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[Opinion] - Propaganda Restricts Speech More Than Censorship Does: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix - Caitlin Johnstone (caitlinjohnstone.com)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Arotrios@kbin.social to c/politics@kbin.social

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The biggest impediment to free speech is people’s belief that they have it. Not censorship. Not refusal to platform critical voices. Not the war on journalism. It’s the fact that most people are propagandized into saying what the powerful want them to say, and don’t know it.

What makes our dilemma so historically unique is that we live under an empire which makes extensive use of the post-Bernays science of mass-scale psychological manipulation to trick its subjects into believing that they are thinking, speaking, and gathering information freely. In this way our rulers suppress any revolution long before it starts, not by making people’s lives better, nor by violent repression, but by manipulating people into thinking there’s nothing to revolt against, because they have no rulers and they are already free.

In our civilization most people are thinking, speaking, gathering information, working, shopping, moving and voting exactly as our rulers want them to, because these mass-scale psychological conditioning systems have been imposed to keep human behavior aligned with the empire. We are trained to believe we are free while behaving exactly how our rulers want us to behave, and to look down on other nations and shake our heads at how unfree their people are.

What the average mainstream partisan really means when they say they want “free speech” is they want to be able to regurgitate the power-serving narratives that were put in their mind by the powerful. That’s not free speech, it’s deeply enslaved speech. But they can’t see it. By design.

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[–] yiliu@informis.land 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

To paraphrase:

We live in a society with something much worse than censorship: we live in a society where I can say whatever I want, but other people disagree with me!

Obviously, this isn't because I'm wrong, or my opinions are debatable. Clearly it must be because everybody is too stupid to see the truth, and they're easily tricked by my ideological opponents, who are liars and who don't actually believe anything they claim to believe.

The ideal society would be one where everybody was totally free to agree with me and my opinions, and all other opinions and viewpoints were recognized as being incorrect!

[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Dafuq you talkin' about Willis?

The article doesn't say that at all. It's an analysis of the influence of corporate propaganda on the exercise of free speech, and how that influence is more powerful than censorship attempts, as it creates a narrative matrix in which true challenges to the status quo are drowned out by the weight of the propaganda.

There's no place where the author argues for censorship. Rather they argue that censorship holds little weight in comparison to corporate propaganda when it comes to constructing a political narrative. This is arguably true, and an interesting debate.

I think you need to go back and actually read the article instead of commenting on the headline.

[–] yiliu@informis.land 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm just reading between the lines. I did skim a bit, but I didn't miss much.

The culture war is a psyop? By who? Are Biden and Trump in cahoots? Is Trump much, much, much smarter than he seems? Or are they both puppets? And if so, of whom? Don't tell me it's a big conspiracy of ((International financiers)) or something...

The culture war is just tribalism and populism in a new medium. It's not a fucking conspiracy by a shadowy elite, it's mobs getting worked up and then politicians pandering.

Again, the implicit suggestion is: the reason people don't agree with the author about shit is because they're being tricked. I agree it's frustrating that polarization has made American politics stupid as shit, but it doesn't take a corporate conspiracy to make people behave stupidly: it comes to us very naturally.

[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago

You missed the entire point of the article and put in your own interpretation. Don't read between the lines if you're not willing to make the effort to read the post.

The author is describing the large scale paradigms put in place by multiple corporate and governmental power structures. This isn't a mysterious cabal - this is something that media execs and political lobbyists will openly admit they're aiming for to increase engagement so that their political power and wealth increases.

It's not a new phenomena - look at the government sponsored propaganda films of the past, the war on drugs (but not Oxycotin, conveniently), the revival of racist rhetoric in the GOP, and the constant reinforcement of capitalist thought throughout the education system.

There's no implicit suggestion that I can find other than the author's hopelessness at this state of affairs. This is the most political statement (other than support for civil rights) within the work:

It’s been this way for generations, and it’s all people know. That everything is confined in this way starves the populace of all nourishment of mind and heart, and it narrows the scope among artists on their ideas of what is possible and what’s worthwhile. It has shrunk the confines of what artists have been willing to explore by orders of magnitude, and it’s resulted in a mainstream culture that is shallow, power-serving and uninspired from top to bottom.

Humanity would look much different and the world would be a much better place if this hadn’t been happening all these years. Capitalist culture is brain poison.

Someday the leaders of ecocidal corporations will be put on trial for their crimes against our planet, and their defense that they did it to generate profits for their shareholders will be treated the same as war criminals saying they were just following orders.

This isn't about the author's politics, she's decrying a state of affairs that makes the exercise of political speech feel fruitless, because the conversation is always the same. The conversation is always the same because the subjects we talk about are set by the propaganda we consume every day, to the point where, like in Brave New World, most of the population can't even be bothered enough to care enough read the whole article.