Fight On!
Dr. Begonia and I got into a somewhat heated argument about propaganda and free speech. She hates propaganda and wants to lessen its influence, noting the destruction it has caused, specifically in the last few years. I champion free speech, as an absolute, and recognize that embracing free speech, truly embracing it, inevitably means that propaganda and hate speech will be a part of it. I also think free speech is the only way to counter propaganda. So, we’ve got ourselves a bit of a conundrum.
For the sake of not inflaming the senses and eliminating all reasoned debate, we shall henceforth refer to a specific ex-president as Charles Shultz’s classic sad-sack cartoon character, Charlie Brown.
We decided to present this debate as a conversation.
Dr. B: We have to do something to stop propaganda.
Bo: Nope, we can’t do that. Free speech is too important.
(anger rising in Dr. B’s slowly-reddening face)
Dr. B.: How can you say that?! You support propaganda?
Bo: (retorting) You don’t support free speech?
(a week of arguing where both of us called the other a Fascist ensued)
(finally, once tempers cooled, we segued from fighting to writing)
Dr. B.: Propaganda is a form of lying. Its purpose is to create a view of reality that the perpetrators want everyone to buy. In all totalitarian regimes pumping out propaganda, anyone who tries to speak their version of reality gets harmed.
Bo: True, but the only way to be able to counter propaganda is under a system that allows for free speech.
Dr. B.: I got so upset about this argument that I called my best friend Dr. Lynn and she said, “With free speech comes responsibility,” which led me to free speech coming with having a moral compass, but with propaganda flying everywhere there is no underlying moral compass.
Bo.: Yeah, I could agree with that, but without free speech there is simply no way to counter lies. The powers-that-be in totalitarian regimes will just kill you.
Dr. B.: Truth is a casualty in our culture it seems. Lying is expected and par for the course. When Charlie Brown got in, I discovered that I had a built-in lying meter, which had a level of expectation for quantity. I expected all senators and representatives to lie at a 50% level, and then Charlie Brown lied at about a 90% level. If we chuckle at allowing a 50% level, does it lead us to a 90% level?
Bo: OK, sure we should expect better from our leaders, but it’s only when people are shaken out of their comfort zone by someone, like Charlie Brown, lying so big and so audaciously that we even realize we’ve been accepting too many lies, and need to turn the ship around.
Dr. B.: In all totalitarian regimes, such as the medical tyranny we are experiencing now, the purpose of propaganda is to strangle free speech. So, the irony of ironies is we who regard free speech as one of the most important rights in our Democracy have to support a form of lying – Murder by Mouth – whose purpose is to threaten our free speech and our Democracy. You, doctor, report these vaccine deaths, then you lose your job.
Bo: Hold on, I agree with you. Are we actually agreeing about this? Then why did we fight in the first place? Do we both just like fighting?
Dr. B.: It kills me to say this, to agree with you, Bo. It just kills me to say that propaganda falls under free speech.
(Apparently we both agree, but are both far too stubborn to ever admit that we’re actually agreeing. Now that we’re on the same page, we can co-write this together…and then fight on our own time.)
Our culture now celebrates lying to an alarming degree. Political spin masters, medical tyrants, the Internet. We’re now living in a roiling sea of propaganda. Did our ever-so-gradual frog-boil of unrealized lies make us numb to the amount of propaganda in our society? The more we tolerate lies, does it lead us to a place where we fail to realize that it’s even propaganda?
(This argument launched us both to thinking in depth about this topic. So, consider this the Introduction to The Propaganda Papers. Next up: Defanging the Dark Side)