From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Jun 19 2001 - 18:24:35 MDT
hal@finney.org wrote:
> Anders writes:
> > 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.
>
> It's still not clear to me how that lesson applies to us. I am not
> comfortable with the thought that we should borrow from the tactics
> of these groups. Yes, they had a degree of effectiveness, but it was
> built on a completely false foundation. If your system is built on a
> lie, you need to work in a certain way to get it accepted. But we are
> surely starting from a completely different point.
Revolutionary theory is far older than Marxism and Naziism. It is merely a tool
that can be used, like any technology. How you use it is what is important. Of
course, Goebbels' Law is to be avoided, as Greg Bear suggested at Extro5: you
never know when you are going to be caught in a lie, so its better not to do so if
the truth is so good that lying is wasting energy, which in our case it is. Other
sorts of subversive activity might also be used, so long as it is examined for how
it will contribute to the sort of society we want to see.
Marxism and Naziism strategies are useless is in areas where tactics help
contribute to a low-trust, low-liberty future, but we also need to examine our own
tactics that way. This is one of the reasons I was so vehemently against Szabo &
Miller's presentations on 'smart contracts'. Too often they can be used to
contribute to low trust, by only creating pseudo-trust that corrodes trust over
the long term. For example, a smart gun that only fires under certain
circumstances for certain users is an example of a smart contract. If control of
who can fire that gun is in the hands of government entities, this represents a
smart contract that contributes to a low trust future, while one where the owner
determines who can and can't use the gun is one that contributes to a high trust,
high liberty future.
> Imagine an honest man seeking to go into business and be successful.
> Should he copy from the techniques of the Mafia? They're successful,
> they make a lot of money. Should he threaten his potential customers and
> try to frighten them into doing business with him? Of course we agree
> he should not. The methods of a movement built on sound principles must
> inherently be of a completely different nature than those of one built
> on falsehoods.
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, this is consistent with what I was saying, but I took it farther.
> I said we could get by with no propaganda at all.
I think your idea of what propaganda is is a little narrow. Any statement that is
semantically constructed to encourage and convince others of a certain viewpoint
is propaganda. Propaganda can be divided into information and disinformation,
based on whether it is constructed around facts or falsehoods. Despotic
individuals rely on disinformation, while freedom loving revolutionaries rely on
information. Both use propaganda differently for different ends.
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