There’s an idea in marketing that if you create a solution, you also need to create new problems that you can market. For example, you buy a printer to allow you to print at home but now you need to buy overpriced proprietary ink. Or maybe you buy a phone, but now what can we do to make sure you come back to buy a new phone in 2 years? Truly solving a problem sells something once and that will not satisfy the infinite growth mindset.
It’s a concept up there with Edward Bernays work in popularizing applying propaganda techniques to modern advertising as the idea that may have done the most to really push capitalism to its worst possible end.
I don’t think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.
The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them “for merit”.
Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.
Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you’d have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.
Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you’ll have Stalin’s time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you’ll have Nazi Germany’s industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.
There’s an idea in marketing that if you create a solution, you also need to create new problems that you can market. For example, you buy a printer to allow you to print at home but now you need to buy overpriced proprietary ink. Or maybe you buy a phone, but now what can we do to make sure you come back to buy a new phone in 2 years? Truly solving a problem sells something once and that will not satisfy the infinite growth mindset.
It’s a concept up there with Edward Bernays work in popularizing applying propaganda techniques to modern advertising as the idea that may have done the most to really push capitalism to its worst possible end.
I don’t think a socialist society without propaganda would be much better or worse than a capitalist society without propaganda.
The differences would be almost decorative, so the socialist variant can be represented as a market of ideas in many democratic organs, with those people more successful by accepted criteria getting more resources allocated to them “for merit”.
Or the capitalist variant can be represented as a system of efficient resource distribution via accepted universal equivalent, with voluntary associations and public morale acting to help those in need.
Those would be both comprised of humans, so without propaganda you’d have normal human hierarchies, human inequality and the resistance to it, human groupings and human hostility, all the same.
Provided, of course, that both are democratic. Otherwise you’ll have Stalin’s time Soviet bosses with their palaces and lovers and cars, and you’ll have Nazi Germany’s industrialists, the former as accountable as the latter and the latter as much part of the state hierarchy as the former.