Re: The meaning of philosophy and the lawn chair

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 13:01:48 MDT


On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:46:09AM -0700, hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> Can't you draw the opposite lesson from this, though? It is a bad sign if
> you find yourself resorting to propaganda in order to make your policies
> acceptable. If the most successful propaganda states were Nazi Germany
> and Communist Russia, are you sure you want to advocate joining them?

Waldemar's point was not that propaganda is important, but that these
regimes spent a lot of energy on developing their philosophies. Then
they distributed that as propaganda, of course.

If you have a badly thought out system propaganda will not help you
beyond a certain point, since people will easily poke holes in it. But
if you have strong arguments (even if they are eventually wrong) the
propaganda is amplified, and you might actually get on with less
propaganda than you otherwise might have needed.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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