Propaganda is ubiquitous,
and everyone uses propaganda.
It's a kind of communication
that makes a case for a goal, bypassing reason.
So what it does is it's a method
to urge you to mobilize towards something
while concealing from you things
that you reasonably should think, should consider.
We have these irrational biases,
and what propaganda does is it takes notions
like freedom, integrity, and it weds them
to these irrational biases.
Operation Iraqi Freedom is what the Iraq War was called.
Why was killing hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis called Operation Iraqi Freedom?
Because the idea was somehow, freedom is what Americans do.
If we're doing it, it must be freedom.
The word propaganda by itself is neither good, nor bad,
because we talk of abolitionist propaganda.
We talk about the propaganda that people use
in social movements.
Social movements need propaganda.
Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the need for propaganda,
because you need to get people
to reconsider their racist assumptions.
If you're doing a social movement
that's trying to change people's attitudes towards,
for example, gay marriage, you're gonna have to use art.
You're gonna have to appeal to people's emotions
to sort of undermine the biases they have.
And what other way do we have
to undermine the biases they have
by challenging those biases in often non-rational ways?
You know, the goal in propaganda is to connect neutral words
to other stuff.
Propaganda will always be here.
Our words always have these associations, any word I have.
When I talk about my cat,
you get a warm, fuzzy feeling.
The propaganda campaign involves connecting our words
to these things.
It's inevitable that people have these associations
between words and images.
Democracy involves having many such associations,
having lots of different words,
and lots of different discussions that are happening,
so we can kind of pick and choose among them.
When there's like two views standing off each other,
when one group thinks
that the conservatives are all fascists,
and the other group thinks the liberals are all communists,
well, then democracy starts to disappear.
So the goal should not be to talk in neutral ways.
The goal is to have lots of different ways of living
and lots of different ways of thinking
and to recognize that we're not a threat to each other.
That some of us can be Orthodox Jews
and others of us can be deeply evangelical Christians,
and others of us can be gay and Muslim
or gay and Atheist, that we can have lots
of different ways of living,
and they don't threaten each other.
But our goal shouldn't be
to sort of disassociate our words with life
because all of our words are embedded in life.
- Get smarter, faster
with videos from the world's biggest thinkers.
And to learn even more from the world's biggest thinkers,
get Big Think + for your business.