Comment by Eextra953 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eextra953 | Hacker News Reader

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Propaganda works on people with all levels of 'capacity for reasoning'. No one is immune to it. Also, a feature of good propaganda is that it gets through a persons bullshit filter so that they are not even aware that they are being manipulated. The article points out the current use of Lego propaganda as examples of governments updating their tools so that they get their message across to more people.

This is important because it lets pluralities build from people who are not aware they are being manipulated. Pluralities can lead to majorities and majorities, in a democratic system, create power. All this to say: I don't think those who have fallen for propaganda are living in a world they are satisfied with but instead that they are living in a world they've been told they are satisfied with and a lack of counter narratives have not shown them a better way. Consider that propaganda gets busted out whenever something isn't naturally popular or beneficial to most people, that is why we see propaganda most used around military efforts.

If someone is continuing to put themselves into situations and contexts where they are overloaded with propaganda, then that indicates they lack a core level of discernment

The idea that people cannot have agency while being subjected to propaganda is totally fucking absurd and demonstrably not true

there are millions of examples of people who can discern propaganda and make decisions based on ground truth data

>put themselves into situations and contexts where they are overloaded with propaganda,

Ah, yes, most of us are independently wealthy and have the financial freedom to avoid working in lobbies blasting fox news all day.

Yes, people can have agency if they choose to, most choose not to because it takes a massive fuckton of energy to do so. But you created society all by yourself from first principles right? Oh you didn't.

The thing is, especially in the modern world with so much media everywhere all the time, we are being subjected to propaganda in nearly everything we do. News, advertizing, lifestyle, all are imbued with propaganda. Some of it's obvious to you and you can quickly discount it. Other parts of it are something you've grown up with and you don't even have the first clue that it is propaganda.

Simply put your feeble human mind cannot comprehend nor perceive the ground truth of all reality and therefore we're subject to the biased and filtered information we receive from others.

When you view having control of your mind and body some kind of impossible standard for only the materially wealthy then you are truly lost

> Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

— Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Na dawn, your arrogance is off the charts and your self delusion infinite.

For sure, there are plenty of such people. They are still very small minority.

Almost everybody I know has a tendency to not overly check the statements that broadly align with their world view, and be dismissive (as propaganda, without doing the work to check the ground truth data) of statements that are contrary.

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