• BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The stuff Americans say about China and North Korea reminds me a lot of an evangelical's reflections I read on the "Procter and Gamble is Satanist" rumor in his community. The guy is pretty lib overall, but he has some very good insight on why this sort of thing happens:

    False Witnesses
    False Witnesses 2 [CW: Discusses animal torture]

    Part 1 lays out the case that people don't actually believe this shit:

    And why are we even bothering to discuss the holes in this story? It’s nothing but holes. Any one of those holes should stop the hearer short, preventing them from passing this ridiculous story along and adding their approval to it.

    If a person is smart enough to comprehend this story and then to repeat it, then that person is, by definition, not stupid enough to really believe it.

    I used to believe that maybe some people were that stupid. They were acting that stupid, so I went along. I believed that the people I was sending that dossier to were merely innocent dupes.

    But in truth they were neither innocent nor dupes. The category of innocent dupe does not apply here. No one could be honestly misled by such a story. The only way to have been misled by it is dishonestly — which is to say deliberately, willingly and willfully. They are claiming to believe a foolish thing, but they are not guilty of foolishness. They are guilty of malice.

    And part 2 explains why they pretend to:

    [They] seem to fulfill some urgent need. They give us someone we can clearly and correctly say we’re better than. Their extravagant cruelty makes us feel better about ourselves because we know that we would never do what they have done. They thus function as signposts of depravity, reassuring the rest of us that we’re Not As Bad As them, and thus letting us tell ourselves that this is the same thing as us being good.

    • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is insightful, and really reminds me of the argument Roderic Day lays out (among other things) in this excellent article: that people accept propaganda not because they are especially gullible and easily duped by elites, but because it is reassuring and comforting over their own precariousness and powerlessness.

      edit: some quoted sections to outline this idea:

      In short, this essay will make the case that “brainwashing” as a political theory breaks society down into three mutually-exclusive camps: 1) a group of elite manipulators, 2) vast masses under their control, 3) a rebellious group of enlightened critics (to which the person launching the accusation of “brainwashing” implicitly always belongs, since they are neither unaware of it nor abetting it). An unstated premise of this political theory is that what determines which of these camps any individual belongs to is a mixture of intellectual enlightenment and moral purity.

      Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style, they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.

      Talk of “manufacturing” and “inventing” suggests an imposition over and against the individual’s will. I believe that, on the contrary, the process of Western propaganda is better understood in terms of “licensing” — the issuing of moral license for the bourgeois proletariat to profitably go along with bourgeois designs without the feeling of shame overwhelming. In this alternative account people aren’t “brainwashed” insofar as they don’t actually believe the lies, not in the way that we generally understand belief. It’s more correct to say that they go along with them, whether enthusiastically or apprehensively, because it’s actually their optimal survival strategy. When we concede that the time horizon and scope of responsibility within which we all make our decisions varies, it becomes much easier to see how their choice could be smart and intelligent. The enlightened critic can plead that if we all agreed to denounce the status quo in unison we’d be immensely rewarded, but the average worker in the first world cannot be accused of naivety for preferring to keep a low profile, particularly after being subject — very often by that same critic — to so many grim stories of murder and of punishment and of how any attempt at radical change always goes awry.