very rocky transition as we move towards it. In the meantime, I believe one of the most important things you can do is begin to open your eyes to the common PR techniques out there. Once you do, it's astounding how differently everything looks.
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