Propaganda Actual

On Synthesizing Social Hierarchies

In recent weeks, the online Right has been troubling itself with why right-wing propaganda seems to be so ineffective. Really, it’s more about contrasting the efficacy of left-wing propaganda against right-wing attempts at propaganda. To this point, every single one of the analyses we have seen has been wrong or incomplete. These commentators focus on the messaging of the propaganda, erroneously supposing that efficacy is based on the message itself. In reality, the efficacy of propaganda is entirely independent from the message being delivered; the means by which it is delivered are far, far more important. If the propaganda is the bunker-buster’s casing, the message is the charge hidden within. The Left often engages in propaganda — effective propaganda — whereas the Right sometimes engages in propaganda, but more frequently engages in reasoned dialogue, which is not propaganda.

The most effective propaganda has two major preconditions:

1. It must be pre-rational.

2. It must be embodied.

Dialogue, discussion, dissertation, essays, explanation, illumination, lecture, etc. are not and cannot be propaganda. They lack both the first and second aspects that are the essence of strong propaganda. First, they are appeals to the rational mind. Humans are not rational creatures. Humans are animals with a limited capacity for reason, flesh and bone imbued with a soul that struggles to reason against its natural instincts. The beliefs held by the overwhelming majority of people are attained by whatever means (almost entirely social) and are rationalized (to the extent they are examined at all) ex post facto in an attempt to explain and persuade others, and to justify them in the face of criticism. This also links us to the second point, namely the Right’s propensity for reasoned dialogues which are not embodied. All discussions of the world and its goings-on are pure abstraction, as anything not directly experienced is itself an abstraction. More on both of these things later.

Part I: De Hominis Natura

We on the Right understand that humans are hierarchical creatures; everything we engage in comes to resemble a hierarchy. Every organization, belief, family, job, religion, sports league. If humans are involved, then its structure becomes hierarchical. Macro-level social dynamics are no different. The respect a person earns from a group is dependent on his place in the social hierarchy he finds himself embedded in. As individuals, our ability to discern this hierarchy is innate and pre-rational. We often do not consciously realize that we have slotted other people into a conceptual social hierarchy, even after interacting with them directly. Our animal brains are able to detect these things because, in our distant past, it was a way of surviving. For males, it is about recognizing who the leader is; whom to follow and/or not to mess with flippantly. It also provides examples of how to act (or not to act) to reach the top of said hierarchy. For females, it is about finding strong mates who can produce healthy children. This is something all of us can roll our eyes at, given how obvious it all is.

What is not so readily obvious is how we gain an understanding of these hierarchies. For both men and women, our concept of the hierarchy’s form is gleaned by observing social interaction. Though a male hierarchy is initially formed through action witnessed by other men, a man new to a group of males will be able to determine who ranks where depending on how the men treat one another. Similarly, women outsource their understanding of any social hierarchy by watching how the men in any situation treat one another. If a single man is given the deference and respect of all others, it is safe to assume that he is on the top of that hierarchy. Similarly, we can see what behaviors those at the top of the hierarchy engage in that have ostensibly gotten them there. We learn by watching, and, since everyone desires to be high-status, we try to mimic the actions of those at the top.

This is true for most aspects of our social life. Children learn how to treat others by watching their parents. We learn what a relationship between a man and a woman looks like by watching how our parents interact with one another. This is something that has been understood by all societies but, in the modern age, The Science™ has provided us with an identified physical process behind this: mirror neurons. Essentially, mirror neurons are the pieces of our brain that allow us to feel what another person is experiencing. Our friend Academic Agent has made the point that bullying plays an important social function in that it shows a group how not to act. That is to say, the crowd sees the actions of the bullied subject, feels the humiliation of being bullied, and learns that the actions of the bullied individual will lead to humiliation. The corollary acts in the same way: the actions of successful people are mimicked by those with less success. It only takes but a few seconds to consider examples of how this plays out on a societal scale: people are deeply concerned with the thoughts and beliefs of celebrities, the rich, and sportocrats despite them usually being idiots. People will buy what they are told to buy, believe what they are told to believe, and do what they are told to do so long as the person telling them is perceived as sufficiently high-status. This is a pre-rational process. It does not require even the lowest level of rational thought because our brains are hardwired to perform these things at an animal level — this behavior is also found in apes. Marketing companies have known this for decades.

Historically (before the invention of mass media), these social hierarchies were formed by one’s immediate community. Parents, older siblings, friends, relations, Church elders, town leaders, etc. found themselves at the top of their social hierarchy because they were able to produce something of value that allowed them to rise to the top. This hierarchy was embodied in the individual who had the positive qualities that allowed everyone else to agree that he or she was at or near the top. I need not elaborate on the qualities these (almost exclusively men) possessed to earn them their positions. The advent of mass media, the atomization of our communities, and the proliferation of the television have completely changed how the widely-accepted social hierarchy is formed.

In our current degraded age, large-scale social hierarchies are not formed by the experiences of the individual in relation to a real social group. They are formed en masse by no less real an experience specifically manufactured for the mass of society. This modern phenomenon is possible only with the advent of photorealistic depictions of social interaction: television. The television allowed for an advancement in propaganda that had never before been possible. Most obviously, the ability to reach into everyone’s home with a single message was revolutionary, but that had been done before by radio. This advancement from sound alone to sound plus image brought with it the ability to hijack the human brain’s capacity for learning through watching; learning in the exact same way as anyone would learn witnessing an event in real life. The human brain cannot differentiate between something experienced in the real and a photorealistic experience of an event.

The television seeds into the population experiences of events, situations, and stories that are exaggerated or entirely fictitious. Lest you think I exaggerate, a few illustrations. A 2001 study asked participants to recall their childhood visit to Disney and showed a commercial featuring Bugs Bunny, a non-Disney character, shaking hands with a child. On subsequent surveys, participants confidently described memories of meeting Bugs and shaking hands. That is to say, a statistically significant portion of people exposed to an ad believed they personally experienced something that is impossible. A similar study in 2011 showed that advertising could manifest within the viewer false memories of having a positive experience with products that don’t exist. These are not advertising tricks; they are the natural responses of a brain that has not evolved with something like television. Over millions of years, the brain has evolved with only a single source of photorealistic audio/visual stimuli: lived experience. The ability to present true-to-life fictional events has only existed for a mere hundred years, and our brains have not evolved to be able to differentiate between the two. In this case, seeing is not only believing; seeing is experiencing. The brain sees the television as a window, not into another world, but into the next room.

Part II: Artifice Becomes Synthesis

Throughout the late ’90s and ’00s, there was a recurring story that I would sometimes hear about: a burglar breaking into a person’s home, becoming injured in the course of committing the crime, suing the homeowner for big money, and winning in civil court. Often, the person retelling this anecdote would say he had “heard it from someone,” not realizing that he was recalling a discussion that had occurred in the 1997 film Liar Liar. He had, indeed, heard it from someone. That someone was fictional, but, nonetheless, it had been related to him by another human, and it made no difference that it came out of the television. Boomers who claim to have attended the original Woodstock festival number in the millions — far more than could have been present at the actual event. In studies, Boomers claiming to have been to the festival were asked to describe what they had seen. They all described the same thing, down to the light glinting off Hendrix’s guitar. They were all describing a recording they had seen on television that captured the glare of the instrument. There are as many stories of similar phenomena as there are stars in the sky.

Television as a device presents the possibility of constructing an entire fictional world tangled up with the real in the minds of the viewers. This does not mean that people think Star Wars literally happened. Humans have “told” stories since before there was language. The ability to discern truth from fiction out of a story relates to our ability to work with abstraction. All means of conveyance for any event which one was not present to witness for oneself is an abstraction that cannot be mistaken for a real, lived experience in a healthy mind. The parts of photorealistic media that people integrate into their memories as real are what they personally witness the characters doing on screen. When a small woman beats up a man three times her size and half her age, the audience learns that this is possible because they have personally witnessed it occurring. People carry these beliefs into the real world once they leave the theater or turn off the television. Imagine, dear reader, what a powerful tool this would be if people spent hundreds of hours a month learning this way. Imagine what could be taught if the programs were all being made by the same group of people pushing the same ideological messaging. Truly, if we lived in a world where a large fraction of society spent more time in their homes binge-watching the same programming, all created by a single group, with a single ideological frame, the power that this group would have would be immeasurable.

What a crazy thing that would be.

(Yes, THE map.)

The absolute scale of what is being seeded into the minds of the population is quite staggering. Everyone reading this can think of his or her own example. The above map, from 2011, shows “mean IAT scores of White participants.” IAT stands for “Implicit Association Test,” and it is just a neologism for “how raysis you is.” I am sure that the map looks very familiar to you, fellow denizens of the Internet. What you may have noticed is that the Whites who have the highest racism score are people who live in “diverse” areas. We all know why this is: those who have to suffer diversity are the ones who are most against it. Why, then, do the people who have almost no experience with diversity have such a high opinion of it? The answer is that they do have experience with diversity. Every social interaction the good people of Maine have had with diversity has been a positive one. In every movie and television program, the diverse characters are the smartest doctors, the best rhetoricians, the most moral actors, the most fearless soldiers. This is where that famous, evergreen “doctors and engineers” statement about the African horde invading the West comes from. A wealthy White liberal, safely insulated from diversity, sees Black faces and relates them to the only experience he has with them. This doesn’t end with diverse actors reading scripts (written by a certain group) that show how all races are equal. The same play extends to making the sexes indistinguishable and to denigrating White men. I need not elaborate on these things. If you have watched a movie or television show since the ’50s, you can certainly list your own.

When all members of society have been bombarded with these images their entire lives, they start to embody these messages as they carry what they have learned into the real world. If media, in lockstep, shows men who have some notion of racial or sex differences, who question certain authoritative bodies, or who are “bigoted” as being low-status, people avoid them, as they risk carrying the stink of low status. What’s more, as individuals avoid having those low-status thoughts, they begin to exclude and shame those who do. And so, we see the artificial social hierarchy being beamed across the airwaves alive in the real world, internalized and acted out by those who encounter them.

In the mid-’10s, there was an argument among the artificial intelligence autists as to whether the term “artificial” was appropriate at all. By way of analogy, the argument is that artificial diamonds (cubic zirconia) are not diamonds, but synthetic diamonds (so called “lab grown” diamonds) are genuine diamonds, simply made by man instead of nature. Thus, the term “artificial” to AGI is a misnomer when the idea is to create a genuine intelligence through synthetic means. Maybe the discussion of synthetic versus artificial within the AI sphere is a big “who cares” matter of semantics, but for propaganda, it is everything. (The Baudrillard nerds are gonna love this one.) The media constructs artificial social hierarchies with the stories portrayed on screen. These hierarchies have the same basic forms (women/browns on top, White men on the bottom, racists worse than rapists and murderers, etc.), so the thousands of programs totaling millions of hours consumed by the average person all reinforce one another by repeating the same messaging again and again. Who was it that said, “Repeat a lie often enough…”? The viewers internalize this artificial hierarchy as though it were a natural one, and then carry their understanding of this hierarchy into the real world. They use it to make decisions about how they act, whom they associate with, and the ideas they will countenance. The artificial has been synthesized into the real.

The perfect form of social engineering already exists, and it’s in your home. To the extent that other propaganda works on society, it is only insofar as it reinforces the foundational myths that have been implanted by the television. This is what is meant by the most effective propaganda being both embodied and pre-rational. The display of social hierarchy works on our hind brains and isn’t thought about at all. The people on the screens physically embody the message, and that message then becomes further embodied within the individual who absorbs the message from the television. The news media, public schools, and universities are also forms of propaganda, but they are much less effective because they are abstracted; they require rationality to examine. It’s why Boomers can “wake up” to some of the lies they’ve been told their whole lives, come to distrust all regime organizations completely, but still have a slavish attachment to WWII, racial equality, and Israel. It’s why the trend of women lamenting that they can’t find an attractive left-wing guy is so prevalent. The most attractive, confident men they’ve ever known have been left-wing, while all the right-wing men have been stupid basement-dwellers, so why can’t they find what they want?! They know they’re out there; they’ve seen them. It is because all those men they’ve “known” were characters on a television screen.

If you tease these things out a little bit, you can see how potentially disastrous this is. Since women are the sexual selectors of the species, and they select for status above all things, a synthetic social hierarchy that places weak men above strong men will have serious dysgenic effects. The effort to get women to miscegenate is also a great focus of these propagandists through the same means. To add to the horror, men will adopt what is perceived to be high-status in emulation of what the television tells them, reinforced by day-to-day interactions. Speech patterns of young Millennials ape ebonics, and Gen Z/Alpha speak as though they were raised in a black ghetto. Voting patterns, buying habits, and a whole slew of behaviors emerge from the influence of this synthetic hierarchy. There is no greater tool of social engineering than photorealistic fictional media that exists today.

Part III: Knowing Is Not Enough

Recently, a friend and fellow OGC member, Dave Greene, published the article “Remember Archie Bunker?” on his Substack wherein he illustrated exactly how this plays out in real life. In a much more personal (and eloquent) account of the very phenomenon illuminated above, Dave describes how this propaganda worked on him personally:

Archie Bunker was a character from the 1970s television show All in the Family, intended by the show’s progressive producers to lampoon the conservatives who were dissatisfied with the negative societal transformations brought about by the 1960s cultural revolution. I think I might have seen at most three episodes of the show, and, like most people who watched it, I found the character of Archie to be quite endearing. I also knew, from the outset, that Archie’s role in the show was calculated political propaganda, something that liberal California Boomers used to talk about like it was some kind of achievement.

And did it matter that, from the hindsight of 1999, Archie was in fact right about many of the consequences of progressive social change?

Not really.

Because until 2011 at least, Archie Bunker was living rent-free in my imagination as a cautionary tale, driving me to vote for policies I knew wouldn’t work and publicly affirm idiotic ideas that I knew weren’t true. My memory of Archie Bunker was a one-way ticket to being a Reddit shit-lib, even before Reddit existed. And I couldn’t explain the reason why.

This is also the way it works on every single one of us. Yes, even you, dear reader.

(He was also right about lasagna.)

What my friend is also describing is how he knew that what he was saying was factually incorrect, and that the things that he supported were doomed to fail, but that he had to espouse them or else risk being perceived as low-status. The propaganda comes to us at this pre-rational level and cannot be excised by rationality alone. As the saying goes, “You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” The liberal priors we all carry around with us (e.g., equality is good, hierarchy is something to regard with suspicion, evil doesn’t really exist) are ingrained in our brains by this method of control and constantly reinforced by those around us. This means that being aware that you are being propagandized in this way does little to diminish the effects of that propaganda. Truly, it is a terrifying notion, as there is no way to interact with wider culture without engaging with its social engineering apparatus. Those around you now draw their cultural reference points from television and movies. Most everything is a reference to something they have seen on the screen.

The foundational worldview upon which all other forms of regime propaganda build is constructed through this means. All human understanding of social hierarchy is pre-rational and pre-linguistic. It is only after it is felt and embodied that it can be rationalized. The media, schools, and politicians only act as reinforcing agents who can rationally legitimize that which was already implanted. I do not mean to minimize these other institutions; they are crucial for the foundational elements to withstand intelligent scrutiny. I mean only to highlight that they are not the primary source from which these things flow.

The only true way to resist having the propaganda stain our subconscious minds is to avoid engaging with it at all. In the same way as Christ tells us to avoid temptation to sin, we must avoid the opportunity for the propaganda to work on our minds. For us, it means avoiding engagement with fictional photorealistic media altogether — a big ask, I know. Almost all of our passive entertainment comes from these sources, so we must seek it elsewhere. It is not for this piece to elaborate on the superiority of active forms of entertainment such as reading and sports over passive activities such as watching television. That has already been elaborated on to the point of banality in our circles. What is imperative to remember is that it is not just we who are susceptible to these methods of propagandizing; it is our children as well. Denying the regime the next generation is the only way of limiting its ability to control them. When children are shielded from this propaganda, they are able to internalize natural social hierarchies from their family, friends, and community.

Our enemies have discovered an extraordinarily powerful means of hijacking the basest parts of human nature and have wielded it in an attempt to establish their utopia. With the influx of a certain group into the United States in the late ’40s, and their subsequent total control over Hollywood, our means of entertainment have been used against us. The characters, settings, and stories are many, but they are manifold: we all have memories of visual media, and this has affected our development and colored our perceptions of others. No one is immune, and each of us bears this mark in ways that may not be readily apparent. One need only to scratch the surface to find the stain rooted deep. However, all utopian projects are destined to fail as the natural world inevitably reasserts itself. It is not for us to deny this part of our being. After all, if the Right does not believe in natural hierarchy and in intrinsic restrictions to human nature, we do not believe in anything. So long as the global media complex exists and is beamed into the homes of the majority of humans, we will not be able to “wake up” the normie. The work that is presented to us once we understand how the regime’s social engineering does its tricks is to build high-status networks outside the approval of the synthetic narrative-crafters. Within these real hierarchies, traditional (read: natural) displays of strength and worthiness will be able to filter to the top, and we will be more effective as a force within society. Since all the regime’s apparatus is set to destroy groups that attempt this, portraying them as something that only low-status people engage in, the work will be thankless. By taking it up as a duty, and starting small, we can build up a structure whose foundation rests in the real, which will always be more robust than the synthetic constructs of utopian madmen. We at the Old Glory Club have taken up this mantle, and, God willing, we will one day be able to win the hearts and minds of the worthy.

If you’ve made it this far, through the driest piece of writing I have ever put to paper, I thank you.