The propaganda loop

Today will be a strange ride, so buckle up. I want to start with Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical that was published this week. It runs some 42,000 words! Having been pretty busy since it came out, I’m not going to pretend I’ve read all of it. But some passages I did read have stuck with me.

The encyclical is about the dangers of artificial intelligence. The pope speaks of technology as not actually neutral, “because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it." Leo also mentioned the dangers that prior popes have warned about, of turning other human beings into “a resource to be used and exploited.”

All this brought to mind Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda, which opens with a definition of the word. Bernays traces it back to the seventeenth century and another Pope, writing about how, in 1622, Pope Gregory created a new office, the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide). Propaganda Fide, the propagation of the faith.

Bernays used this origin story to argue that propaganda in and of itself wasn’t inherently bad, and to say—as he was writing the book in the 1920s—that only recently had it come to be seen as a force for bad. But the general public’s view of the missionaries whom the Catholic Church sent out into the world under the auspices of that office dedicated to Propaganda fide has has changed a lot in the century since Bernays wrote his book. And his first example might be more of a counterexample at this point.

There are other far more openly evil characters in the history of propaganda, particularly among the Nazis. But as an extraordinarily mercenary character with less genocidal intent, Bernays likely did as much harm as any of them. He boosted cigarette smoking by women through strategic stunts and ad campaigns, actively tying cigarettes to beauty in the form of keeping women thin. He played a key role in the United Fruit Company debacle of US intervention in the Americas, including the overthrow of the Guatemalan government.

Building a world to live in

Bernays made use of psychological concepts of his uncle, Sigmund Freud (and was also the father of a former writing teacher of mine). Bernays may have done more than anyone to create the world we live in today—a world of deceptive messaging that seeks to control other humans’ behaviors.

What to do about this world we now live in is a big question. And the Catholic Church has plenty of blood on its hands, so I don’t typically look to it for moral guidance. Yet the Pope’s encyclical is a fascinating example of a human in charge of an institution taking the long view and asking “What kind of world are we building, and is it a good one?”

ICE arrests and abuses are still happening. Trump and his allies are inflicting violence here at home and on those who live in other countries, whether through quiet extinction or open war. These things have to be resisted. Yet I do think it’s worth it to step back and try to get a panoramic pictures of where we’re at—to try to see the big things coming.

I’ve talked before about how Trump’s end is coming. And it seems easier to imagine now, with his cratering polls and the fury over the criminal disaster he’s unleashed in Iran. We can’t take it for granted—we still have to delegitimize his entire movement and work toward shutting the door on it. But I would argue that we also have to be thinking about the country and world that comes after him.

The current crisis

My sense is that the world currently being made is one filled with dehumanization, propaganda, and a lack of human agency. These elements all undergird a concentration camp society, so maybe it’s no surprise that’s where we’re at, but I want to talk about how to think beyond it and not to fall into the assumptions that become normal in this kind of setting.

Edward Bernays created or fine-tuned many of the worst aspects of the today’s world. Nevertheless, for more than a century, countless U.S. outlets, many with big budgets, scrambled to cover the news in cities, states, and countries. That they did so in blinkered and even bigoted ways kept some vital stories from the light of day. These same outlets also covered corruption and daily events large and small that conveyed useful information that would provide a significant service in a democracy. We have somehow lost much of the latter while keeping the downsides of the former.

The creation of a culture of lies and stunts, a flim-flam con man selling the world on hate and fear in order to make a the next buck and outrun consequences for criminal behavior—Donald Trump is the physical manifestation of Edward Bernays’ work.

We live in an increasingly propagandized society. While countless individual journalists and a few companies keep reporting in heroic ways, journalism as a force for informing the general public has been shrunk and shattered. The general public always held inexplicable and unreal views, but could previously be reached through large-scale stories and reporting efforts. Now, a majority of the country is unlikely to have a shared experience of news of any kind, with the exception of some true crime events.

Instead, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a revival of propaganda, a return of the kind of people that existed in Bernays’ era—like Father Coughlin, who understood as well as Bernays did how to use propaganda. Coughlin once counted nearly a quarter of the American public among his audience. He spread antisemitic and Nazi ideology widely in the U.S., and only the beginning of World War II led to authorities cancelling his program and ending his influence.

Camps and propaganda

Propaganda tends to go hand in hand with concentration camp societies, because propaganda always sets itself against something and uses it to fearmonger. A thing can never be promoted simply on its own virtues—it has to be recast as better than something else, or as an antidote to some threat. Propaganda tries to shut down critical thought and foster group-think that defines itself by degrading something else.

Concentration camp societies can’t exist without extensive propaganda. I’ve said before that it usually takes years of effort to demonize a group enough for the general public to see other human beings as such a threat that they should be put in camps.

Without journalism, and in an increasingly post-literate society, we become more susceptible to propaganda. In addition, the early 20th century has seen the rise of social media and digital worlds that are configured to relentlessly harvest our attention in ways that are difficult to break. This leads to more reaction, less thinking, less verifiable information available to any particular person, and less real information in general. When all that is paired with propaganda, it’s a funnel to a concentration camp society, as we saw with the campaigns on Facebook against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

21st Century conmen

Today, artificial intelligence—in the way that the oligarchs are pushing it and fooling people about it—is poised to build the next world, a worse world, using the model inherited from political and corporate propagandists like Bernays, and the compulsive attention-grabbing models of social media.

I’ll take a moment to say that one of my kids is in an engineering program that involves a lot of computer work. And because of talking with him about all this and seeing what kind of work he does, I’ve seen this other world, where machine learning would have had a different existence as an extraordinary tool that could help a lot of scientific and tech projects.

And that life as a tool appears to be taking place, but the field of AI has subsumed it. The people developing an selling AI have tried to turn it into a creative mind, a companion, a romantic partner, and things is entirely incapable of being or doing. The propaganda they are pushing—and I mean it is literally propaganda—makes bigger and bigger claims for what artificial intelligence can do now, will be able to do in the future, and what it even is.

Like all propaganda, it depends on fear and relies on lies that cheat people and divide humanity. We’re seeing the rise of AI “psychosis.” Then there’s the deluge of shitty AI music and books. Companies are now offering the false promise of AI companions—who, if anything, will render you more unfit for the real friction of actual human encounters. The useful tool AI for specific tech and scientific tasks wouldn’t have been profitable enough to satisfy the men who own it. So a broader myth of AI is being sold to much of the public, one that’s an illusion and a lie. It’s also a money sink. You don’t have to accept it.

A Catholic education

I haven’t forgotten that I started this post with a reference to two Popes. In the interest of of full disclosure: I was baptized Catholic, became a Lutheran when my mother divorced and remarried. During my early teenage years, my mother’s second husband swept us into evangelical communities, but during that time, I also briefly attended a Catholic junior high school. Later, I would up at a Jesuit university for an undergraduate degree, which included some additional Catholic education.

As I said, I don’t generally look to the Church to direct my moral compass. I know it can produce a Father Coughlin as easily as it can produce a Pope Leo XIV. And I don’t have any illusions about the relationship to power you have to engage in to be a pope.

But I think Leo is right to be concerned about artificial intelligence in its current form. And it goes back to the Propaganda fide—the propagation of the faith. Propaganda is composed only of an argument for, and aims to bend free thought and will into service to someone else’s authority and ideas. That service typically limits a person’s well-being or rights and obscures the harm done.

The current crusade for AI—which explains the world to you in an overarching way (one that’s often sloppy or incorrect), is designed to be a companion, or simply flatters you—is part of a propaganda mindset. It’s being sold more heavily than anything in my lifetime. And there is a reason for that.

Just as with propaganda, people want to control you for their own ends. So I try to think about the larger degree to which people are ceding control and understanding of their world to authorities and processes that don’t have their best interests at heart.

I wrote a couple weeks ago that I don’t want to treat machines like people, or people like machines. So it’s important to be aware of what tools you’re going to use and whose tool you might unwittingly become.

One thing about propaganda—whether it’s over AI or immigration—is that it requires tremendous resources, and it exacts a cost. It damages the people who accept it and even the people who use it. They weaken themselves by coming to believe their own lies, and they underestimate their opposition. Ground yourself in a political or philosophical or theological heritage with real teeth instead, and use it to weigh the actual facts on the ground, not to explain them away.

What to do about it

How, then to we plan for that other world, a world not built on false promises, fear, and deception? Maybe don’t demonize your political opponents in the way they demonize trans folks or immigrants. If you judge them and hold them in contempt, do it for the specific things they’ve done and not for a category you can throw them into. These are real people doing specific things. Call them on those things, and don’t fall into a propaganda mindset by letting everything become abstract and feel inevitable.

Also try not to focus only on crises—on the events you find dangerous or troubling. Create community centered on the parts of the world you like, and the kind of connections you want to last. Whether that’s a book club or a sports rec league—or even church, if you’re more devout than I am. Keep at least some focus on building something positive.

If you’re active in the political realm, it’s worth asking whether a given strategy relies on fooling people or does it actively embrace the world you want in a way that will make sense to the people its directed at, inviting them to be a part of that world? I think that’s the key difference between politicians who are clearly able to talk about and address our current crisis of democracy and those who are weather vanes or just speak in platitudes. Anyone who’s really going to lead has to stand for something.

Whether you’re talking about ICE detention, the war in Iran, or about AI or any of a number of other deeply disturbing propaganda phenomena underway right now, it’s become extraordinary for public figures to simply say aloud the shocking things that are unfolding around us. So say what you see happening and share it with those in your life and your community: at school board meetings, in city council meetings, in whatever forum you can create. Note concrete details and make plans to do something specific in response, rather than staying in the realm of ideas.

Anyone can do it. The 10-year-old girl outside the Delaney Hall ICE concentration camp in Newark on Day four of the hunger strike did it beautifully by going to visit her father, and telling reporters outside exactly what was happening.

“They need to let all these people out. If they’re such big and bad [sic]—why won’t they just take their mask off? They wanted to work here. They wanted to work here. They wanted to work here. So let them show their face. They should show their face… Why are you so scared. Why? There’s nothing to be scared of. We’re all here to just see our family members. We’re not here for trouble… We’re just here to, just see our family members.”

She witnessed the larger events unfolding, she went to offer relief from suffering, or barring that, to testify about it. Saying what’s happening publicly in a literal way is an anchoring practice and radical act of anti-propaganda. We can all do more of it.

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