When propaganda backfires
Narrative isn’t everything
The idea that there is no objective truth, that we all have our own truth based on our subjective views of the world, has become very popular in recent years, especially among young people. It follows the postmodern claim that truth is not discovered but created. Most notably, it was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who argued that what we call 'truth' or 'knowledge' is intimately bound up with power relations. He believed that those in power ultimately determine our perspectives and produce knowledge to reinforce their power. According to postmodernists, language is a powerful tool that shapes our understanding of reality. Those who control language and discourse have the ability to shape and control power relations.
Postmodern thinkers such as Foucault provided an important critique of the Enlightenment view of man as a rational being with the capacity to know reality through the power of reason and scientific progress. Shedding light on the fact that there is always a myriad of contextual factors that subjectivise and distort our view of reality is an important intellectual contribution. It's also clear that power plays an important role in our perception of reality in many ways: for example, who funds science influences the production of knowledge, and who controls the media narrative influences what people think about the world.
But what was undoubtedly a useful analysis by Foucault has since taken on a life of its own, initially conquering the social sciences and humanities and then becoming highly influential in society at large.
According to author and journalist Sohrab Ahmari,
Foucault’s ingenious methods for analysing power have now emerged as but one more strategy for the maintenance and expansion of existing institutional power. This, even as these institutions themselves remain susceptible to his critique of what he called the ‘devious and supple mechanisms of power.’
Everyone in our elite institutions - NGOs, media and government - is now obsessed with winning the battle of narratives. Where power could be one of several useful lenses through which to explain the world, postmodernism has now infected our institutions to such an extent that power, exercised through discourse, has become the explanation for everything.
This worldview completely ignores the fact that human nature does exist. Our minds are not blank slates, as today's social sciences would have us believe. Our evolved biology explains much of how our minds work. Culture and tradition also contain much wisdom about life that we may not fully understand rationally, but which plays an important role in how we see the world.
Our beliefs don't have to be factually true to survive for very long. Religious and popular myths, for example, can persist in a culture for centuries and millennia if they prove useful to the people who believe in them. They often provide guidance on how to thrive in the real world, even if they are not factually true. They are metaphorically true, as evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein puts it.
However, postmodern thinking ignores the power of reality and overestimates the power of discourse and narrative.
As the futurist Jordan Hall noted some years ago:
This is how delusions fall apart. Try as we might, our desire to interpret reality to mean what we want it to, at the end of the day, will always be checked against what reality actually is. It may take some time because we’re pretty good at making things up and pretending, but eventually reality is reality.
In other words, while (totalitarian) propaganda can distort people's sense of reality, it cannot do so forever.
How propaganda is failing
It's now eight years since Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and the British people voted against remaining in the EU. 2016 wasn't the beginning of the ongoing right-wing populist backlash, but it was when it began to be perceived as a real threat by Western elites.
What was obvious to everyone was that in the most urban neighbourhoods of the big metropolises like Berlin, Paris, London and San Francisco, very few people voted for populism, while in smaller towns and the countryside, the proportion of votes in favour of populism was often very high or even majority.
Most urban, academically educated people interpreted that the less educated people who supported populism were less able to deal with the complexities of modern life and were being misled by nasty populist leaders who offered simple solutions and pointed to immigrants as easy scapegoats for people's problems. According to this view, ordinary people are being manipulated by far-right narratives that are normalised by a multitude of online and offline actors.
Eight years later, this is still the most common view of the phenomenon to be found in the commentary of Europe's mainstream media and public television talk shows.
What has changed in that time, however, is that the discourse around the populist trend has become more hysterical, social divisions have widened, and despite immense efforts and hundreds of millions of euros spent on combating the phenomenon, national populism has gone from strength to strength almost everywhere in Europe.
Spaces where the rise of populism is more honestly and deeply analysed remain the exception in the mainstream media, despite all the signals that current strategies may be ineffective. Instead, our Western institutions and their representatives seem to see the problem entirely through a Foucaultian lens of the power of discourse, and they act as if the problem could be solved entirely by putting more effort into the war of narratives. Countless articles and reports have been written on how to counter far-right narratives. Whenever the populists get stronger, our liberal-progressive institutions stubbornly double down, putting more effort and money into pushing progressive counter-narratives.
Last week, after the right-wing populist AfD won the regional elections in the German state of Thuringia with 33% of the vote, several representatives of the Chancellor's Social Democratic Party, which was badly beaten in Thuringia (6% of the vote), argued that the elections showed that the party clearly needed to get its message across better.