Why is propaganda stupid – almost by definition?

I don’t mean it’s wrong, or evil. Like the Human Centipede, propaganda exists in a space where concepts like that don’t even seem to apply. What I mean is that it’s dumb. Cartoony. WW2 propaganda posters (for any side) look like bad science fiction movies made by Ed Wood.

Where’s the intellectual propaganda? Where are the Cold War posters that outline the intellectual and moral case against communism, rather than characterising it as a creed of the inhuman Ivan out to sap our bodily fluids?

If your first thought is “well, Joe and Jane Sixpack are dumb and they won’t understand smart stuff, so you have to speak their language” then I hope you have a second, because I’m not satisfied. Common folk have a lot of respect for their intellectual betters, so long as they don’t feel patronised or bullshitted. An easy influence technique is to convince someone that something’s over their head, and that they’d better just leave it in your hands. That’s the basis of the Stanley Milgram experiments. “I have a lab coat, and I know better than you, so just shut up and press the button, faggot.”

I think that we’re looking at the wrong side of the black box. Dumb propaganda isn’t popular because it’s easy to consume. It’s popular because it’s easy to spread.

There is a man called Mike Huben, who has produced a large body of material (of varying quality) arguing against libertarianism. Probably his best insight is this: libertarianism’s success (beyond a heavy PR campaign by the Koch Brothers) is that it breaks down to a few concepts that 1), sound good, and b) are easily spammable, even by stupid people. It doesn’t take a smart guy to shout “FREEDOM” like Mel Gibson, and if you can emotionally identify libertarianism with that simple, idealistic concept, you can turn any moron into an evangelist. You don’t make people argue for consequentialism or minarchism or fewer tariffs. You make them argue for freedom itself.

According to Huben, the philosophy’s success is based, not on being especially intellectually compelling, but by being really good at creating new followers. Hence, you get stuff like /r/EnoughLibertarianSpam. It’s one of those philosophies that has an incredible ability to turn people into characters from Snow Crash, their brains overwritten by a hyper-catching mental virus.

For years, we’ve tried to make spambots sound like humans. Libertarianism achieves the opposite, it makes humans sound like spambots.

Some religions could be described along similar lines. I’ve heard many atheists complain about “Godbotting”, where believers don’t actually engage in discussion or debate, but just repeat simple, canned messages (“God loves you!”, “I’m praying for you!”, etc). Without taking a position on either libertarianism or religion, it seems like a big part of surviving in a memeplex is that you have lots of short, mantra-like messages for quick and efficient spamming. In-depth arguing is a waste of time. It’s better to take that same effort and blast a thousand strangers with ads for intellectual V1AGR4 and C14L1S.

It seems things are still a volume game: quantity trumps quality, the effective positions are the ones that are quickly able to deploy lots of shock troops. They say nations are often still mentally fighting the last war. In the case of the internet, it that war is the American Civil War.

Regarding the ACW, historians often say that the Confederate cause was a Lost one before it even began. The North held all the cards. To quote Rhett Butler, “I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines–all the things we haven’t got. Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”

But on the other hand, remember that the Union had a much more difficult strategic goal. They had to impress the rogue states back into the Union, while the Confederacy only had to continue existing. And various dominos fell in the Union’s favor. The Confederacy never thought they’d be fighting a war alone, they counted on support from sovereign nations like Great Britain and France (who needed cheap cotton). When that didn’t come, the Confederacy found themselves outnumbered, outgunned, and staring down the barrel of a blockade. But even then, the Confederates held out for nearly fifty times Rhett’s pronouncement. Why?

In large part, because footsoldiers were cheap. All you needed was a musket, and a bandolier with 40 rounds. At no other time was the role of huge numbers of men so evident. Cavalry was losing prominence, artillery had yet to come into its own, and the chief way to fight wars was via a numbers game.

If the Confederates had invested in a small number of elite, well-trained troops, they’d have been horsefucked. As it was, they eventually lost the war, but their ethos lives on in propaganda. Spam your way to success. We are Civil War Re-Enactors, all of us. Did I mention that one of the reasons they failed was because they finally ran out of manpower? A problem that will never occur in an intellectual arena where keyboards can copy and paste?

Ecclesiastes 9-11 has the following quote: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

That might have been true in Ecclesiastes’ time, but in the 21st century we have a more idoneous answer: the race is to the dumb.

CS Lewis wrote fantasy. He also wrote this line: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important,” but that’s a fantasy too. It’s easy for Christianity to be false and moderately important, since believers are using its tenets to modify their behavior – or they say they do? In practice, many Christians practice secular, liberal morality, usually some kind of utilitarianism/consequentialism. There’s a whole generation of Christians who seem functionally identical to atheists, except they go to church.

Some would ask: if believers and non believers do exactly the same things, what’s the value of “Christianity” even being in the picture? What’s the point of accepting a supernatural framework of God, Son, Holy Ghost, sola scriptura et cetera if it leads you to do the exact same thing you’d do anyway? It’s like praying because the battery in your car went flat, and receiving divine word that you must go to Supercheap Auto.

That’s a good question. I think that consequentialist morality as practiced by a Christian is still arguably superior to consequentialist morality as practiced by an atheist. Or at least, it’s different. The answer is found in prisoner’s dilemma.

Two prisoners (in separate rooms, working independently and without the other’s knowledge) have the choice to either cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, they get a small reward. If both defect, they get a small punishment. If one defects and the other cooperates, the defector gets a big reward and the cooperator gets a big punishment. It’s a simple game and although it’s possible to overapply it, it’s an important part of understanding altruism and partnership.

The key insight of prisoners’ dilemma is that it’s impossible to lose by defecting. No matter what your opponent does, you’ll at least get the same outcome as him. The only way “cooperate” can be a good strategy is if a), the game is iterated, with round after round, so that a cooperator has a chance to punish a defecting partner b), exists and competes in an ecosystem of prisoners. Two players who defect 100% of the time will have an equal score at the end, but they’ll still have “lost” relative to prisoners in the next cellblock who co-operate 100% of the time, reaping massive rewards.

Robert Axelrod’s famous experiments found that the optimal strategy in most cases is “tit for tat” – that is, cooperate on your first move, and thereafter copy your opponent’s last move. In other words, assume honesty, immediately punish defectors, but be prepared to forgive. The essence of tit for tat is found in Theodore Roosevelt’s line on diplomatic policy: “speak softly, and carry a big stick”.

But a key part in finding the optimum strategy is to ask “how long is the game? Is it 10 iterations? 20 iterations? An unknown number of iterations?”

And that’s where atheists and Christians break ranks. Atheists believe that the game has a limited number of iterations. That is, eventually you die, and then you’re no longer playing prisoners dilemma. You can’t punish defectors, or reward cooperators, or do anything at all. The game’s just…over.

Imagine someone who lives his life, and, moments before death, defects in a massive way. Tit for tat doesn’t work. There’s simply no way to punish him. Look at the Columbine kids – they defected because they knew they had a way to escape the game and its consequences – two bullets between the teeth.

For Christians, it’s different. Their prisoners dilemma game has infinite iterations.

Eternal life or eternal damnation is much the same motivator in any faith: it’s a prisoners dilemma game that doesn’t end. You can’t escape, or weasel out. This fundamentally changes things.

I wonder how many would-be murderers have stayed their hand because they were afraid of hell. Probably quite a few.

In practice, this doesn’t mean Christians are going to act like they’re playing an infinitely long prisoners dilemma game. And lots of atheists act like they’re playing neverending prisoners dilemma (some of the transhumanist bent believe that the dead will someday be reborn by nanotechnology or some other means. It’s sort of like the game pauses and them resumes after a coffee break.) But the motivators are there, and if humans aren’t acting rationally, that’s their problem.

This is why I think Christian morality is distinct and perhaps superior to secular morality even if God isn’t real, worms eat us after we die, and Golgotha was never anything but a rubbish tip.

Legendary Amazon mega-reviewer Harriet Klausner has passed away. I assume she’s leaving loved ones behind. My condolences.

She embodied everything wrong with criticism, both at the professional and amateur level (it’s unclear which class she belonged to). For people who mistrust online reviews, for people who assume it’s all just an incestuous, payola-greased web of marketing, cross-promotion and buddy-buddy backslapping, Harriet Klausner is Exhibit A. She is the smoking gun, with a complementary five star review on Amazon.

31,014 reviews, largely of romance novels. 99.7% of these reviews had four or five star ratings. She reviewed everything, and loved everything, but it’s clear that she didn’t read everything. Someone wrote a book that (strategically?) included a character called “Harriet Klausner”, but her obligatory glowing review made no mention of this. There’s also the fact that there’s only 24 hours in a day.

Her reviews had a nebulous, creepy quality, like they were written by a computer. She was the queen of vague adjectives, vapid cliches, and rewritten cover blurbs. Have you seen the video where rapper will.i.am has bullshits his way through an explanation of logos and branding? That video is Harriet Klausner’s entire life for the past fifteen years.

She was so prolific and so worthless that for years there were conspiracy theories about Klausner – that she didn’t exist, and was an account controlled by a shadowy cabal of publishers. In the end, it was confirmed that she was a real person, which is probably worse. At least a shadowy cabal could conceivably have the manpower to actually read the books. The truth is this (h/t to this guy’s sleuthing): she received large numbers of Advance Reader Copies from publishers. She didn’t disclose that she was getting ARCs (in breach of FTC disclosure rules, but nobody on Amazon cares about that) and she would then re-sell them via a third party (apparently legal, but frowned upon). Books got promoted, Klausner could pay her cat food bills, and everyone won except for the people reviews exist for in the first place.

With Amazon now taking steps to protect the integrity of their reviews, but you wonder if outright grifters are the problem here. The issue seems to be an economic one: reviewers want free shit, publishers and writers want favourable reviews. The actual consumer is very much an externality here – they don’t have a skin in the game, so they just have to hope and pray the reviewer has the integrity not to whore out their opinions to keep the majestic Free Shit River flowing in full flood.

I used to read a metal site called Teufel’s Tomb. While every other metal site had a chummy “support the scene, bro!” ethos, Teufel’s opinion was that 90% of bands, labels, and distros should just eat bullets and die. It was a refreshing attitude. You could trust their opinions.

Someone had the misfortune of interviewing Teufel. The guy was obviously drunk and spent most of the interview pushing the interviewer’s buttons, but he also says some interesting things about “objectivity” while staring down the barrel of payola. “Objectivity, in metal reviews, is to say as much about the music, without saying anything at all. All the bands and record labels want is for you to say things that will help them sell more records. They don’t want you to state an opinion, unless your opinion is positive. Really, objectivity in metal reviews is to simply drone on and on and on about “this is the lyrical subject matter, this is the band line-up, this is the style of music they play, they sound like these bands, you should buy this album if you like these bands.” […] I’ve been on all of the major metal label promo lists, and they all took me off after they actually read that I was stating opinions that some of their releases are just plain boring or sucked.”

Pauline Kael once said “In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” To which Harriet Klausner and her spiritual descendants say “why not both?”