I have recently been enjoying a diverse crop of propaganda, amateur and professional, especially that dedicated to the Magic Poop Berry. I can hardly look at a commercial website or even check my mail without having my brain instantaneously invaded by a superbly crafted yet meaningless phrase referring to this wonder fruit. It seems to have been discovered by a single mom somewhere in the Amazon rain forest, who found a miraculous way to achieve that holy grail of weight loss, a flat stomach. I gained even more knowledge from a few minutes of a television infomercial which sent me zooming through a virtual bowel, taking, I presume, the magic poop berry's own belly-flattening viewpoint as it rips through your innards. Photos of big flabby guts and fat old people were juxtaposed with slim young women (never more than three pounds over in their lives) leaping joyfully on the beach and wrapping a tape measure around their perfect waists with inches to spare. I soon learned that my sluggish bowels, and yours too, may produce that hideous bulging gut by retaining up to several pounds of impacted waste matter. That's a quote - up to several pounds - and a masterstroke of the propagandist's art, a perfectly meaningless phrase which you probably zipped right past just now. How many is several? More than two? Less than eight? Anything less than several is "up to" several, so up to several means the same as "some or less." That is, it means nothing - yet it seems to mean something. "Up to" is one of the supreme triumphs of the art, and whenever you see it, look out. The perfect propaganda is a short simple phrase which seems to mean something but is meaningless if not outright false. The magic poop berry, it is never said outright, is a laxative. You take it and it makes you poop out the up to several pounds of poop that didn't get pooped out and, if the image association is to believed, transforms you from a grumpy old flab bag into a young slim leaping woman or muscle-bulging chest-hair-less young weightlifting man. Yet they never actually say that, the factual parts or the false parts.
Some infomercials never tell you how much the product actually costs. Never mind that trick where they double the offer if you order now, just pay separate shipping and handling of eight to ten dollars to get your FREE product that costs them a couple of bucks tops. I saw a new way yesterday of not saying how much the product actually costs, in an infomercial for an exciting new product that will save you so much money and is really fun and new! Set in a fake kitchen, an excited couple, who do not hesitate to tell you how excited they are, share their exciting new product discovery with a handful of low-grade actors pretending to be their friends. This great new money-saving device is available for a risk-free thirty-day trial offer for only $19.99! If not insanely delighted, just return it and you will not owe another dime! No, you don't get you twenty bucks back, or the ten bucks you pay them for shipping it to you, or your own shipping costs to send it back, they just don't make you pay the rest of whatever the thing would cost you. You get to rent it for a month.
I like propaganda so much because it can slip things like that right past us. Yes, we were told the terms of the deal but we didn't know it. We were told nothing at all but thought we were told something meaningful. We were given a short, exciting phrase we could repeat to others which excites their emotions just as ours are excited, but we never stopped to ask if what we were telling them is actually true. We will just repeat these exciting phrases, without knowing what they mean or whether they are true, and use them to deny or refute actual facts because they appeal to our prejudices and emotional reactions, our need to feel emotions about things. I had the fascinating experience just last week of being told that my own personal experience and knowledge of a subject, the result of years of genuine scholarship of the topic, was irrelevant or meaningless, that I was duped and fooled, because it conflicted with the exciting and easily repeatable phrases they read on the internet. It used to be a joke that "I read it on the internet so it must be true" but somehow it became a reality. I like propaganda so much because it can shut down rational thought in an instant and make us repeat things that are meaningless or outright false, and deny or refute any actual facts which can't be stated in such tight and thrilling terms. It makes us revel in prejudice and ignorance as if they were virtues.
Reason and emotion are two equally valid aspects of human thought. Like socks and hats, they are useful for their own purposes, but you don't want to use one in place of the other. Propaganda will make you wear a sock on your head and a hat on your foot, and declare other people evil or insane for not doing likewise.
