Passion and Propaganda

Men are passionate beings, but what do we allow to stir our passions?

Two days ago, my dad’s earthly remains were laid to rest at Fort Logan National Cemetery.

Heartfelt words were boldly spoken.

21 shots were fired.

Taps was played.

The flag that draped his coffin was meticulously folded and gifted to my mom on behalf of the President and a grateful nation.

The honor bell rang out seven times.

I couldn’t help but have tears well up in my eyes. Hell, they’re starting to form again as I type this.

And I say that as someone who is also well aware that so much of what I witnessed this past Monday, was passion-stirring propaganda. Plenty of it was also lies.

Propaganda

Propaganda is “the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.” To put it another way, propaganda is the selling of an idea.

Monday’s service sold a vision of the US Armed Forces as the protectors of America and the defenders of freedom and liberty worldwide.

The symbolism, designed to stir an emotional response, helps make the message feel right, inviting us to support or join the cause.

But that story doesn’t quite work for a few reasons:

• We were talking specifically about a man who served in Vietnam and neither the North Vietnamese nor her allies attacked America, so my dad wasn’t protecting America.

• The argument that he defended freedom and liberty is also questionable. The French first colonized Vietnam in the mid-to-late 1800s. Therefore, Vietnam lacked self-determination (an essential for freedom and liberty) for 100 years before America got involved. The war itself started as a battle of ideas among the Vietnamese on how to govern. One side embraced Western ideals and the other Communism. By interceding, the United States perpetuated this lack of self-determination, which might be why the Vietnamese still call it The American War.

So if it wasn’t about protecting America or defending freedom and liberty worldwide, what is the reason for the propaganda?

As he prepared to vacate the presidency, Dwight Eisenhower famously said:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.

Ike warned the nation about a shift in the defense industry. Before WWII manufacturers shifted their production lines (for example, going from cars to tanks). However, starting with the Korean War, weapons-specific manufacturers appeared on the scene.

This change meant you now had for-profit businesses whose sole (or at least primary) source of income was machines of war, meaning, if there is no war, there is no profit. So these businesses now had every reason in the world to stir up concern for war or lobby for military engagement worldwide, a reality only compounded by the desire of other US corporations to access material resources in foreign lands (oil, rare earth minerals, farmland, etc).

That said, the public wouldn’t support militarism for the sake of boosting the corporate bottom line, so they need a message that captures hearts and stirs souls. Thus messaging that we need not only protectors of America but defenders of freedom and liberty around the world.

Given the size of the Pentagon’s budget and that it has now failed seven self-conducted audits in a row, it’s clear that the messaging has worked and Ike’s warning fell on deaf ears.

Note: I am not writing off every military intervention, however, except for a month between 9-11 and when the US rejected the Taliban’s offer to turn Bin Laden over to a third party for trial, it’s hard to find an example since WWII where the military-industrial complex explanation doesn’t make more sense than the defenders of freedom and liberty narrative.

But for propaganda to be effective, it must connect, and that’s where passion comes in.

Men and Passion

While popular perceptions of men might not lead to describing us with the adjective passionate (one of the apparent effects of testosterone is a dulling of emotions), all the evidence otherwise is available at any given sports bar on game day.

The key to captivating a man’s passion is tapping into the psychological effects of testosterone. This includes:

• competitiveness

• risk-taking

• goal-directed behavior

No wonder militarism and the warrior obsession are so effective against men.

But the downside of getting caught up in such passion-stirring propaganda is that, in this case, you can easily become a shill for the bottom line of Pentagon contractors.

So how do we control what stirs our passions so we don’t become useful idiots?

Getting Passionate About Truth Seeking

One of the common mistakes about testosterone is that it acts independently of culture. By this, I mean that, for example, testosterone doesn’t make you like sports. Testosterone makes you more competitive, and because our culture values sports, it becomes easy to get competitive about sports.

But what if we found something else to get competitive about? For example, being the most loving husband or nurturing father. Or maybe it’s caring for our bodies, getting in touch with our hearts, or feeding our souls.

In the face of propaganda, it is worth getting competitive about seeking the truth.

The same logic can be applied to other psychological effects of testosterone. After all, it’s risky to challenge the status quo and embrace a different narrative. And what better goal could we pursue than not just understanding how the world works, but doing what we can to improve it for all people?

So how do we become truth-seekers? When it comes to gathering information, be it the daily news or digging into history books, I have two basic rules:

1. If you don’t pay for it, you are what’s being sold.

2. Everyone is biased, it’s just figuring out what their actual bias is.

Let me break those down.

You Are the Product

There is no such thing as a free service. If you aren’t paying for it, whether it is an app, a TV show, a radio broadcast, or a podcast, either you pay for it or someone else is paying for access to you, be it directly or for your information.

It could be explicit advertising or a notice that “this program is sponsored by _______.” Perhaps some other party is buying your data, be it to target you directly or to better understand consumer behavior. Even this newsletter was initiated with visions of connecting with potential clients for a holistic life coaching business.

So why is that so bad?

Because their motive now easily shifts from delivering the best service possible to keeping you tuned in as long as possible. In other words, they are playing with your passion.

In theory, the beneficial service would keep you tuned in. Unfortunately, human psychology doesn’t work that way. In 2019, Facebook realized people logged in more if what they saw made them angry. So they showed people more of what pissed them off. As a side effect, this fueled the rapid spread of misinformation (on both sides of the aisle).

As another variant of moving away from the best service, Facebook recently reworked its algorithm as part of a blatant attempt to find itself in the good graces of the Trump administration. Why? When you’re in an AGI (artificial general intelligence) arms race and face antitrust threats, you want the government on your side.

The point is, that a free service is never free.

However, if you pay for something, you are paying them to deliver what you want and, if they stop doing that, you cancel the subscription.

This doesn’t mean that free services are necessarily bad, you just need to be aware how they are trying to sell you.

See what I did there with an invitation to sign up for my free service? It actually gives both Substack and I access to your email address. But I promise, I won’t do anything malicious with it and, to date, Substack has been cool.

Everyone is Biased

My second rule of thumb is that everyone is biased, the only question is how overt they are about it.

Perhaps the easiest example here is Fox News and the claim to be, “Fair and Balanced.” We all know that slogan is said tongue-in-cheek, after all, nobody thinks Fox New is fair or balanced. They are, boldly and overtly, Right-wing. The same thing happens on the Left with MSNBC, who, at least when they’re not trying to stay in Trump’s good graces, seeks to carry the mantel for the political Left. But what neither talks about is their devotion to a corporate agenda (which is why Joe and Mika went to Mar-a-Lago and the Washington Post now limits the scope of its op eds).

The point is, both use the obvious Right and Left bias as a coverup for their real loyalty to their oligarch owners who, more than any other agenda, want policies that further enrich themselves. They are happy to have one play the part of the political Right and the other the Left, as long as it benefits the bottom line. Moreover, creating division over cultural issues serves as a distraction that allows them to push a unified economic policy that is good for them and bad for the vast majority of us.

So whether it is the political Right or Left, the real purpose of their propaganda is to distract you from the issues that matter most, like the opportunity to earn a fair wage, provide for your basic needs (including health care), and, if we really want to get crazy, a work-life balance that includes a healthy dose of recreation and maybe even a vacation.

Here we need to ask questions like:

• Who pays for the service?

• What are they not saying?

• What consistent themes can you identify and what does this say about their ethos?

• Does their argumentation demonstrate a consistent thesis that makes sense of the world?

As an example of this last point, I offer a behind-the-scenes look at Saagar Enjeti’s recent stint in the White House Press Briefing Room:

If you listen to the clip, Karoline Leavitt has a thesis to explain problems in the economy, namely, the reckless spending of Joe Biden, and a theory on how to fix it, specifically deregulation and tax breaks for billionaires and corporations (at other times she’ll talk about immigration issues).

Now, I’ll be honest, I think this is a better narrative than the one offered by Biden and Harris in the most recent election, after all, they basically told us to look at the macroeconomic numbers and insist that everything was ok. All most families had to do was look at their bank account and grocery bills to determine that story was bull shit.

That said, I don’t think this is a cohesive narrative either, for several reasons:

• First, much of Biden's spending was initiated by Trump as a response to COVID-19. Biden actually rolled back much of the spending. You can’t blame the guy who rolled the spending back for spending too much.

• Second, while that spending did mean that some people had more money in their pockets and fewer things to spend it on (increasing demand), even a basic understanding of supply and demand can see it was really a supply failure undergirded by our dependency on China. Therefore solution isn’t to cut demand but to fix the supply chain through a combination of targeted tariffs and industrial policy (which Biden sort of did in a half ass way but never sold as part of a cohesive agenda).

• Another component of the economic mess is inflation. In theory, inflation is the result of businesses needing to spend more to develop the goods and services we consume. If it costs more to make a TV, the manufacturer charges more for the TV to cover those costs. What inflation shouldn’t do, is drive up profits. Yet, during and since Covid, businesses recorded record profits, making somewhere around 50% of inflation actually greedflation. In other words we’re in a mess because of price gouging which both sides ignore because they both serve the price gougers.

• Cutting taxes on billionaires and corporations does nothing to encourage them to invest in higher wages or research and development, it just allows them to pocket more money, pay investor dividends, or buy back stock to further inflate stock prices. Contrary to popular thinking, higher tax rates drive up wages and fuel research and development because businesses are only taxed on profit. Because businesses don’t want to lose money to taxes, higher tax rates encourage them to invest in their company (wages and research) in order to increase future profits.

Clearly, Karoline Leavitt’s bias isn't sound so I don’t see her as a trusted source of information on anything beyond what Trump might be thinking.

What Does My Truth Seeking Look Like?

So how do I navigate the passion and propaganda?

I start with a broad narrative that I use to make sense of the world.

For me, this starts with an overarching framework where I see a clash between the Way of Power vs. the Way of Love or the Kingdom of Caesar vs. the Kingdom of God. Does it have origins in faith? Yes, but in this application it’s more mythological, a story to make sense of our experience in the world, than theological, which is where things get religious.

To test this overarching framework, I see if it helps explain current and historical events. Here I listen to a lot of audiobooks. On economics, I think Naomi Klein nails it in, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. And while it’s not an audiobook, I also really appreciated the breakdown offered by The Lever in its podcast series, Masterplan.

That said, I am always open to listening to other views and adapting my perspective. After all, my overarching framework is my bias and I’d hate to trap myself in an echo chamber.

From there I take in news and filter it through my broad framework and my historical understanding. I will admit that I lean towards information sources that have a similar overarching framework.

To this end, I am a premium subscriber for Breaking Points. Every year I throw down $90 for a news show that offers me both conservative and progressive takes on what’s happening in the world, but always starts with a “follow the money” premise and sees the economic top and bottom and a far more important dichotomy than the political Right and Left.

When I have extra resources, I do the same for newsletters like Drop Site News or The BIG Newsletter (if you’re stressing over egg prices, you should check out his last couple posts) and podcasts like The Bad Faith Podcast and Congressional Dish.

As you can see, I dig into this stuff with the fervor of a sports fanatic. I’m competitive about getting the right narrative. I boldly take risks as I embrace ideas that challenge the status quo. My goal is to cultivate human thriving. In other words, I am on a testosterone fueled quest to know the truth.

Back to Fort Logan

So where did this testosterone fueled quest for the truth have me on Monday, as I observed the final ceremony surrounding my dad’s earthly remains?

I found myself grieving.

Simultaneously, I recognize the heightened emotional state that made the passion and propaganda on display so moving.

I also recognized the broader narrative behind the rites and rituals, and I saw the place of that narrative within my own overarching understanding of how the world works. This was a display of power and the Way of Caesar.

In the midst of it all, I honored a man who went to war even though he didn’t believe in the cause, but because he was true to his word. I honored a man who acted from a place of duty while rejecting the agenda of those who sent him.

It’s all part of learning to navigate the passion and propaganda.