Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of information designed to shape public perception toward a specific goal or agenda. Such information is typically false or designed to misdirect, and a key sign of it being false is that dissenting narratives are suppressed. Throughout history, governments and industries have used propaganda to create and defend large-scale false narratives. This is an utterly unremarkable thing to say. No historian on the planet would contest it.
The pattern is that of a latent agenda driving the generation of false propaganda, seeking to culminate in the distillation of an ideology. Once the ideology is firmly rooted in the public imagination, the latent agenda can become patent, meaning it can be implemented in the broad light of day without material objection.
This framework has close historical analogues. The Hegelian Dialectic, the favourite of Marxists, talks about thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The so-called PRS model talks about problem-reaction-solution.
Before the distillation of an ideology is achieved, the false narrative must be protected from dissent by way of censorship. Those who try to expose the latent agenda are derided as “conspiracy theorists” or “deniers” of a purported problem. During the covid phenomenon, I framed this as a law dubbed Hudson’s Razor, stating that anything that is (1) presented as a global crisis (2) admitting only global solutions (3) amid suppression of dissent, is definitively a scam.
This is, of course, not to say that there can never be any such thing as a global crisis. If a volcano bigger than Krakatoa blew its top, we’d all know about it for years. But global solutions would be very unlikely. People in one place might prioritise buying blankets; in another, building greenhouses. And suppression of dissenters would be completely pointless. We wouldn’t need to call a blind man who couldn’t see the ash cloud a volcano-denier, or censor anyone who said the ash actually came from a different source. People would just get on with the job of dealing with less sunlight in multiple different ways.
It is difficult to fake a physical crisis with a tangible, visible threat. Telling people a volcano had gone boom when it hadn’t wouldn’t work if you lacked the capacity to fake an enormous ash cloud. So, the default pattern is to pretend there is an invisible threat that is a global crisis. The global solution can then be a form of “safety” whose efficacy exists only in a theory or in a model, and the suppression of dissent can include the customary allegation that all sceptics are “deniers” of the invisible threat. If the fear generation is implemented properly, nothing about the solution needs to make any sense. People will clamour for it....<<<Read More>>>...
