Loss, Grief and Propaganda
The global pandemic has generated universal loss and grief. For some, it may have tragically involved the death of a loved one. Others have faced the loss of livelihood; or the end of easy and comforting access to friends and family; or the loss of health either due to surviving the virus or due to all the indirect impacts of how stress works on the body. And all of us, to varying degrees, have faced the loss of a Before Times way of being in the world.
We are not our most flexible or best selves these days because loss and grief generate significant distraction. The signal-to-noise ratio is very poor no matter where you are in the world. What this means is that desired facts and information (the signal) are weak to non-existent, whereas as propaganda and embellishments (the noise) dominate all media everywhere.
Why is this important? It is important because your relationship to propaganda is something you need to understand. If you live anywhere in any western country, you assume, along with everyone else, that propaganda is what “the nefarious others” do and that it is the “uneducated” who will be sucked into believing it. You too are part of generating propaganda and aligning with it (even as you may not believe it), but you have never likely framed it that way and now is a good time to start turning a critical eye on the whole thing.
And why do you need to understand your relationship to propaganda? Propaganda will feature prominently and increasingly in our ongoing lives and identifying and naming its presence in your life will be highly protective for you and your loved ones.
The definition of propaganda is very broad: biased or misleading information that is used to promote a political cause or point of view. When most of us think of propaganda we picture huge very flattering posters of dictators and dear leaders plastered in every public space. But here is another example of propaganda:
[image taken somewhere in the Ukraine picturing two tanks driving by on the road with half a dozen soldiers in battle gear and helmets perched on the roof of each tank with a prominent Ukraine flag flying on each tank. In the foreground are a boy and a girl holding hands standing on the side of the road with their backs to the camera and they are facing the tanks going by on the road. The boy has a toy rifle strapped across his back and is wearing a hat with ear flaps and a waterproof jacket, matching pants and winter boots. He is saluting the soldiers and the soldiers are waving at the girl and boy. The girl has on a pink winter coat a navy pair of winter pants and matching pink boots with a double pompom toque and she is holding a large stuffed bunny rabbit by its foot in one hand by her side]
Propaganda and fake news are a bit of a Venn diagram where there is tremendous overlap but you can have propaganda that is not fake news and vice versa.
An example of fake news that is not propaganda is when someone generates a fake story and/or image but their motivation is to troll or to gain notoriety and popularity—they are not trying to promote any point of view. An example of propaganda that is not fake news is the relaying of something that has actually occurred, but doing so in a flattering light—think pretty much every press release from any organization ever.
As someone who has spent a lifetime working in Photoshop, I see the above image has been created from a composite because the lighting is off. If you look at the girl’s bunny rabbit it is essentially too brightly and evenly lit relative to the ambient light of the day, the sky and the nearby smoke or fog.
The individual who created this composite image may have had the motivation to create propaganda or fake news, or both. When you see this in your social media feeds and subsequently share it then you are leveraging it as propaganda (because I am going to assume that you are not passing it on knowing it is fake and wanting some notoriety).
The actual provenance of this image is still unclear. It definitely dates back to 2016 as it was released on FB by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense both in 2016 and in 2022. However, I suspect that the original image is still doctored given the lighting discrepancy, although it is possible the image is a promotional one with only the bunny added in post-production.
Given that those who shared this image, or the myriad other equally doctored and/or historical images that were passed off as of-the-moment, did so fully believing it was an accurate and immediate capture of the situation on the ground, does that make those folk gullible people?
Well that will depend on the coordination motive which I will get to in a moment.
Very few of us would willingly choose to be purposeful propagandists. Now we might, after we discover our mistake, rationalize having passed it on as still supporting “the right side.” But that minimization of what has happened does you and those you love a disservice. It is time for you to broaden your understanding of propaganda and hone your skills at identifying it in your life.
There is not a huge amount of research out there on stress and gullibility, but let us start with the basics: trust and gullibility appear to be two distinct things in humans. Those with high trust are not automatically highly gullible.
“Extreme high trust, on the other hand, was not associated with gullibility or with related interpersonal difficulties, supporting arguments that trust is essentially distinct from gullibility and exploitability.”
Gullibility does increase if you are distracted and this is relevant to us all in these times of loss and grief. [2]
Another piece of the gullibility puzzle is that adverse childhood events predispose individuals to be more gullible and vulnerable to being misled. The researcher involved in the six-month study that uncovered the correlation between adverse childhood events and gullibility had this to say:
“The majority of people may learn through repeated exposure to adversity to distrust their own judgment; a person might believe something to be true, but when they, for example, read something in a newspaper that contradicts their opinion, or they talk to someone with a different view-point, that individual is more likely to take on that other person’s view. This is because the person may have learned to distrust their actions, judgements and decisions due to the fact that the majority of the time their actions have been perceived to invite negative consequences.”
“The majority of people may learn through repeated exposure to adversity to distrust their own judgment; a person might believe something to be true, but when they, for example, read something in a newspaper that contradicts their opinion, or they talk to someone with a different view-point, that individual is more likely to take on that other person’s view. This is because the person may have learned to distrust their actions, judgements and decisions due to the fact that the majority of the time their actions have been perceived to invite negative consequences.”
But our relationship to propaganda is not exclusively dependent on our personal experience and gullibility and this is where it gets truly weird:
“… politicians lie because some people believe them. While those who believe whatever the government tells them are tautologically responsive to propaganda, their presence has powerful effects on the behavior of those who are aware that they are being lied to, as well as those doing the lying.”
Basically, the gullible within our society signal to the rest of us and then we make our own determination on how much we are going to go along with the propaganda based on our assessment of how well we think that government is doing.
“…citizens want to support governments that perform well, and want to pick a level of support in line with what others choose. This latter coordination motive can drive even those who know the government is lying to behave as if they accept the signal as true because they know the credulous citizens will be influenced by propaganda.”
And finally, governments will increase the level of propaganda when citizens are less responsive [7]. Maybe this happens because as long as it might be possible to attract the most gullible to believe propaganda, the rest of us will go along even though it does not align with our actual belief system.
In getting back to my question as to whether it is a gullible move to share an image that turns out to be propaganda, it is gullible if you believed it to be factual. However, it could be that it was not gullibility so much as it was virtue signalling or a coordination motive at play if you thought it might be fake and yet shared it because you felt it was the right thing to do.
Remember that we all have an ability to assess whether we are seeing our governments perform well or not and we use that internal meter to determine how much of a coordination motive we will use to outwardly accept the signal as true even as we know internally it is not. We have an added problem in the western world beyond our coordination motive: we generally believe that we are not exposed to propaganda “from our own side.”
We have ironically accepted the western propaganda that propaganda is something that occurs only in places like China or Russia where there are oligarchs, state censorship, and authoritarian regimes. We fail to recognize our own democracies also have oligarchs, state censorship and increasing levels of authoritarian interfaces with their populations as well.
If you find yourself wanting to defend that no democracy is as bad as any garden-variety authoritarian regime, then you are missing the point: if you live in a democracy, how bad it is elsewhere is of no relevance to you. What matters is how bad is it where you are.
When the signal to noise ratio of information is poor where you are, look to assess both your level of gullibility and your coordination motive because propaganda must be propagated to be successful.
Breaking the chain of propagating propaganda (that is a mouthful) is important for the protection of mental health and critical thinking abilities. Critical thinking, like many things in life, is a use-it-or-lose-it skill.
In times of loss, grief and propaganda, exercise your critical thinking so that you can protect yourself from not only propagating propaganda, but also being party to influencing the gullible (yourself included) to a point where you will make grave errors in judgment and perhaps even undermine the safety of yourself and others.
There are many good books on how to get better at critical thought and this one is a fairly quick but dense read if you are interested: Critical Thinking Effect.
Disclaimer: The above is a piece about loss, grief and propaganda and not war. There are approximately 40 ongoing conflicts occurring in the world today. If you wish to help people who are directly impacted by armed conflicts and war, you may want to consider donations to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) or of course donate to your preferred non-profit or charity as you see fit.
Gurtman MB. Trust, distrust, and interpersonal problems: a circumplex analysis. Journal of personality and social psychology. 1992 Jun;62(6):989.
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/how-gullible-are-you/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060523072353.htm
Little AT. Propaganda and credulity. Games and Economic Behavior. 2017 Mar 1;102:224-32.
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