I don’t know about y’all, but if I grew up in a country that never has the news criticizing its leaders, I’d be very skepical and deduce that there is censorshop going on and the offical news could be exaggerated or entirely falsified. Do people in authoritarian countries actually just eat the propaganda? To what extent do they believe the propaganda?
This can be controversial, but my opinion is that religious education normally is the opposite of critical thinking. If you teach the kids to accept beliefs just based on faith, you’re killing critical thinking.
It’s not religion that’s the problem but ideology and lazy thinking in general. How many people in the political parties we oppose just accept the lies being fed to them with no critical thought or investigation?
My point is that religious education trains the kids to believe things without verifying facts, even unbelievable fables. I’m just trying to point a potential source of what we know is a big problem.
True People saying “im from the government and here to help are the scariest words ever”. Aren’t really any different then people that drill a religious phrase into their kids.
No one, including you, is immune to propaganda.
I try and explain this to people all the time but many don’t want to believe it.
There are 2 types of people in this world; those who are influenced by propaganda, and those who don’t know they are influenced by propaganda.
There’s a third type. People like me see the propaganda everywhere, get a sad laugh out of it every time, and go about my day dodging rain drops and replacing alternators.
IDGAF
Toupee fallacy. Just because you can recognize some of the propaganda, it doesn’t mean you can recognize all of it. You’re not aware of what flies under the radar while still influencing you.
I don’t have anything influencing me except my roommate and my mom, and that’s usually just helping keep their vehicles running, carrying groceries, taking the trash out, and bathing the dog.
I see the politics and propaganda every day, I just don’t give a fuck. Nothing I can do about it anyways.
Ah so you’ve fallen for the propaganda that says you don’t have the power to change anything, that’s just what the small number of elites want the large number of masses to think
I’ve helped the NSA return stolen laptops, and risked my life putting out a forest fire with my hoodie before it got a chance to reach the dead grass field.
Of course there’s things I can and have done to help change the world, but politics ain’t quite my thing.
You’re contradicting yourself my dude. You give enough of a fuck to help people. Doing things for your community is a political action. Maybe you just haven’t gotten the chance to understand your political leanings
So you’ve been propagandized into thinking there’s nothing you can do, so you shouldn’t care.
Nah, I just don’t have the means to do anything.
I’m a repair tech, not a politician.
It’s working.
If you see propaganda everywhere, the it was successful on you. One purpose of propaganda is to erode the fundamental trust in society and sow distrust about anything and anyone, that way people become politically ineffective and easy to manipulate.
I don’t have any significant distrust in society in general, just a heavy distrust of the greedy oligarchs in positions of power.
Meanwhile, the orange turd posted an AI generated image of himself as the next pope…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5AvLxeTvivY
Go ahead and read some comments there, he done offended even the atheists out there!
I’m not a governor, attorney, judge, senator, etc in any position to directly do anything about the crooked powers in charge, but as a citizen, I guess this is the best I can do, share the news.
Bold of you to assume you recognize every piece of propaganda for what it truly is. And that you have a choice to just ignore it. It often feels like we are in control of what we give attention to and what we choose to retain as factual knowledge but we’re not.
The best we can do is try to recognize when some piece of information, or source, we believe may not be as valid as it once appeared and try to rectify our beliefs moving forward. It’s a never ending job. But if you want to actually have beliefs based in fact there’s no other option.
Yes. However believing all beliefs are equal because they are equally likely to be false which is what “everyone is influenced by propaganda” implies, is also an incorrect way to think and an intellectually dishonest shirking of responsibility. Kudos to you for not simply repeating the mantra but stating the right response to it.
I believe in mathematics and schematics. I also believe in the right to repair.
I do not believe in invisible deities and I don’t trust most politicians.
Edit: And I damn sure don’t trust AI!
Those are like the most superficial layer of propaganda. The real danger of propaganda is that it doesn’t look like it, it looks like other regular people making you support their interests without you realizing it.
Do you like engines? Do you dislike electric vehicles? Do you like guns? If so, when and where did those ideas come from? You weren’t born with them.
The real propaganda is money.
Like, whoever designed the idea of rent (which is basically a safe place to perform the biological function of sleep and store your stuff).
You don’t own a damn thing anymore, nor do I. But for real, whoever invented the concept of rent, invented the concept of taxing humans for the right to sleep in a safe space.
Edit: Do you own the dirt under your feet?
Didn’t think so.
Do you own the dirt under your feet?
The house around me, and the dirt under it, yes.
Something like host over half of all Americans cannot read above a 5th grade level. Almost a third are functionally illiterate.
It’s not that they don’t have critical thinking skills. It’s that the entire lower-90% have been so badly nerfed that it is increasingly difficult for anyone in that cohort to get to a point where they can educate themselves without copious assistance.
And that’s exactly how Republicans prefer the population - uneducated, illiterate, ignorant and gullible. The better with which to scam them for their votes.
Critical thinking is a skill that requires teaching and practice. If children are not given that preparation they won’t have that skill in adulthood. That’s why authoritarian governments care so much about controlling and/or limiting access to proper education.
I find way too many people talking about “common sense” as if that was even a thing. It frustrates me to no end.
“common sense”
A set of assumptions(usually false) acquired before age 12.
I’m wondering how you are measuring “common sense” that arrives at “usually false.” Are you ignoring obviously common sense things, like “the sky is up” – since that’s just common sense?
If you are in North America and you draw a line straight up, will you reach the sky in Australia?
Well I didn’t say the sky isn’t also down. (Begrudging upvote.)
You know, you are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
I respect your technical smartass response to my technical smartass check attempt.
Many of the United States have removed teaching critical thinking from their curriculum.
Seriously, if you are AWARE of propaganda, you are also aware that you have been influenced by it. Propaganda is pervasive in civilizations. It is simply manipulation. TV ads and guys trying to pick up chicks are everyday uses of propaganda.
I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.
And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.
People focus their energies on getting through the day for the most part of their lives. It is very hard for people to muster the time and energy to paying attention to politics, let alone ideologically political propaganda.
The vast majority flat ignore it entirely and remain in an apolitical state. This is a primary function of propaganda: insulating people from political action or thought that might alter the status quo.
Decision fatigue is a real thing. Ask anyone who sat through three tests in one day; even if you have studied the material, it’s hard to focus after a while. It’s easy to fill our day with minutia that distracts us from the impostant issues.
Critical thinking has to be taught in order for a person have it. And when you either restrict/limit education (for example, making it so that one needs a lot of money for proper schooling, thus barring lower classes from getting the education they need) or alter the education to become indoctrination. (These methods are most efficient combined!) It’s why authoritarian people and parties want to control and/or destroy education systems so bad.
Being a history nerd, I’ve been convinced that the vast majority of people can be tricked into believing nearly anything. No one is immune to propaganda, it’s just a matter of circumistances and the education you receive.
If you had grew up in a society where everyone told you that, say, pigs are a type of lizard, and your school taught you that pigs are lizards, all biologists were bribed or forced into saying pigs are lizards, and all the books you read and all the movies or shows you watched said pigs are lizards, chances are that you would believe pigs are lizards.
I’d also like to note that the above scenario would work especially well if you had never actually spent time with pigs. For example, it’s a lot easier to convince someone that gay people are evil if they don’t personally know any gay people.
I also think that often people know that, for example, elections are fraudulent, but they are too scared to say anything and thus act like they aren’t.
Back in the 70s, I had one if those subversive high school English teachers - longish hair, no tie, wore bell bottoms, arranged the desks in his classroom in a circle, etc. His name was Mr. Clark.
Mr. Clark had an unusual teaching style that I really responded to. Much more Socratic, making us defend our ideas, but be willing to change our minds if someone had a better one. I liked his teaching so much, i took his classes 3 years in a row, including 2 Shakespeare classes.
It wasn’t until years after college, that i realized he wasnt really teaching us Shakespeare, he was teaching us to think, using Shakespeare as a vehicle. We were practicing Critical Thinking Skills every day for three years, without even realizing it.
It became so ingrained in me to question assertions and allegations without sources, and view everything objectively before drawing a conclusion, that I found it very easy to resist propaganda. When Rush Limbaugh came on the radio in the late 80s, I was shocked that anyone was buying into his obvious bullshit, but my well-honed Critical Thinking Skills saw through his “logic” instantly.
At some point, I tried to look up Mr Clark, so I could thank him for being the most influential teacher in my life, but he had passed away about 5 years before. He literally taught me how to think.
often people know that, for example, elections are fraudulent, but they are too scared to say anything
People might vaguely understand that elections don’t produce good outcomes or have systemic bias. That’s then condensed to „elections are rigged“, regardless of the facts and details.
Most people know little about most things. It’s difficult to even have good fundamentals about most things in our complex world. So people will defer to their personal experience and information seeped into their minds by osmosis/exposure.
Things like an economy or political system are extremely complex already and not fully understood even by experts.
There is deeply emotional resistance to the idea of topics being too complex for the average person to understand. The “experts” promote something that superficially contradicts our lived experience? They must be corrupt liars! Down with the experts!
The economy had, on balance, positive trends in 2024? We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched! /s
Feels scarily like America is moving towards something like China’s Great Leap Forward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
The Great Leap Forward stemmed from multiple factors, including "the purge of intellectuals, the surge of less-educated radicals… Mao was dismissive of technical experts and basic economic principles…
Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies… Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and “rightists” who opposed him…
…dozens of dams constructed in Zhumadian, Henan, during the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1975 (under the influence of Typhoon Nina)… with estimates of its death toll ranging from tens of thousands to 240,000.
The failure of agricultural policies… suppressed the food supply… The shortage of supply clashed with an explosion in demand, leading to millions of deaths from severe famine.
We felt poorer, so economists should be lynched!
The contrast between people’s experiences in their everyday lives and what politicians or experts say is important.
If the economy is supposedly doing great but I can afford less and less and my life gets worse, that’s a contradiction.
The USA is moving more to something like the gilded age with more wealth disparity, more suffering for the poor, more violence.
The anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism of the cultural revolution was far more extreme. You are right that there are some similar ideas brewing.
When the political and economic system is no longer delivering for the population, it will turn against the (perceived) leaders. Trump and the right spins this very well by directing the anger against „woke“ liberal academics, foreigners, and away from the billionaires.
The „woke“ elites are also in crisis. The Democratic Party is in shambles.
I think this USSR quote is a good answer:
We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying. In our country, the lie has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.
(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
In any authoritarian system where indoctrination starts young you’ll probably have a fifth of the population that’s high on the coolaid or never questioned anything due to ideology or intelligence (or both). The rest know they’re lying, etc. And keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to go to Siberia or El Salvador.
