The Illusion of Dialogue
Conversing with the Propaganda Hyper-Agent
One of my favourite documentary series is called The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. In it, Curtis outlines the weaponization of the work of Sigmund Freud by his nephew, Edward Bernays.
Bernays quite literally wrote the book on Propaganda. He is dubbed the father of modern public relations and his work was used in corporations to manipulate the masses into buying products tied to a cultivated image of their self. He was so successful in selling the masses a version of their self image, that naturally he was recruited by the US government and its agencies to use those magic tricks on the public at scale. In his own words, Bernays was “engineering consent”.
"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, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of."
- Edward Bernays
The naiveté with which we now exist seems to suppose that all of these magic tricks have been packed away. But the rabbit has never gone back into the hat, I’m afraid.
In contrast to this, philosopher Jurgen Habermas advocated for the Public Sphere in which free and open dialogue occur amongst the citizenry of a democracy such that organic deliberation and decision making are made possible. Habermas argued that without a true Public Sphere we end up with a passive citizenry and what he called a representational culture. A representational culture is one in which a central arbiter of truth inserts that truth top-down on its citizens rather than the bottom-up process of the free and open Public Sphere.
But in the public sphere of the hyper-propagandized age, you have to be careful you are not speaking with the hyper-agent of propaganda. In fact, in most public discourse, you will certainly be encountering a set of inorganic, top-down ideas. So it is our task then, to strip these apart in natural dialogue. This doesn’t happen in a comment section. We’re going to need to commune with one another.
The problem as I see it is that a majority of the population seems to not understand that the rabbit is still out of its hat. Propaganda appears to be categorized as something that either used to happen, or something that the “other side” does.
The first step then, is for us all to recognize that we are at all times in the crosshairs of sophisticated information warfare. The playbook has been made public, so we have to understand that we (myself included of course) are all deeply propagandized. Our consent is always being engineered in a “democracy”. Whether it is selling you a car or a proposed amendment to a bill, you are being swayed in one direction or another.
Right now we are deceived into thinking we are engaging with the Public Sphere. There is a pseudo-dialogue where top-down ideas go to battle with more top-down ideas in the manipulated market of ideas. We don’t have free markets in the financial world, and we don’t have them at the level of information.
We would do well to aim at the communicative rationality that Habermas advocated for. Authentic communication between authentic participants. But the precondition of this is recognizing that each and every one of us is not immune to propaganda.
Communicative rationality of the Public Sphere also needs the integration of a contemplative rationality, the ability to step back and look at the framing that emerges from our dialogues. Natural dialogue itself is not immune to phase locking to rigid ideological attractors. This is why when dialogue approaches a stand still, stepping back and examining the frames we are using can introduce the right amount of entropy to reorganize into something productive.
This ties directly to yesterday’s entry on the necessity of our worldviews to be ever evolving. Breaking your frames and allowing for their organic reorganization is how worldviews evolve and avoid ossification.
These morning entries are limited in time and hence in scope. But perhaps this is all something for a longer form researched essay in the future.