You're Not Immune To Propaganda

ready here we go propaganda is always obvious in retrospect today you look at the posters the films the cartoons from World War II and the Cold War and it's really clear what's going on it's obvious you see the emotions that are being played on you see the symbolism of everything it's propaganda and it looks like it that's right and I'm an American twenty years after the start of the Iraq War this is what the bush years look like Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support Terror an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder the Iraqi regime has plotted to develop Anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of Evil arming to threaten the Peace of the world [Music] today we know that Saddam Hussein never had wmds he wasn't responsible for the anthrax attacks and he wasn't funding Al Qaeda all the justifications for the Iraq war that made it out to be a battle between good and evil that convinced millions of Americans their army should invade another country and that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths were unfounded and spread at times knowingly by senior government officials and major news outlets when we think of propaganda this is what usually comes to mind war and lies very attractively packaged discourse to get people to fight but there is much more to propaganda than the flashy stuff propaganda can be and actually thrives when it's mundane we should talk definitions Encyclopedia Britannica defines propaganda as the dissemination of information facts arguments rumors half truths or lies to influence public opinion If we're honest the less sensationalist way to describe most propaganda is influential rhetoric or maybe advertising something doesn't need to be a lie to be propaganda it doesn't need to come from the government and it doesn't need to be about war or another country being the root of all evil if you don't like this video for example you can call it propaganda if you want it technically fits that description there's no such thing as unbiased media and I openly admit this Channel's socialist bent so this is influential rhetoric but most of us don't use the word propaganda correctly like the very uptight people at Britannica we tend to think of propaganda more like Edward Bernays the guy credited with developing modern public relations back in the 1920s Bernays described propaganda as quote the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses unlike Bernays though most of us think this is a bad thing he said it was an important element in Democratic Society that's because Bernays had a terrible understanding of what democracy is Bernay saw democracy not as a society where people govern themselves striving to defuse power equally between all and organize fairly their interdependence but as a society that could be managed by what he called quote invisible governors he believed most people were just too dumb or prone to violence to think for themselves except in the narrow confines of an election between two Max three or four pre-selected candidates the rest of the time people needed to be policed and nudged from the top down for life to remain decent and as Society started turning away for more overt and violent forms of control he helped devise strategies that would help manage Society through the more subtle means of public relations instead Bernays wrote mostly for advertisers he cared about molding habits to increase company profits but soon enough the importance of his work carried his techniques into State politics starting in the 1940s for example Bernays was hired by United Fruit Company now Chiquita the banana people to run a massive PR strategy in the U.S working primarily but not exclusively through influencing the Press Bernays and United Fruit drummed up fear of a communist Takeover in Guatemala which had recently democratically elected a president with somewhat left-wing politics if you've ever heard of United Fruit you know how this story goes it's the same almost everywhere in Latin America in 1954 thanks in part to bernay's and United fruits efforts to demonize jacobo Adams and paint him as a Soviet puppet a cia-backed coup overthrew the Guatemalan president and replaced him with a military dictatorship that plunged the country into Civil War for decades but back to the present Bernays is long dead and neoliberalism has perfected propaganda influential rhetoric if you want to be less dramatic about it the new wave of political rhetoric that's flourished under neoliberalism isn't as often about that bad country over there or the bad ideology you need to hate that's still around obviously but rather the more subtle more diffuse propaganda of modern neoliberalism is a lot more about who we should be as people right neoliberalism more so than previous capitalist societies has pushed its propaganda its jargon and its way of thinking into almost every aspect of Our Lives it has found the most effective way to become bulletproof without openly relying on violence neoliberalism is plenty violent but nearly invisible control works to protect itself neoliberalism actually molds people in its image through a mix of both rhetoric and economic policy designed to change people's habits and beliefs in line with its own objectives in other words neoliberal propaganda creates neoliberal subjects neoliberal capitalism is often misunderstood because of people like Reagan Thatcher Friedman and Hayek who made small government their whole thing that's often how we think about neoliberalism our current period of capitalism where governments supposedly shrank and corporate power grew but that's not what neoliberalism is neither in theory nor in practice neoliberalism actually means more just slightly different government where the welfare state capitalism that existed before acted as a safety valve for capitalists by preventing markets from doing what they do increasing inequality exploitation and poverty neoliberalism is a different approach to the same problem of how do you stop capitalism from imploding when left to its own devices instead of having capitalists compromise neoliberal policies start from the assumption that it's the general mass of people that are the problem neoliberal policies demand a tremendous government efforts to build and make sure that the supposedly free markets actually work and plenty of these policies are there to change people partly by making every possible area of Life amenable to Market practices and Market Logic the market comes first and everything else follows or as Margaret Thatcher is reported to have said quote economics is the method but the object is to change the soul but that's really abstract in practice this logic at the heart of neoliberalism translates to real policies like increasing incarceration tying welfare and health care to work criminalizing poverty and homelessness increasing State and corporate surveillance to better exploit and increase consumption creating new property rights like intellectual property to marketize areas of human life that worked without them using international sanctions threats of war and full-on invasions to blast open countries who don't invite in foreign capital or resist free markets bailing out private Capital when Banks crash year after year redefining corporations as people so they can enjoy more rights and so on the free market isn't something that just exists and neoliberals understood that their project is using state power to create and sustain their vision of what it should be creating the free market and making it interact with more parts of our day and I know it feels like we've strayed from propaganda right now but all this is a very important part of understanding what propaganda actually does under neoliberalism it's there to accompany all these policies make them more palatable and ultimately create a market Society filled with people who think like capitalists and therefore accept more easily the fact that more things suddenly start operating like businesses here's what I mean [Music] things that exist outside the market are either reframed in Market terms or demonized Trump ran in 2016 on the promise of running America like a business in France macron run on promising to transform the country into a startup Nation where every kid should dream of becoming a billionaire that's an actual quote the Iraq War supposedly fought to spread democracy was briefly considered a success when the country was announced as open for business welfare money set aside by the government to patch the gaps when the market doesn't allocate work efficiently becomes handouts and its recipients are admonished as lazy or welfare Queens every government policy with the unique exception of the military budget is treated to a rigorous cost benefit analysis as if the benefits of every policy could be measured in monetary terms and despite the ability of governments to fund whatever it wants at a keystroke government success is measured not by the impacts of its policies their popularity or the efficiency with which they're carried out but by its ability to remain within budget and keeping the economy healthy all the economy ever means by the way is capitalist profits just as a side note outside of the state all political movements like strikes are reduced to the same cost benefit analysis with events like the railroad workers Strike last fall being almost exclusively discussed on CNN as a two billion a day expense inviting viewers to make their own judgment of whether better working conditions are really worth all the strain on the economy and this logic extends further and further out from the neoliberal core education isn't about learning it's jobs training the means to acquire human capital so that you can better Market yourself to Future employers self-care is buying the right face mask or treating yourself to a new tech product rest is really important and valuable and necessary so long as you're doing it to recharge for work the next day every problem is promised to be solved by an app that's democratizing access to something when all democratizing means for these companies is making stuff cheaper and this isn't just something that tech companies do in neo-liberal societies whether it's Bush or some Tech Guy saying it an association is constantly made between markets and democracy or if some other positive value like freedom nationalized companies are always framed as state-controlled the implication being that that's necessarily authoritarian and juxtaposed with free markets freedom is what happens when BP comes into a country and takes over all the oil refineries this stems from the fact that neoliberals have a terrible understanding of and generally a pretty strong distaste for democracy and try to make it up by pretending that the market with its huge disparities of power is actually where democracy thrives because people vote with their dollar no matter that some people and corporations have billions of votes and some people have none Friedrich Hayek for example one of the small government neoliberal guys by the way was a terribly undemocratic thinker his ideal government's upper legislative house would only allow men of substantial property over the age of 45 to vote or be elected no political parties would be allowed and each member would stand for a 15-year term these guys have no clue what democracy and freedom are but they're not shy about co-opting these terms and the positive values they carry to them Freedom means giving corporations permission to do anything they want so long as they can generate profit and giving consumers the freedom to buy any one of 50 different brands of toothpastes even as their boss Cuts their pay on a whim and their government festers with Rich old white dudes who stay there for decades but the march of the market and its logic extends even further past government policy past political organizing past the values of freedom and democracy even and into our everyday life your hobby is now your side hustle my little grind setter you're not dating you're in the dating Market two words that were actually put side by side by The neoliberal Thinker Gary Becker who argued that more powerful wealthier men Were Somehow more entitled to polygamy because they won at business the most classic example of this though has to be the one you hear endlessly parroted by neoliberal politicians most notably guys like macron and all those motivational Instagram accounts just become an entrepreneur the entrepreneur is the epitome of the neoliberal subject the person who is a business entrepreneurs are constantly applauded by neoliberals and the entrepreneurial life is repeatedly sold to People by politicians and intelligent businessmen slash grifters with an 80 course as the way to achieve freedom [Music] that's because another element of neoliberal propaganda is that you and only you are responsible for your freedom which is made to be synonymous with financial success it's propaganda in the sense that it's a lie because this rhetoric is repeated over and over again even though tremendous political efforts are expanded by neoliberal governments to make your ability to find success harder neoliberal policies encourage wages to stagnate or decrease in real terms to cut off the safety net to defund the public resources that allow the development of people and their skills to force people into taking on and being submerged with debt and to imprison and police ever greater parts of the population that live outside the specific understanding of freedom under neoliberalism if you cannot survive in the market the place that is made more Cutthroat every year you don't deserve to complain until you've spent every shred of your energy trying to start your own business or selling your labor to someone else once again macron is the best example of this logic in 2018 a citizen looking for work in agriculture came up to the French President explaining that he couldn't find a job despite his best efforts all macron found to say to him was that there were plenty of jobs around that he himself would only have to quote cross the street and he'd find a job for him the idea behind the statement being that unemployment isn't the fault of capitalist society which just happens to benefit from unemployment on the one hand and overwork on the other no unemployment is the fault of the individual who must be ready to take any job regardless of how degrading or low paying it is rather than be unemployed because if the market has produced that job opening so neoliberal thinking goes then that job must be worth doing even if the only way to convince people to do it is to threaten them with poverty if they don't but statements like macron's just crossed the street and you'll find work are the rhetorical part of the neoliberal strategy the propaganda that makes it seem like unemployment is the fault of individuals not working hard enough it's there to accompany macron's reforms to French unemployment that actively make it harder to get unemployment benefits and overall just make life worse for people without work it's in these moments that the paradoxes and contradictions at the core of neoliberalism are on full display on the one hand you can do anything you want be an entrepreneur dream of becoming a billionaire from the earliest age and yet on the other hand you're a lazy bum who must be willing to accept any job at any rate and will do so in an environment where every means of collective support is gutted and the thing that will actually decide if you can do what you want is the market the place where big companies and governments set the rules for what ultimately generates profit do what you want so long as it generates profit for those at the top everything else is worthless if you're not convinced think of every Centrist or conservative politician's speech about jobs for the past 50 or so years in those speeches whenever they talk about unemployment it's never the responsibility of employers and the market to cater to the desires and skills of workers it's always your responsibility to retrain yourself and lower your standards for the jobs that they offer you flexibility Independence and resilience are elevated as virtues because a market that can exploit and dispose of people at will is more profitable than one that guarantees everyone a decent job with good pay and security it's a form of control that doesn't rely on the negative you can't do that but convinces people that they can do anything and when they inevitably come up short it's because they have the wrong mindset work harder think positive and anything is possible look every political movement has its propaganda it's rhetoric that it's getting out there to try to bring people to its cause but what good is neoliberalism we work harder for Worse pay and we're burning out like never before the value we produce is captured by a few billionaires who blow it on Joyrides in space and buying social media platforms so people stop bullying them neoliberal propaganda communicates the most shallow and meaningless definitions of freedom and democracy I'm tired of it and I know you are too we talked a lot about how rhetoric can be weaponized in this episode so I wanted to take a second and give a concrete example of what that looks like using today's sponsor ground news let's take a single event the UK Junior doctor strike and see what headlines look like from Outlets with different interests remember the goal of effective propaganda is to persuade so let's see how these different news outlets try to get us to feel a certain way here are three headlines from three different groups same story but take a look at how subtle wording differences can completely change our gut reaction to the event here we have examples of right wing coverage nominally Centrist coverage from an outlet with a single wealthy owner and coverage from an explicitly socialist perspective notice how the story is framed patient safety patient convenience and the actual reason for the strike by omitting certain details or by giving precedence to one quote or fact over another news outlets can frame a story in a way that nudges the reader towards a conclusion that benefits their operation often beholden to obscenely Rich individual owners or a particular flavor of Economics this is something I get asked about a lot how do I help parents or friends break out of their little propaganda bubble it's great to analyze an event like this comparing coverage from different interest groups but it's a lot of work and none of us have time for that that's why I always recommend people check out ground news because it has a ton of really useful tools to make building media literacy skills a lot easier ground news is a web and mobile app that Aggregates over 50 000 news sources and offers intuitive easy to understand comparison tools so you can do things like what we did here see how a particular story is being spun by various corporate Outlets you can also see the political leaning factuality rating and ownership of every single news source right in the app no tedious research required now full disclaimer as a socialist I obviously disagree with the placement of some of these outlets for example I don't think CNN should be placed as far left as it is but honestly this might be a good thing when trying to educate your friends and family if you come at them with well actually CNN is a right-wing Network they're not going to take you seriously ground news is the perfect first baby step towards media literacy if you're looking for a way to give your friends and family a great set of tools to understand media bias who it serves and how to spot it I highly recommend you check out ground news at the link below so head to ground.news second thought and give it a shot today I promise it'll make your life a whole lot easier

Channel: Second Thought

Views: 1,759,059

Keywords: Second thought, second thought channel, facts about, facts you didn’t know, things you didn’t know, propaganda, media, mainstream, neoliberalism, capitalism, socialism, government, democracy, bernays, you're not immune to propaganda, news, china, russia, United States, North Korea, education, learning, educational videos, explained, documentary, video essay

Id: dl2fnWIlDZg

Length: 20min 26sec (1226 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023