The third rail

 September 19, 2022

The (new?) third rail of American politics...

For some reason, propaganda has become the third rail of American politics. The reason that it is learned to be so is that no one wants the truth about what people are thinking, but only the truth about what they are doing when they are making the decisions. And no one will tell them. Is it true? Is some of it true?

The whole problem is that the secrets that we know are right there are also right there in plain sight.

Doesn't make sense? Here's an example.

Tolstoy had a wife, you know, and she edited his random stack of papers for War and Peace. And this might lead you to imagine that she listened to him. She did not. His voice is on Wikipedia. Her name was Sophia. Still this might make you think that she listened to him. She did not.

More simple example.

Voltaire visited Prince Frederick but left his court after a while, but she might think this means they weren't friends still. Maybe that they didn't like each other anymore. This is not true. They liked each other the same. Because he left, even so.

Example.

Columns have different names based on how they are decorated at the top. But that is not what makes them distinct. It is how tall they are; what stone they are, that makes them columns.

Synthesis of examples because that's how people make sense of it all in propaganda. Propaganda is all this detail, it's a fancy, that just says that we like it when people do work, and we talk about the detail ancillary to the real work. People look at everything as a work and it is not that, not all the time. And this is why propaganda frustrates people because it is totally besides the work; it may fit together with the real work like a puzzle piece but the truth of what it's about is outside of it and not within it. People are going deeper and deeper into it to find "it"; some golden nug of truth, but this is the past that doesn't work, a relic. And that is why propaganda is so infuriating. Propaganda is so interesting though because the truth is so mundane but at least it is not banal.

Here's a thought - the newspaper only has a lot of good stuff in it when nobody or not enough people are reading it, if they are all reading it, nothing is new to people… So what's the point? It's a corrective…

People concerned about propaganda… It's like caution tape in a sense. Nothing new here… Just working…

But the reason it has become the third rail is that we're concerned that we don't know who it is that is doing the work. That is why powerful people are concerned and telling you to be concerned, not because the work the propaganda is referring to is no good, but because it is good, and yet we don't know who is doing it… we should be far less concerned that there is propaganda, far less concerned about the reason that there is propaganda, and focus less on the echo, that echo, of what is important, and far more on what is important that is creating an echo… That propaganda, this thing that is scary and makes no sense, exists, is an echo, and logically therefore, of some thing that makes sense, and that is nice.

Common sense works to tell you what it is, probably, that propaganda is probably about: only so much things are going on at once, in the state, and so on. You might not know what each example of propaganda is referring to, but that is not the point, the propaganda is not even the clue… Common sense and not following the crowd will show you what is being talked about, and common sense will tell you that. And that is as good as that kind of thing gets…