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How Propaganda Works QUOTES

How Propaganda Works QUOTES

1 " American philosopher W.E.B. Du Bois repeatedly emphasizes that the nation owes its Black citizens three things: “the free right to vote, [the right] to enjoy civic rights, and [the right] to be educated.”11 Du Bois demands that “[n]egroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood … and that black boys need education as well as white boys.” Du Bois focuses on these three rights—voting rights, civic equality, and education—because he thinks of political participation as special among the liberties; education is important because only the educated citizen can participate well in civic life. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

2 " In the United States, the two-party system works as a way to manufacture an artificial group identity, akin to an ethnic or national one or an allegiance to a sports team. Part of the identity seems to consist in allegiance to certain conclusions on a range of “hot button” political issues. On those issues, political party affiliation does seem to result in rigidly held belief and loyalty in the voting booth. Allegiance to the group identity forged by political party affiliation renders Americans blind to the essential similarities between the agendas of the two parties, similarities that can be expected to be exactly the ones that run counter to public interest, in other words, those interests of the deep-pocketed backers of elections to which any politician must be subservient in order to raise the kind of money necessary to run for national office. Satisfaction at having one’s group “win” seems to override the clearly present fundamental dissatisfaction with the lack of genuine policy options.33 If the function of the two parties is to hide the fact that the basic agenda of both is shared, and irrational adherence to one of the two parties is used propagandistically to mask their fundamental overlap, then we can see how Burnham’s prediction may have come to pass, despite the existence of two distinct political parties. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

3 " Here is one final reason to think that the United States may be a state that uses the language of democracy to mask an undemocratic reality. An oligarchy is a system in which only those with a certain amount of money or land have access to the political process. An oligarchy is not a majoritarian electoral democracy. For years, the political scientist Martin Gilens has been trying to test empirically the claim that the United States is, as we learn it to be in schools, a “majoritarian electoral democracy.” Gilens and his coauthor Benjamin Page conclude that the empirical evidence between 1981 and 2002 entails that the hypothesis that the United States is a pure majoritarian electoral democracy “can be decisively rejected.”40 Wealthy individuals and powerful interest groups (such as the gun lobby) have significant impact on policy. In contrast, “[n]ot only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.” Gilens’s work is the subject of continuing debate.41 But it seems nevertheless widely agreed that the available empirical evidence makes it at the very least worthy of serious consideration that the language of liberal democracy does not accurately explain the cause of most US policy. One must worry about even apparently robustly liberal democratic states that the language of democracy is simply used to mask an undemocratic reality. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

4 " Lying too is a betrayal of the rational will. But it is a different kind of betrayal of the rational will than propaganda. At least with lying, one purports to provide evidence. Propaganda is worse than that. It attempts to unify opinion without attempting to appeal to our rational will at all. It bypasses any sense of autonomous decision. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

5 " A managerial society is a society ruled by technocrats who make decisions on behalf of the masses. It "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

6 " If one ought to obey a law, it must be possible to obey that law. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

7 " A democratic society is one that values liberty and a distinctive kind of equality, which I have been calling political equality. It is suffused with tolerance of difference. Since Plato’s time, some of the central questions of democratic political theory have concerned the nature of these goods: that is, the nature of liberty as it pertains to democracy, and the nature of political equality as it pertains to democracy. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

8 " Perhaps most disturbingly for me, when I look upon my own discipline, the discipline of philosophy, I find egregious effects of ideology and propaganda. Philosophy is self-consciously devoted to the ideal of objective truth. Yet philosophers from Aristotle to the present day have justified slavery and racism. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works

9 " flawed social structures tend to give rise to flawed ideological belief, in a similar (yet perhaps less inevitable) way to the manner in which Hume takes our flawed psychology to lead to what he thinks of as our flawed ideological belief in external things. We are capable of setting this belief temporarily aside, according to Hume, when we explicitly rationally reflect upon its justification. But as soon as we return to ordinary life, we slip back into believing in external things. In a similar way, when we explicitly rationally reflect upon the flawed ideological beliefs that are caused by living in a society with structural injustice, we often reject them. But when we return to ordinary life, we nevertheless slip back into the flawed ideological beliefs. "

― Jason F. Stanley , How Propaganda Works