(256)S11E6/1: Propaganda and Science
Welcome back to the Fourth Way podcast. In this episode, we are delving into a new area of propaganda, medical and scientific propaganda. Before we dig into the episode proper, I want to do a quick review of our major takeaways from the other areas of propaganda which we've discussed so far. In the first section of the season, we talked about how abusers manipulate information and propagandize their victims. While abusers implement a variety of strategies, one of their most powerful strategies is their emphasis on community.
Derek:We've discussed how propaganda works best when groups are polarized and how propaganda seeks to cut off cognitive dissonance, to cut off alternative information. It doesn't want you to question its narrative or seek information from another source. Abusers excel in this polarization and isolation, just like cults do. Abusers make victims and their friends and families feel isolated from each other by subverting their relationships. They make friends and family think that the victim is withdrawn and crazy while making the victim feel as though others despise her and are abandoning her.
Derek:In distancing victims from a support network, the abuser then becomes the only authority speaking into the victim's life, and he pits the victim against her former support network. Abusers polarize relationships and isolate one from information. After taking a look at propaganda and abuse, we also explored propaganda as it relates to racism. The power of racist propaganda tends to come from its ability to fulfill two basic needs for people. First, their social need, and second, their cognitive need.
Derek:It's no coincidence that the far right conservatism that mythologizes The United States tends to be both racist and nationalist. The two go hand in hand. But why? One reason is because people have a felt need to be a part of a strong cohesive social group. To feel like one is an integral part of a group, especially a group of importance, like the descendants of our godly founding fathers who established the best nation in history.
Derek:Nope. That's priceless to be a part of that group. People want a piece of that because it makes them feel not only important, but also in control. Of course, great nations and groups are built out of great struggle. And that's a common theme with nationalists, perhaps most famously seen in Hitler's book entitled My Struggle, just in German.
Derek:Great nations and great groups need great enemies. Blacks, other minorities, immigrants, communists, whoever it may be, many people want to identify enemies that their group has overcome or are currently needing to overcome. Beyond providing feelings of solidarity, purpose, and control, nationalism also abates cognitive dissonance. How do you hold two truths in tandem which seem to contradict? How did Thomas Jefferson work to establish a pretty solid government yet hold slaves and sexually abuse them?
Derek:How can our nation be such a bastion of freedom and wealth for so many yet harbor so much inequality? If one faces history head on, it's really hard to walk away knowing exactly what to think of the people and the events that made our history. You can't look at US history and say that The US was uniquely evil as it seems most nations that have held significant power from Genghis Khan in the East to Montezuma in the South sacrificed millions on the altar of war or religion. And at the same time, The United States hasn't been uniquely benevolent as we have committed thousands upon thousands of atrocities and injustices because of our self interest and lack of concern for others. But neither the left nor the right like complexity and dissonance.
Derek:Racial prejudice arises in part for a desire to resolve this dissonance and to arrive at simple conclusions. All those of European ancestry are bad and bloodthirsty because that's just the way that group is, or all blacks are immoral or profligate because that's just the way that their group is. While we focused mostly on the far right and their particular brand of nationalism, it's important to remember that if you're on the other pole, the result of buying into propaganda isn't any different. While the left may not at this time have the power that the right has historically had in The United States, it may not be too many decades until the tides change and the left's racial or religious prejudice will turn into oppression with the obtaining of structural power. So racial propaganda thrives on appealing to our desire for group solidarity and the resolution of cognitive dissonance, often through the mythologizing of the past.
Derek:The third form of propaganda we discussed was corporate propaganda. Corporate propaganda is uniquely powerful in that its emphasis isn't negative, as in the abusers tearing down of relationships or isolation, nor is it as much like racial propaganda in its mythologizing of the past. And that's in part because corporate propaganda has the desire not to have you withdraw from others or to ground yourself in the past. Not really at all, usually. Corporate propaganda instead seeks to create in you the desire to become part of a group and to move into the future.
Derek:Whereas the abuser isolates, corporate propaganda tells you that you no longer have to be isolated like you currently are. They have the perfect solution for you and the product that they're selling. You can become a part of the group. And the past? Who needs the past?
Derek:The past is where obsolete ideas and products reside. You want to be avant garde. You want the new gadgets. You don't want to be trapped in the past, but rather to move into the future in style. Thus, corporate propaganda is a more positive form of propaganda in that it seeks to create and build in you desires that you may not have known that you had.
Derek:It is an extremely powerful form of propaganda because unlike the other forms, which require some palette with which to work, corporate propaganda can fabricate desire for just about anything. Just take a walk around your house, especially the kitchen probably, and look at all the absolute junk you have or haven't used for a while. Go to a yard sale or have your own yard sale and just look at all the crap that we've bought into. It's absolutely astounding. Finally, we addressed propaganda as utilized by the media.
Derek:Certainly, the media uses a variety of propaganda methods, and their joining together with the corporate sector has married the two in many ways. But a unique aspect that the media uses to its advantage is silence. In Hollywood, that may mean that movies contain very few minorities. Never seeing minorities on screen or as protagonists and heroes can definitely shape how you think about the world. There's also silence in movies about war, where The US is rarely critiqued by big budget films, in part because Hollywood gets kickbacks from the government so long as they behave.
Derek:When Russia and China are always the bad guys in movies and The US is always good, or at least always resolves any of the injustices that some characters in the movie commit by the end of that movie, that does something to our perception. Of course, the news media does the same sort of thing. The war in Ukraine is immediately a crisis of utmost concern, while the war in Yemen, with its far greater loss of life and the horror of starvation and malnutrition, has lingered on for nearly a decade with only silence from The US media. Of course, the media can't talk about everything, but as you start to look at the items it does talk about incessantly and the items to which it's silent about, you notice that there's a huge impact of this silence. Out of sight, out of mind.
Derek:With media, we could say out of earshot, out of mind. If we don't hear about it from the people and institutions who are supposed to highlight what's important, that's going to significantly impact our knowledge and our views. And maybe that's a good way of putting what the media does. They're highlighters. They take a marker to the text and underline what they think we should know and cross out what they think we don't need to see.
Derek:That's a lot of power. Alright. With that review under our belt, we are ready to jump into the next section of propaganda, medical and scientific propaganda. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages the scientific and medical communities have in propagandizing relates to the authority which they hold. Yes.
Derek:They do have authority in the sense that this community tends to be highly educated and intelligent. Individuals in this community have gone to school for a long time and have legitimate credentials. But this authority is compounded by the way that our culture idolizes both science and medicine. As far as doctors are concerned, they're the closest thing we'll get to the fountain of youth. They preserve our lives.
Derek:Stanley Hauerwas has a fantastic article or or talk on this. I can't really remember what it is off the top of my head, but I'll try to find it and put it in the show notes. But Haarwa was essentially says that doctors are our modern day priests. We revere them because we idolize life and we seek to avoid suffering. We have a sim similar, reverence for scientists.
Derek:These men and women who bring us all of our gadgets of comfort, who help us to live efficiently, and who will save us from the apocalypse to come. You know, whether that's global warming or some imposing asteroid. I mean, this stuff is everywhere. I was just watching a new Scooby Doo with my kids, and the episode had the scientist who is clearly Bill Nye. I don't know if it was voiced by him, but it was it was clearly intended to be Bill Nye.
Derek:And they made various comments throughout the show, like, there are no mysteries if we follow the science. Now our reverence for science and medicine really is on a religious level here. Now I want you to think about science and medical communities, authority in relation to how authority would be handled in the other areas that we've talked about already. You know, in regard to abusers, they undermined the authority of others. Abusers stripped away close friends and family who can speak into the life of the victim.
Derek:They separated the victim from authorities, both in terms of physical and emotional distance. They isolate as far as they can. Propaganda and race tends to do something pretty similar. And then, of course, in the media, you've got separators like, you know, fake news, mainstream media, liberal scientists, or liberal liberal universities, woke historians. You've got terms like that which are meant to distance you from those people and isolate you from them.
Derek:Now while some of those terms can be used benignly in order to describe, like, perhaps mainstream media or liberal scientists that could be used informatively, they often tend to be pejorative terms and and something meant to isolate you and, distinguish you from that group. You just replace mainstream, liberal, and woke with a different adjective here. Right? Consensus. The consensus media, the consensus scientists, and the consensus historians.
Derek:If you use it in that way, it's not really pejorative. But if you use it the way that a lot of people use it, you know, the mainstream media, like, we can't trust them, then that's that's quite a bit different. Now I don't at all, here, want to attempt to argue that historians, scientists, or the media are all trustworthy. I simply wanna point out what racist and nationalist propaganda does in regard to authority. It spends a lot of its time tearing authority down, whether it's abusers or nationalists, racists, whatever they are.
Derek:They like to tear authority down. They want you to only trust their authority. Now what we're gonna find in regard to scientific and medical propaganda is that it actually does kind of the opposite here. Now rather than try to tear down authority in order to propagandize, its propaganda actually relies on its heavy indoctrination or building up of positive authority on their end. I mean, in in some ways, it does tear down authority and that it discounts things like pseudoscience and fringe science, and those terms which themselves seem like they'd lend themselves well to polarizing propaganda.
Derek:Right? I mean, those those terms are thrown around a lot too. But by and large, the scientific community relies on positive authority rather than on tearing down the authority of others. Corporate propaganda also used authority, and they they did it by placing it either in the hands of the experts who created the product or in the the hands of you, the consumer who is the expert that knows exactly what you want and how to fulfill your desires. Desires you might not have known that you had until they informed you about them, but desires that, were you became yours nonetheless.
Derek:And the media, they also utilize authority, a lot, for sure. But what we're gonna see when we, when we look at the scientific community is that it uses authority more as a hammer, more than any of the other forms of propaganda that we've discussed so far. The other aspect that we're gonna discuss in relation to scientific propaganda is its guise of benevolence. Again, the other forms of propaganda that we've discussed do this too, just not as good as scientific propaganda does it. Abusers cause their victims to think that their mistreatment is actually for their own good and may cause outsiders to think that the abuser is actually trying to care for his difficult partner.
Derek:Racist propaganda has long had at its core components, or a thread of paternalism. This notion that, you know, blacks and other minorities are like helpless, ignorant, or wayward children, and our racist views and responses to those groups are really meant to guide and help them, to nurture them because we really care about them. Corporate propaganda also disguises itself behind benevolence and making you think that they really care about fulfilling your desires, because they know what you need. And we saw that very clearly in the pursuit in the persuaders film, how they get you to desire becoming a part of their good family. You begin to view brands as a caring family, like a cult.
Derek:And finally, the news media certainly uses the idea of benevolence when they attempt to depict how they care for the community or the world. Neil Postman probably exposes this the best in his work, entitled How to Watch TV News. In that book, he digs into the nitty gritty and even talks about how many news agencies set themselves up as a family with a mom and a dad figure as the main anchors. You know, they always have, like, a a man and a woman. And then you've got the lovable crazy uncle who's the funny sportscaster and all that kind of stuff.
Derek:Like, everybody's got a role, and it really is like a family. And they set it up that way on purpose. So all good propagandists know that perceived benevolence correlates very strongly with perceived credibility. You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar, as they say. Despite all the ways that other forms of propaganda seek to manipulate this notion of benevolence, though, I don't think this aspect is more pronounced in any other area than it is when it comes to the scientific and medical propaganda.
Derek:So with those two ideas in mind, authority and benevolence, let's dig into the episode and get into some specifics here. First, the science and medical community rely heavily on authority. Now this truth has really become particularly pronounced in the twentieth century as scientific progress and implementation really took off like it hadn't ever done before. Part of that takeoff was a result not only of globalization, but also the size of governments and the scale of war. Governments with large funds and huge amounts of power at their disposal and both an excuse and a platform to test new discoveries, namely in war, it it provided an opportunity and the ability to help advance science rapidly.
Derek:With two world wars completing in three decades, and then entering into a cold war arms race, Science was glorified and scientists divinized. Add to this the amazing medical breakthroughs and various vaccinations, especially considering the eradication of polio. It seemed that both life and comfort were in the hands of the scientific and medical communities. Who could argue with those who held both life and death in their hands? The life of serums, vaccines, and cures divvied out in their benevolence, or the death of noxious gases, nuclear bombs, and precision precision engineered machine guns wielded by governments as they meted out what they called justice.
Derek:Science and medicine became the gods of our age. Gods who could be trusted to do justice and to love mercy, though never to walk humbly. And it's in this lack of humility and in this arrogance of power that science and medicine have the power, and I'd argue the tendency, to lead us astray. One of the most famous studies in psychology is an experiment performed by Stanley Milgram. A lot of people were wondering how normal everyday German citizens could have committed such horrendous atrocities against so many.
Derek:Milgram set out to test whether he could get average citizens off the street to do something similar. So he grabbed your average everyday Joe, and he got them into this room. And he said, hey. Look. We got this this guy in this other room, and, we're gonna ask him some questions.
Derek:And we kinda wanna see, you know, how if if we can influence him, if we can motivate him to, get right answers. And so, he said, look. You got this dial in front of you, and the dial was labeled, you know, like, something like light shock, heavy shock, dangerous, like warning, like death may may, come about if you'd use this, whatever. It's labeled like that. And, he just wanted to see how far they would go.
Derek:When the guy gets a wrong answer, you push the button, and then you up the dosage. So how far would somebody off the street go? Just from having this guy in a white coat tell them, yeah. Go ahead. Just push the button.
Derek:That's what you're supposed to do. Just push the button. And they found that a lot of people, way more than you'd think, they they push the button all the way into, like, the deadly area. Even after the guy, like, stopped responding. So clearly, he wasn't in pain anymore, because he probably had had a heart attack.
Derek:Of course, it was a fake guy in the other room. But nevertheless, these these people who are pushing the button thought it was real. And so Milgram's point is, look, authority holds a whole lot of sway even over our society, which we think is so individualistic in The United States. You can get somebody off the street to basically kill some other random person. Right?
Derek:Just because a guy in a white coat tells him it's okay to push a button. So that that's Milgram's experiment. Now it's important to note that Milgram's experiment has recently come into question, and some think that his data was a bit inaccurate or, you know, maybe rigged to exaggerate his findings. But, you know, that's okay because I don't rely on Milgram alone to make my point here. In fact, I don't even need him at all.
Derek:You could just take a look at the books Ordinary Men and They Thought They Were Free. They're two great looks at average German citizens and an exploration into what transpired in Germany to get people to be knowingly complicit in atrocities or willfully ignorant. Ordinary Men, in particular, is great because it it shows that a lot of the worst executions were actually carried out not by hardened SS troops, but reservists, school teachers, lawyers, doctors, people called up and in temporary service. These groups were largely responsible for the up close and personal executions with bullets to the backs of heads in the mass graves. They didn't have the luxury of this, distance faceless executions and mass with victims in the large gas chamber.
Derek:Now these everyday citizens were often the faithful German executioners. Now why did they do it? Well, there are a number of explanations, but one of the major components was that an authority issued the command. And I think we get another sort of glimpse of this type of idea with Hannah Arendt's famous insight when writing about the Nuremberg trials. She was amazed that when she sat at the trials, the murderous Nazi maniacs weren't at all maniacal.
Derek:She coined the term the banality of evil because these men who carried out such horrendous atrocities were very normal seeming people. Evil doesn't tend to be advanced by physically powerful, apparently insane individuals. It travels through relatively normal people and through relatively normal hierarchical structures of authority. Particularly in systems, evil is transmitted and facilitated on a large scale better through the medium of normalcy. If you just think about something like the January sixth insurrection or the the Trump presidency in The United States, you'll notice that while plenty of people were pushed towards the right and hardened there, that huge jump of insanity all at once actually pushed a lot of people away from the right as well.
Derek:Huge leaps tend to have the effect of waking people up, whereas normalcy and structures are a great way to desensitize someone to evils. Strong hierarchies, systems, and authorities are very conducive to producing atrocities. Historically, our scientific and medical communities are set up to foster atrocities and injustices. We trust the science and follow the science where it leads us. Now such thinking refuses to acknowledge the fact that science isn't just a set of facts, but a set of facts interpreted by fallible and biased human beings.
Derek:Science may, in theory, have high levels of accountability through things like peer review, but it also has tremendous incentive to only study, review, and support certain conclusions. Human bias and motivation are factors assumed out of the system because God is dead, and we, the people, don't do well without gods. Science has therefore become our god, and we need to be able to have faith in it. Because like all gods, it promises preservation and the good life. Therefore, we jump when the science says jump.
Derek:We duck when the science says duck, and we sacrifice when the science says sacrifice. Even if you're a regular Joe off the street, you're happy and willing to sacrifice that guy in the other room because the scientist told you to. Trust the men and women in the white coats, and do what they say. This brings us to our second point for the episode, which is that science not only stands on the idea of authority, but it also hides behind the idea of benevolence. Nobody wants to serve a malevolent God.
Derek:Even those who serve a God who require that they sacrifice some of their children, they believe that their God is benevolent. This child devouring God may eat a child here or there, but think of all the children and lives he saves by bringing rain or quelling the volcano's anger. What is one sacrificial child in the scheme of a whole community? It's a small price to pay to the gods. In fact, it's a merciful bargain, isn't it?
Derek:This one life for many? Yet we moderns are too advanced to be fooled by such archaic and barbaric gods who would ask us to throw our children into volcanoes or to pierce the hearts of our eldest son. How could one call such a god benevolent? Yet the god of science is no different than those barbaric gods. Like many of the gods of old, this benevolent god is really a malevolent one who asks us to make human sacrifices for the greater good all the time.
Derek:And, really, the god of science is far more malevolent in that he requires millions of sacrificial victims rather than just one. And the god of science is devious in hiding his horrors. Whereas the ancient priests of old may have been asked to sacrifice their own children to the gods, a sacrifice of great honor and value that didn't leave even the most powerful person in the community untouched. Science obscures its thirst for human blood by sacrificing those whose bodies can be easily hidden, the oppressed and the exploited. Science has long experimented on and mangled the bodies of prisoners hidden behind prison walls, the enslaved behind walls of oppression, minorities behind the walls of the ghetto, and the foreigner behind the walls of policies, borders, and obscurity.
Derek:Science has a thirst for blood, which if we knew how great it truly was, might appall us, or I suppose it might not. Actually, it it probably wouldn't, because we who worship science the most tend to be those who are most benefited by it. The facade of benevolence is a powerful one. When a person or an ideology can define good and evil for itself, then it can make whatever it wants into that which is good. It defines it.
Derek:What we will find as we explore the propaganda of science and medicine is that it constantly declares to us what is good, and it's usually right. Right? Saving lives is good. Bringing comfort is good. Advancing technology?
Derek:That's good. Increasing knowledge? Sure. That's good too. But what science almost always hides from us is the cost of the good.
Derek:It hides from us the bad that it uses to obtain the good. But to put this in vulgar terms, how many drops of poop would I need to put into a batch of brownies for you to, to not eat those brownies? It'll only take one batch or one drop. Right? And then the whole the whole batch is defiled.
Derek:Science is not the first creature to hide behind authority and benevolence. It's an age old strategy. We saw it used with precision in the first garden, and we see it used again as science promises to get us back to that garden. As we delve into some specifics in the rest of the section, keep these aspects in mind, authority and benevolence. That's all for now.
Derek:So peace. And because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to nonviolence and Kingdom Living.
