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.

Have you ever listened to a conversation in a foreign language? That’s what sexual fetishes are like. They’re exciting if you speak the language. If you don’t, you’re left watching two people make noises with your mouth, your brain struggling to pattern-match their syllables against some meaning until eventually you give up.

I don’t find BDSM interesting, so much of Venus in Furs is a conversation in Putonghua or Sundanese. After I gave up trying to follow the conversation, I looked for a story, and there wasn’t much of one.

It’s a book within a book. A man reads a text about a “supersensual” man, Severin von Kusiemski, who falls under the spell of a woman with the South Park-sounding name Wanda von Dunajew. She wears furs. She captivates him – literally. He wants to be her slave. They go away on adventures together. The tone of the book feels like cordial that’s on the verge of fermenting into poison: a fantasy pushed as far as it can go.

Venus in Furs contains frank descriptions of a lot of things that would not have names for decades to come. It’s also unfocused, and suffers from the curious comorbidity of too much and not enough. The plot’s repetitive, with events looping around like a 12 inch record caught in a groove. But von Sacher-Masoch keeps adding in all these asides about metaphysics and gender roles and paganism, throwing the novel’s forward momentum into a talespin.

Sacher-Masoch likes to set up bowling pins and then forget to knock them down. Partway through the story, a few black female slaves assist Wanda in humiliating Severin. Could that have led to a reflection on real bondage? And the shallowness of what he experiences with Wanda? After all, Severin can reclaim his freedom and dignity whenever he wants, whereas some people can’t. BDSM’s just a fantasy, which is good in real life, but in a fictional book, why couldn’t he have gone beyond fantasy? Why not talk about real bondage? Venus in Furs dwells obsessively on saccharine instead of real sugar.

Apparently in BDSM there is a concept called “topping from the bottom”, where the submissive person uses the fact of their submission as collateral to manipulate or control the dominant. “I gave up my freedom for you. You really owe me, so let’s run this relationship on my terms.”

I’m the furthest thing from an expert, but Severin seemed like he was topping from the bottom a lot. One of his first acts is to make Wanda sign a contract of his servitude, stating among other things that she must always wear her furs. This adds a false, insincere dynamic to their relationship: like putting someone in chains and giving them the key. It’s like von Sacher-Masoch was topping me from the bottom. The book lures you in with the promise of revelation, intimacy, and one man exposing his secret heart. He immediately starts offloading mountains of ruminations on gender roles and metaphysics and paganism. This book could be subtitled “Dear Diary.”

The fetish-as-language metaphor breaks down. When you hear an unfamiliar language, the problem is that you don’t understand it. With a sexual fetish, you understand it perfectly well, it just has no meaning. After it’s possible to learn a new language, but I don’t know that it’s possible to learn a new fetish. If you can, Venus in Furs is no Berlitz Easy Language course.

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.