Propaganda Inc.

“Propaganda: To propagate, multiply, spread a barrage of small lies to sustain the big lie.”

 

Waiting for my flight in the Ho Chi Minh City Airport, I decided to listen to a podcast from Michael Meade (Podcast #427—Finding a Place to Stand to be exact. Definitely worth your time). Took some notes while listening and these days, there’s very few insights in talks like these that I don’t already share—just new details and sometimes historical perspectives. But everything I read and everything I write is mostly reminders of that which I— and I think, we—already know. So even though it feels like saying what’s been said before or preaching to the choir is pointless, they’re not. They’re the needed daily sustenance for the Soul which like food for the body needs constant renewal. 

 

Paraphrasing some of the podcast, he begins with Pope Gregory the 15^th, creating a College of Propaganda in 1622 to train priests in methods of proselytizing. These were designed to convert colonized people from indigenous cultures to believe in their God. “Follow the money” is one of those indelible truths that needs constant iteration and though some priests may have been sincere in sharing “the good news of the Gospel,” mostly they were backed by a narrative of material greed and power that the white Supremacy doctrine ("the big Lie" and not Jesus’ Gospel, to be clear!) decreed. By converting the “natives,” the path was laid open to harvest their resources for personal and collective wealth. 

 

Propaganda as a purposeful, intentional plan, using human intelligence to bamboozle, fool, convert, sway, became part of political dictators looking to control people and run (and ruin) their lives. Witness Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as two familiar examples. One effective strategy was (and is) to polarize good and evil. In Germany, Christians- good, Jews-bad, in Russia, Communists- good, Capitalists - bad. (In America, Capitalists-good, Communists-bad—remember the McCarthy hearings?) Such polarization in simplistic terms made it easy to brainwash citizens who would then excuse and justify all dubious choices based on their manufactured illusion that all problems are caused by the “bad group” and the only solution is to remove them. 

Sound familiar? That old playbook is running—and ruining— my beloved country at the moment and ignorance of how this works is part of what makes it work. Hence, my mantra of the day— the race between education and catastrophe— has never rung so true. Without people understanding how they’re being duped and brainwashed, there is no resistance. 

 

Michael Meade’s Podcasts mostly look at the role of growing Soul in helping us bear up and ultimately, turn things round. He talks about how the epidemic of lying, disinformation, misinformation coming from the top down is creating a sense of helplessness and hopelessness and is being done deliberately and purposefully and shamelessly. 

And it’s working. Helped by Fox News and in more subtle ways, even the N.Y. Times and Washington Post, people are shutting down, are overwhelmed, are digging deeper into their insistence that they are being told the truth when some part of them must know it’s bullshit. How to resist the rapid-fire propaganda overwhelming us? 

 

Here Michael Meade hearkens back to Socrates who named two different kinds of lies. The first he called the Noble Lie— the mythological fiction that reveals actual truth. No one is harmed by such “lies” but in fact, uplifted and inspired by them. That is how Art works and Myths work and Poetry works. A ‘lie” that knows it is not a literal truth, but understands it is a deeper mythological and metaphorical and artistic truth.

 

The second lie Socrates called the Lie of the Soul. Not that the notion of “Soul” is a lie. In fact, the polar opposite. It is the lies being told for personal profit and power and privilege that are misleading and damaging to the Soul because when people swallow them whole, they become part of their identity. They will not seek to discover the truth because it is intolerable to admit that they’ve built their life on a lie. The scientist Carl Sagan noted: 

 

"One of the saddest lies in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

 

The only antidotes to these toxic lies? Tell and live the true truth of your own noble soul and wholly embrace the nobility of each person’s soul. The medicine that can convert lies to truth is only found in the individual soul. That’s the little piece of solid ground amidst the upheaving tectonic plates of the purposely manufactured earthquakes under our feet. 

 

It is well and good—though difficult— to live an authentic life based on the nobility of one’s Soul, to see through the game, to refuse the bamboozle. But maddening nonetheless that the epidemic of brainwashing becomes the collective air we breathe and our lives our dependent on those who won't admit the lie, who refuse to wake up. There is literally nothing you can do or say to convince these people that they’re being taken. The only hope is to manage the Propaganda from the State with accountability and the expectation that lies are unacceptable. Those guard rails are now being flung to the side and we are plunging deeply into the chaos. 

 

So I—we—are forced to live and breathe this toxic air that every day is becoming more poisonous. Nothing to do but keep living this life of feeding the Souls of children and adults with music and dance and play and honest speech. And to keep singing my version of Miss Mary Mack that ends like this:

 

                        She jumped so high, high, high.

                    She touched the sky, sky, sky.

                    And didn’t come back, back, back,

                    ‘Till the 4^th of Ju-ly, ly, ly,

                    DON’T LIE!!!!!