I have a number of friends on social media who share political posters. They vary from extreme liberal to extreme conservative. I find all propaganda, regardless of political persuasion, to be irrational. And I hate irrationality more than any specific political view.
It doesn’t matter if it’s something you agree with or not. Propaganda is any material that is designed to bypass your reason by activating your passions. If it calls out some group or political party and speaks of them in stark absolute terms, it’s almost certainly propaganda: “The world is going straight to Hell because of the Hated Party” or “Everything went wrong in Absurdistan due to the deliberate evil of the Other Guys.”
The term comes from Italian and literally means to propagate (replicate) an idea. When you yield to propaganda, you become a pawn in someone else’s political game. You are turning yourself into a component of their information machine, just one more link in a chain of thought influence. (There’s another great term from Italian: influenza.) Resist! Stand up against this manipulation. Start by not re-posting propaganda.
I just don’t care about who did bad to whom, or who’s character was scraped off the slime-pits of Hell. We have more important things to discuss. Yes, seriously, we do. Politics are important because they are how we enact our bigger ideas, but I think right now we are distracted by a lot of trivia.
So what should we be discussing? The bigger ideas themselves. Not gun control and taxation, but what civilization as whole should try to accomplish, or avoid.
Here’s what I care about: The world is in a odd state now. We have the technology to give everyone a comfortable life with practically no effort on their part. However, we don’t have the resources to do this for everyone at our current population level. So there are haves and have-nots, and we argue about who is worthy.
Malthus argued that we always grow population to the point of misery. One solution over most of human history has been to expand into new territory, but practically speaking there aren’t any of those left on Earth. Another solution is new technologies (the “Green Revolution”) which enable us to feed more people. At this point, new technology is our only option, but we still need to prove Malthus wrong. When the next big technology comes along and relieves poverty, swear to me that we won’t grow population until they are starving again.