Consilience Project - We don’t make propaganda! they do! (website)
source: https://consilienceproject.org/we-dont-make-propaganda-they-do/
The critical difference, however, is that education is—by design and intention—non-coercive, non-manipulative, and anti-propagandistic.
(In education) There is a mutual interest in decreasing asymmetries of knowledge and power over time
It is not possible to graduate from a propaganda campaign into a position of knowing as much as the propagandizers
Propaganda is any media product that has been deliberately designed and distributed by or for a political group in order to cause political action.
Changing people’s ideas is a means of changing their behaviors. For the propagandists, getting someone to understand something is not an end in itself. The actions taken cannot be undone, and this binds one in unity with a group. Once you act at the bequest of propaganda you have joined a group and are made more susceptible to future propaganda that targets its members.
(In truthful but misleading propaganda) Propagandists make populations look for truth in one direction so that they do not have to lie about what is in the other direction. Many truths strung together can be a good way to mislead people by inferring a bigger picture that is not true. This is part of how one can lie with facts
(Horizontal, organically distributed propaganda) Powerful symbols and memes can be invented by the very populations being manipulated. A deeply propagandized population will create its own propaganda and believe it is education.
Preparatory/pre-propaganda suffuses the society with images and memes in order to support a later campaign.
unconscious propaganda: unknown to the recipient, exploits psychology. MKUltra is the best example
Classic strategies for changing people’s minds include shaping research agendas in specific sciences in particular directions. This could, for example, entail creating a specific kind of research institute tasked with asking only a certain, pre-defined set of questions. The results of this research are spread through multi-media advertising campaigns, frequently orchestrated by public relations firms. These firms now use experts in psychometrics to target specific ads to specific personality types, based on user data lifted from social media sites. The firms collaborate with think tanks and academics to create publications, which are repackaged in relationships with the media and onto every screen. After some time—it could be months or years—large segments of the targeted population have changed basic habits and beliefs, while now making choices that conform with the interests of those controlling the information environment.
In heavily propagandized environments it can become hard to tease apart agreeable propaganda from information that is truly educational. Those seeking in good faith to serve as educators become almost impossible to distinguish from those seeking to serve as culture warriors.
People were free to explore any direction or aspect of the Committee’s rich multimedia exhibits and campaigns, but these experiences could only be chosen from a menu created by a small group of experts. This is sometimes called “choice architecture” and it is currently used as one aspect of “nudging” campaigns, in which certain personal decisions are mitigated through the careful control of choice architecture in information environments and commercial interactions
Both propaganda and education involve the deliberate design of informational environments, for the purposes of emotional engagement, behavior change, and the learning of specific ideas. As we have seen, propaganda acts ultimately in the interest of powers held by a political group. Education, however, acts in the interest of reducing the difference in power between those “in the know” and those who need to learn. Educators are interested in securing a successful transmission between generations and classes of shared responsibility for the social system. True educators are not interested in solidifying political power and administering social control through the use of information and its strategic communication.
[…] epistemic nihilism—and removes the possibility for education to occur. It makes the mistake of assuming that there is no point in even trying to distinguish between education and propaganda. A cultural mood of epistemic nihilism is the fallout of information war. It leads to an inability to orient toward legitimate epistemic asymmetries. The end result is a breakdown of educational cooperation between generations. Over time, epistemic suspicion systematically distorts educational exchange—between generations and between parts of society with access to different levels of information.