People need propaganda, don’t they?

After all, humans are meaning-seeking narrative-building machines. As ancient people evolved it was beneficial to ‘figure shit out’ – to observe the cycles of the moon and nature, and to correlate that with the optimum time of the year for planting and harvesting. We observed and deduced patterns in wildlife behaviour and migration and refined hunting and domestication to suit. Like biological evolution, the development of this ‘figure shit out’ behaviour benefited societies who employed it, and it was refined and mastered over millennia. The trade-off in the hyper development of the ‘figure shit out’ behaviour (or gene? It’s all biological, isn’t it?) is that we often turn our deducing and pattern-seeking attention to things we can’t comprehend, and the result is psychologically painful and leaves one vulnerable to often (and ironically) abandon the logic and reasoning that was so beneficial in the first place. Case in point, there are actual people in this world who are convinced they have figured out what happens after death, and there are many more people who would rather believe this fiction than deal with the psychological pain of meaninglessness and uncertainty. If you listen to static long enough, a song emerges, and that’s because most would rather hear music, not because it exists.

So we need meaning and will build narratives accordingly. All societies have their foundational myths and (hi)stories, and the society’s cohesion in the form of common values and beliefs are hard-coded therein, resulting in a common way of life for that society. The foundational myth of the west is that we are the developers and guardians of progress. Through enlightenment, the scientific method, democracy and capitalism we have risen above other cultures on the planet. We own all the stock on truth, justice and progress, and when we go and interfere with other cultures using warfare (military and economic), we are working to spread truth, justice and progress for the good of humanity. In our minds, we are the good guys.

We need to believe. Deep down, we all know our governments, media and cultural institutions lie to us, but don’t we need them to? Don’t we implicitly demand untruth whenever we fail to rise up and challenge the bullshit-spewing status-quo? After all, what is the alternative? To recognize that one is just a cog in a vast machine of western domination and empire? To face the fact that our collective effort in keeping the machine going, the 40 hour work week, paying of taxes, consumption of product, ect… all of it feeds the system that is directly responsible for death, destruction and exploitation around the globe. Isn’t this too harsh to face? Isn’t it just better to believe that you in the west are uniquely good and hardworking and that the rest of the world is undeserving and/or evil? Certainly, it would be hard to be proud of ourselves thinking that the rise of the west directly correlates to colonialism and slavery and that the only thing we may be uniquely better at than anybody on the planet is cruelty and exploitation.

And this is where mainstream western media and cultural institutions come in. They tell us we are the good guys. We are the most talented, innovative and hardworking culture and we deserve the big slice of the resource pie we control. Others are evil brainwashed drones who hate us for our freedom and simply want to take what we have by force or infiltration. We only use military force to save the day – to save the rest of the world from themselves. This is the song we want to hear, because the alternative is painful static.