In the words of Morgan State University Journalism and Communications Professor, Dr. Jared Ball: “How do you know what you know? And, why do you like what you like?” This necessitates a discussion of how the empire’s propaganda functions from a materialist standpoint. Two models have been established in media studies, the Hypodermic Needle–developed by Harold Lasswell in the 1920s, and the Two-step Flow of Communication–instituted by Paul Lazarsfeld et al., and further elucidated in 1955 in collaboration with Elihu Katz. Lasswell’s theory postulates that media messaging is “injected” into the populace in the manner of a simultaneous mass inoculation. Lazarsfeld’s update of that model suggests that the masses are not passively influenced by Media directly, but that Opinion Leaders are–who then impel the rest of us to accept our beliefs. This supposedly explains how ideas are transferred within a given population: Media > Opinion Leaders > Broader Population. In essence, there are two steps–involving people–that happen to create mass influence.
The problem with both of these models is how media gets defined–or not defined at all–for the public. Every experience is rooted in material reality, either naturally occurring objects like trees or minerals, or human-made items derived from them, like wooden chairs or smartphones. “Media” is not organic matter. Nothing is natural about its presence in our lives. There are people who create all the media that influences us. Once we situate them at the start of the value chain as people, and not an innocuous void, this produces a third (or originating) step. In other words: The Producers > The Obscurants > The Acceptance. All three steps involve a human-generated process, unlike Lasswell’s one-step, and Lazarsfeld’s two-step models.
Primordial Step: The Producers
The Producers are people in control of society’s productive forces who create reality for the purpose of developing mass belief in a material phenomenon. These people have been invisiblized within the infrastructure of “media,” since they do not routinely appear publicly to inform the base about said phenomenon. The creation of any phenomenon is meant to protect the ruling class’s capital accumulation. This requires metadeception, layers of deceit beyond what appears on the surface. The broader deception encompasses private planning to create the phenomenon, as well as the orchestration of the mechanisms to bring it into being. Depending on the reality created, an elite group of people who plan may never be revealed, because part of the metadeception is to drive the illusion of an outcome being attributable to a naturally ubiquitous state.
Think of the Producers as a clique of capitalists who control the societal structures required to impose any type of propaganda schemes that protect their system whenever and wherever they choose. No matter the subject, these people–representing families with intergenerational corporate wealth–only change through the natural cycle of life and death. Otherwise, they should be deemed a static consociation.
Secondary Step: The Obscurants
The obscurants prop up information about the phenomenon in vague, non-material ways meant to confound and obscure reality. There are two types of obscurantists: Witting and unwitting. The witting are aware of the deception and are in on the lie. They receive material gain from their participation. The unwitting suffer from naivete that allows their opinions to be elevated as obfuscating “fact,” thereby lending legitimacy to the variance of opposing forces collectively conforming to the constructed reality. The Obscurants work for and at the behest of the Producers. Think of them as a dynamic crew, deployed across multiple areas simultaneously like the tentacles of an octopus connected to the same source. They constantly change depending on what we are meant to believe.
Tertiary Step: The Acceptance
Acceptance occurs when a critical mass embraces the phenomenon, resulting from collusion between the Producers and the Obscurants. When the phenomenon is omnipresent, this normalizes the belief that the falsity is indeed true. Once this “truth” has been accepted, related mythology can then be scaffolded on top of it, thereby making it difficult to discern not only what the primary lie is, but its point of origin in time. Once the masses believe, the propaganda develops additional viscous layers, which makes the myth difficult to supplant with any countervailing evidence.
Not all propaganda is destructive to the people. It can be beneficially constructed to reveal helpful, hidden truths. However, when its deployment for the purpose of “devising means for elites to manage the ideology and public opinion of the masses” is so pervasive, the normalizing effect that utter bullshit has on our psyche makes the truth seem unfathomable. Circling back to Dr. Ball: As he demonstrates in the Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, there’s a process in place that spans time and geography, making us believe what we believe. Buried behind decades of planned corporate messaging, Producers–like the Selig Center–set out to make the masses believe that having a choice of where to collectively spend money is power. They employ witting Obscurants, like John Hope Bryant, to coalesce around the lie that conceals the imperialist process, along with a host of unwitting podcasters participating in corporate-sponsored events. These actions cause the lie to be accepted in perpetuity. The constant messaging deflects attention from a critical truth: Real power means controlling the means of production. And, as long as a small group of people on the planet controls the earth’s resources, no amount of consumer spending will ever alleviate any societal ills that plague us. This is how the process works.
