This diary began as a comment responding to a comment in Ray Pensador's most recent diary on how propaganda controls people and ballooned into a diary of its own. While I do not at all discount the power of propaganda-- or, as it's called in critical theory circles, "ideology" --to control people, I do think we have a tendency to overestimate the power of distorted beliefs to control people, thereby overlooking far more powerful things that compel people to tolerate oppressive conditions. If this is true, then it has significant implications for what political activism should be engaged in seeking to produce a more just and equitable society. Follow me below the fold to see what I have in mind.
What if the truth as to why people tolerate unjust social systems is much more mundane than the thesis that they are tricked by propaganda? What if the reason that people tolerate these horrible, unjust conditions isn't that they've been tricked or deceived by some sort of propaganda machine, but that they're trapped in life. People are busy raising kids, working to pay home loans, car loans, education loans, insurance, bills, and struggling to eat. Their lives are filled with activities and obligations.
When you talk to people-- and I talk to hundreds every day --you often hear them all express the same thing regardless of party affiliation: the system is rigged and designed to benefit the wealthy. This suggests that propaganda, while it's certainly something that exists and that's all over the place, isn't particularly effective. If it's not particularly effective, then we need another hypothesis as to why people tolerate that injustice. The fabric of life for the average inhabitant of first tier countries suggests the answer: 1) people have little alternative but to tolerate this unjust system if they're to meet their daily obligations (raising children, paying bills, eating, etc), and 2) that conditions aren't so horrible that people are ready to pursue an alternative.
Hasn't this always been the shortcoming of the critical theorist? The critical theorist believes that the primary reason people tolerate unjust conditions is because they're tricked by propaganda or, the term d'art in the field, "ideology". This is actually a pleasant thought. For if it's only ideology that's standing in the way of producing a just and equitable society, then all we have to do is educate people and change their beliefs to produce social change. From a Marxist perspective, this way of understanding why unjust conditions persist reflects a certain class privilege. The person that thinks this way is likely to be someone who enjoys a certain financial security, has their material needs taken care of, has few obligations to children or sick parents, etc. Because their lives are relatively secure at the material level, they think that power all consists in ideas or beliefs and that it's sufficient to change ideas and beliefs to change social relations. In a Marxist framework, the idea that society is the way that it is primarily because of ideas, propaganda, beliefs, or ideologies would be an example of bourgeois and idealist social and political theory. Such a way of thinking suggests a sort of class privilege that renders one blind to material conditions.
However, if it's the material constraints of existence that exercise power-- as Marx argued --then the question of how to produce political change becomes quite different. Now it's no longer enough to simply change beliefs-- though that's a part of the equation --but you also have to change material reality as well. You have to transform material constraints in such a way that new possibilities of life actually become available to actual people.
Rather than referring to propaganda to explain why people tolerate this unjust system (and most people I encounter are cynics), let's take one example among many: debt. How might debt reinforce the power of the 1%? Well there's the obvious way in that the 1% accumulates even more wealth off the interest of debt, but there's also the far more concrete consequences of debt. The person who lives in a state of debt has to work more and harder to pay their debt lest the legal system come after them. Their life is more pervaded by anxiety and worry. Will I be able to pay my bills? Will I be able to care for my children? What if I get sick or something happens to my car? Will I be able to continue working? How will I get to work. I have a cavity, how will I pay for it to get filled? Tensions arise in their marriages. They suffer fatigue from all this worry and work. Their attention is perpetually focused on these things leaving little energy for anything else save trifling little amusements at the end of the day.
Doesn't debt-- and it's just one instance of material constraint among many --exercise far more controlling and normalizing power than propaganda? Crushed under the ripple effect of the work and worry involved in living through debt, the person is left with little energy to struggle for a more just system. They're too busy attending to life. Too exhausted by worry. And besides, they say to themselves, would their effort struggling for this alternative social world really pay off? Would it make any difference or would it just be wasted time drawing them away from their children and partners?
If it's things like this that contribute to normalization and control, to the disciplining of the population, then the targets of our political activism become rather different. While discrediting propaganda can't hurt, it's likely to be ineffectual because it leaves the material infrastructure in place that is the real source of control and power. Oh sure, denouncing propaganda is satisfying. Not only do you get to feel superior to the majority of people because you work on the premise that they're deceived idiots, but you also have a theory as to why no one else sees as you do. However, as the German rock-star philosopher and critical theorist Peter Sloterdijk pointed out over a decade ago in his Critique of Cynical Reason, almost everyone is a cynic today; which is to say that almost no one buys the propaganda or ruling ideology. We all know it's bs. If it's true that material agencies such as debt are what exercise control and what allow these divides to persist, then our revolutionary efforts are better served pursuing ways to free people of debt, either through legislation or some other means such as raising money to pay off forms of debt that crush existence. When people are freed from the constraints of material existence, they also become free to struggle to form new societies.