The Rules of Propaganda

Modern propaganda and how it affects people can be summed up as a collection of rules and techniques. These rules can be deployed by anyone for any purpose. Because these rules and techniques are so effective, it is important to understand how and why propaganda affects people. Maybe even how propaganda has affected you.

Many writers have reflected on the fact that, in America today, parallels with Germany in the 1930’s are striking. This has led to renewed interest in Joseph Goebbels who was, among other things, the chief propagandist of the NSDAP, the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party). In fact, one of his titles was “Reich Minister of Propaganda”, head of the “Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”, a name that has its goal right in the name - “Public Enlightenment”.

Goebbels was a virulent anti-Semite. However, that aspect of his personality is not the focus here. The interest here is how he was able to communicate and persuade otherwise rational people to listen to, believe in, and accept the Agenda of the NSDAP and Hitler. While today it is easy to dismiss Goebbels and the Nazi Agenda out of hand - Godwin’s Law comes to mind - it is important to look back at this period and try to understand the dynamics at play and the techniques used to convert millions of people to his cause.

At its core, propaganda is the communication of ideas and values having an Agenda that is intended to inform or persuade a person, a group, or the public at large; or to confirm that Agenda to an already “informed” public.

A form of manipulation, it attempts to get people to believe in something - an idea, value, person, objective, goal. Post WW II, the term “propaganda” has become overloaded with a negative, sinister, even evil connotations. That’s rather remarkable since Allied media made use of many of the same techniques before and during the war, and later while confronting communism. Millions of lives were affected by propaganda, either through direct personal belief or through inclusion in a state that was subsumed by it politically. That is still true today.

It is useful then to study how propaganda is created and deployed, what works well, and what is likely to have the best effect on people today.
These rules worked then, and they work just as effectively now.

The quotes below are taken from AZ Quotes.

1. Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.

If you are stunned when you read this, you are not alone. It was a crucial insight then, and is just as crucial today. It goes to the core of human behavior, free will. Americans value freedom above all else - the freedom to worship as they choose, pursue their own happiness, do their own thing. If you are a propagandist, how then do you get people to act in your interest while they believe they are acting in their own?

2. If you tell a lie, tell a big one.

Most people are conditioned to hear and accommodate simple lies. In day to day life, it doesn’t matter if you said you went to the grocery store instead of the liquor store, or that you don’t have any money on you when you pass by the panhandler. No one is going to stop you and demand proof that what you said is true.

By contrast, we are also accustomed to believe that no one would really, truly lie about something big, really big. As a society, we’ve been conditioned to value honesty, at least at face value. So it is too much to believe that someone would really, truly lie about something huge - on a personal level such as having an affair, or in the public space such as claiming to have won a national election after having actually lost it. We think it would be too preposterous, too outlandish to lie about something so big where there certainly would be enough evidence to prove that you lied. That’s because no one wants to be caught in any lie - it’s very uncomfortable and can be personally damaging.

So on hearing such a huge lie, unbelief rings though our brains, looking for a way out. But the true propagandist is just getting started.

3. If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.

4. A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

These tenets are told from the perspective of the propagandist. It is more instructive to rephrase them for the listener:

3. If you hear a lie often enough, you will believe it.

4. If you hear a lie a thousand times it eventually becomes the truth to you.

It falls then on the listener to determine whether what they are seeing and hearing is true. Perhaps the first time they hear something, they don’t believe it. That could be because of implicit bias, or it could be that the propaganda is easily shown to be demonstrably false. But repetition, particularly when there is no adverse communication is the key. If we like or trust the speaker, internally, we repeat the lie to ourselves. There is no need for an external propagandist to repeat anything.

5. A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity.

Cloaking a negative, uniformity in this case, with a positive, diversity, gives the illusion of balance and fairness to the propagandist. Balance and fairness are external signals of transparency - the willingness to allow anyone to know the actual truth about something. Our society values transparency, because it allows us to make our own informed decisions.

By withholding true diversity and transparency, listeners are not allowed to hear differing points of view, different ways of thinking. There is no real balance, but this fact is not obvious. In fact “ostensible diversity” is substituted, providing the listener with a perception of fairness and balance when in fact there is none.

6. It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.

Writ large in closed societies, such as North Korea, this is easy to see. Nothing is published or broadcast without the approval of the state. “State television”, is often used to refer to the source of information from these countries.

Writ small, in a political party or a corporation or even a social or religious group, “the State” is a euphemism for those in power - the “party bosses”, or the “C-suite” or, in the case of religion, the “heads” of the group or sect. All these are the same entity. They are those who set the Agenda, and those who enforce compliance with it. Left alone, whatever this group decides will affect the lives of those in the group, one way or the other.

7. Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.

Avoiding adverse communication is censorship, but it is also nothing more than selective inclusion of communication in line with the Agenda. It’s the action taken to provide Agenda uniformity. If you control the messaging, it is relatively easy make people believe falsehoods.

Here, another concept comes immediately into play - trust. Few people are absolutely going to believe that a square is actually a circle when they first hear someone say it. But if you trust the speaker, or even if don’t distrust the speaker, you may suspend your disbelief for a time. And this is the key moment. It is the moment that the listener gives the speaker to make or break their case.

8. It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned, that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise intent.

The propagandist can, by choice and use of words, convince doubters (suspenders of belief) that what is false is true and what is true is false. If he is successful, the trust is strengthened. If not, it is lessened - though not necessarily broken. Usually, it takes more than one false moment to completely break a bond of trust. Every individual knows they have been wrong in the past and may be wrong in the future, and so has everyone else. But the propagandist will balance the message carefully, keeping it tilted toward the Agenda just enough to strengthen trust.

9. There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

10. There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear, and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.

It falls to the propagandist to select the appropriate content to advance the Agenda. Advancing the Agenda is, by definition, getting more people to believe in the content and by getting more people to advance the Agenda themselves - in other words to proselytize. But notice that the content, lacking intellectual basis, substitutes “appeal to emotions and instincts”. Emotion leads one to lean in favor if they like something or to lean in rejection if they don’t. Emotions are individually bound to each person. What one person likes, someone else may dislike; what one hates, another adores. According to Goebbels, the drivers for appeal are to make them “crude, clear and forcible” forcing the listener to make an immediate choice for or against the content. He says that it’s best to lean in favor of the “man in the street”, meaning the working class man - the less educated, blinkered, rough around the edges, stronger, tougher, physical type. Appealing to the emotions and instinct of the “man of the street” makes a more rapid advancement of the Agenda than appeal to intellect. And intimidation of the weaker by the stronger causes even further advancement.

“Truth was unimportant” heralds the notion of the veil. The veil, pulled down over the listeners eyes, makes the listener unafraid to accept the Agenda in total. There is no no longer any downside because there is no perception of objective truth. If you can substitute the Agenda for truth, you will be successful. Today we hear established media derided as “fake news” - a clear, forcible label on content that is possibly truthful, but not in alignment with the Agenda. In this way the Agenda and only the Agenda, becomes “real news”.

11. Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.

Hatred is one of the strongest emotions people have. By tapping into hatred, the propagandist can focus actions of aggression onto any target. The target can be adverse or neutral. But once aggression is targeted, the target no longer remains perceived as neutral and it becomes the object of hatred. The more hatred that can be channeled by “appeal to emotions and instinct”, the deeper into the Agenda the listener falls. Goebbels notes that this tactic is an imperative. Propaganda must focus aggression onto targets to be effective.

In today’s political climate, the established news media, well known politicians outside the Agenda, and values such as science, and democracy itself have all been targets for hatred. While intense hatred might spawn cries to “Murder the Media”, and “Off with their Heads” in a riot, less intense hatred coupled with following along with the group action yields chants like “Lock Her Up”, or jeers and threats at the media.

12. The masses need something that will give them a thrill of horror.

Here, hate and the thrill of horror operate in a feedback loop. If the propagandist can get the listener to experience a thrill, a flash of intense pleasure, from the emotional outburst or actions of hatred he has succeeded. Not only that, but people are innately conditioned to want to perform and re-perform any act of intense pleasure. Once they experience a thrill, they will want to repeat whatever it was that gave them that thrill. Left unchecked, it becomes an addiction.

13. This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

14. The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.

As a goal, this is perfect - persuade people into the Agenda and keep them there indefinitely while they have no clue. In modern parlance, we call this a “bubble” - a self-coherent set of beliefs and communication that channel all reality into the same Agenda, no matter what objective reality is telling them. All objective reality is bent to conform to the structure of the bubble, by the propagandist or by the listener themselves. Psychologists use the term “cognitive dissonance” to describe how a “won over” person experiences objective reality until they manage to re-bend that reality to conform to the Agenda in order to continue to experience that “thrill” or even simple satisfaction of sustained inclusion inside the bubble. “No man is an island” it is said - and no one wants to be completely isolated from everyone else. People long for connectivity, for being included somewhere by some group.

15. We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as a tradition, as education, and as human affection.

You don’t have to consider a “laugh” or “laughing” here as the common response to something funny. This quote actually describes the vigorous, fiery outbursts of those who won, chanting and shouting loudly as they celebrate their victory. It’s that “end zone moment” with people beating their chests and screaming of their greatness.

If there was any doubt about this tenet, you have only to look at the videos of the riot on the US Capitol. The “joy” is evident in the rioters getting their way as they attack the Capitol police, attack the media, smash windows and doors and run through the building. Thankfully, substantial defacement of the building (particularly the artwork) was avoided, but it should not be assumed this is because the rioters were not serious.

The rioters in the street and in the Capitol showed that the propagandist had reached his goal after having focused the aggression of the crowd on the targets at hand, successfully convincing thousands of people to laugh as they acted of their own free will. They were completely unaware that they have been won over to an Agenda based on a big lie (and tens of thousands of other lies) repeated over and over, enabled by a conglomeration of media claiming to be “fair and balanced”. Presented in mostly emotional tones, that propagandist and his chosen media claims to speak for the people, soothing any cognitive dissonance by only including “facts” that align to the Agenda.

This is the legacy of Donald Trump. Trump is not a master politician. He knows little about how the US Government actually works, and is not a skilled legislator in forming policy, domestic or foreign. Rather Trump is but a master propagandist, the Goebbels of the modern age, cleaned up for modern consumption. All Americans continue to listen to this man at our own mortal and national peril.

I leave the last quote without comment, as it has a simplicity and clarity all its own. It is a prophecy, told by another master propagandist. It came true in his time, and it must surely come true in our time.

16. There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, and truth will again triumph.

In following posts, we will examine the real world and see how propaganda is thriving today.