No Such Thing As Propaganda

With the world being in a constant state of war, be it political, economical, territorial, or any other kind of war for that matter, we’ve been subjected to the effect of propaganda.

A word that we’ve heard over and over, yet it still remains a word that is widely misunderstood.

In its definition we can see that propaganda is nothing more than a communication tool used to spread information and ideas in order to influence people’s opinions, mostly by not giving all the facts, or, only emphasising one viewpoint.

However, what we often fail to see is that no matter what our view on a subject is, no matter what our ideology is, we as people think that only the other side is brainwashed by propaganda. This in itself makes us believe that our views are to be taken as true value, while those who are unfortunate fall under the effect of lies told by the media.

We Are All Brainwashed, Yet None Of Us Is

As we have seen throughout the years, and as we have heard so many times, history is written by the victor, so does this mean that the only information that is not propaganda is the information given by the said victor? Well, yes, kind of.

History has always been defined by wars, even though most of them for territorial gain, there’s always one slept on fact about them. The winning said gets to spread their culture, with it they are spreading their ideology. Often leading to forsaking previous ideologies, deeming them as barbaric, inhumane and downright vile. This has been the case since the dawn of time, the Romans spreading their culture and ideology throughout Europe and Africa, the Ottomans, British, Spanish, French, etc., are all good examples of how through territorial gain, cultures and ideologies are brought to the verge of extinction.

However, saying that the only reason why these empires were successful was because of their military power would be incorrect, as one of the most important tools in war is propaganda itself.

“Propaganda is speech that irrationally closes off certain options that should be considered. This is related to the classical sense of propaganda, but does not require as a goal immediate action. Action could be reached by several steps of propaganda, in the sense of biased speech. I shall call this propaganda as biased speech” — Jason Stanley

If we believe that what Jason Stanley is saying is true, then we can come to the conclusion that by irrationally closing off ideas that should be considered, we fall into a rabbit hole where we justify our horrible actions simply because we believe it is the only thing, the right thing, to do.

From Governments To Corporations

In the modern day propaganda has went from the most useful tool of governments to the most useful tool of corporations and media. The most widely known occurrence of such an event was when American sugar companies paid off scientists to blame cholesterol and fats as the leading cause for health problems.

Having the power to influence our opinions and beliefs through social media, companies have become experts in using propaganda in order to increase their profits, cause irrational fears and divide the people through aggressive marketing plots that share messages that are downright dystopian.

Turning consumerism into a weapon, these companies aim to form cliques with the only goal of shaming anyone and everyone who doesn’t own their products. This is mostly present in the mobile phone industry, where people are either diehard fans for Apple products or fanatics for Android products. Conversation between these two opposing forces often result in insults rather than a logical discussion, further causing a rift between the people.

We can see that propaganda keeps evolving with the times, being able to adapt to any situation, and making facts and information less viable for people to access, with a goal of forcing down a product that even though it’s harmful to us, it’s still “less” harmful than any other product on the market.

Fighting The Power

So if propaganda is always present in our lives, should we just give up and call it a day? Become the happy consumers that it wants us to be? Support ideologies that we know are wrong yet we are left with no choice but to comply? Of course not.

As it has been throughout history, the only way to battle propaganda is to stay informed, not just by different media but through the most important way we humans have, connections and discussions. We are all prone to be misinformed, still, the only way to fix this problem is through constant debates and discussions with our peers, suppressing our dislike for our differences and instead of fighting, we talk them out.

The only thing propaganda can’t influence is our rational thinking, and the only way to think rationally is to have genuine heart to heart conversations, especially with those that we do not agree with.