It's curious to us Chinese: All anti-Chinese Press (NYT, Guardian, etc) and media (YouTube, Substack) propaganda (a) appeals entirely to and is bought by an Anglophone audience (including Anglophiles here on Substack) which in China is less than 0.001% of population, and (b) on topics (macroeconomics, international relations, governance), issues (national/personal debt, security, kinship) and problems (housing, welfare, jobs, drug epidemic) wholly absent in China but found everywhere in US coast to coast. Yet, the propaganda seem effective; why? On whom? How so?
Why is propaganda so rampant in the US/West, not other societies?
Further regress the US/western propaganda leads to the conclusion: (a) the propaganda is effective only because it easily penetrates the vulnerable (which you've described in this essay, "propaganda ruled"), but that at levels which doesn't connect with education. Instead, the vulnerability is purely on ethical, civilized, cultural terms. And, (b) only some societies are more prone to this "propaganda rule" than others (and democracies, with its "freedom of speech" rights, whatever that is, fit best into this category) .
In China, one of our best singer-composers 刀郎 Dao Lang released the song《羅剎海市》, translated the Kingdom of Lousha. Since its official release Aug 19, there had been more than 10 billion (yes, billion) online downloads, and heard street to street. Dao Lang never said a word since but there's universal Chinese agreement, fitting all the given lyrical criteria, the song parodies the US.
In the Dao Lang lyrics is an explicit mention by name of Austrian/German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein whose Picture Theory of Language in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' Dao Lang invokes: "The world is everything that is the case." That is, Americans (or white people) grow up in the language that made them and they, in their turn, made the language, which includes the language of propaganda that Caitlin describes here. Restated another way, if your language is defective at onset it produces in its turn defective persons/personalities. Small wonder the US is exemplar of such a sick society.
Wittgenstein isn't new to us Chinese. We very easily understood what he means because we learn the same epistemology (how do you know what you know) from 2,500 years ago in Confucian training, within which is this idea in an Analects passage 13-3: The Rectification of Terms. 名不正、則言不訓。言不訓、則事不成。事不成、則禮樂不興。禮樂不興、則刑罰不中。刑罰不中、則民無所措手足。Inter alia, “If terms be false, then what's said can't be transmitted true to its end. If all that is said aren't in the end true, then nothing is accomplished. If nothing is accomplished, then comes.... crime ....Thus, in the 君子 (noble person) meanings must be true to language, speech true to actions.."
Top of examples of this bad language birthing the US that it is today is found in the Bible. It's pure voodoo! In contrast, the Chinese hanzi 汉字 language is always true to its terms: it can never lie, deceive much less. This is the essence in Wittgenstein’s Pictorial Theory of Language.
It's curious to us Chinese: All anti-Chinese Press (NYT, Guardian, etc) and media (YouTube, Substack) propaganda (a) appeals entirely to and is bought by an Anglophone audience (including Anglophiles here on Substack) which in China is less than 0.001% of population, and (b) on topics (macroeconomics, international relations, governance), issues (national/personal debt, security, kinship) and problems (housing, welfare, jobs, drug epidemic) wholly absent in China but found everywhere in US coast to coast. Yet, the propaganda seem effective; why? On whom? How so?
Why is propaganda so rampant in the US/West, not other societies?
Further regress the US/western propaganda leads to the conclusion: (a) the propaganda is effective only because it easily penetrates the vulnerable (which you've described in this essay, "propaganda ruled"), but that at levels which doesn't connect with education. Instead, the vulnerability is purely on ethical, civilized, cultural terms. And, (b) only some societies are more prone to this "propaganda rule" than others (and democracies, with its "freedom of speech" rights, whatever that is, fit best into this category) .
In China, one of our best singer-composers 刀郎 Dao Lang released the song《羅剎海市》, translated the Kingdom of Lousha. Since its official release Aug 19, there had been more than 10 billion (yes, billion) online downloads, and heard street to street. Dao Lang never said a word since but there's universal Chinese agreement, fitting all the given lyrical criteria, the song parodies the US.
In the Dao Lang lyrics is an explicit mention by name of Austrian/German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein whose Picture Theory of Language in his 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' Dao Lang invokes: "The world is everything that is the case." That is, Americans (or white people) grow up in the language that made them and they, in their turn, made the language, which includes the language of propaganda that Caitlin describes here. Restated another way, if your language is defective at onset it produces in its turn defective persons/personalities. Small wonder the US is exemplar of such a sick society.
Wittgenstein isn't new to us Chinese. We very easily understood what he means because we learn the same epistemology (how do you know what you know) from 2,500 years ago in Confucian training, within which is this idea in an Analects passage 13-3: The Rectification of Terms. 名不正、則言不訓。言不訓、則事不成。事不成、則禮樂不興。禮樂不興、則刑罰不中。刑罰不中、則民無所措手足。Inter alia, “If terms be false, then what's said can't be transmitted true to its end. If all that is said aren't in the end true, then nothing is accomplished. If nothing is accomplished, then comes.... crime ....Thus, in the 君子 (noble person) meanings must be true to language, speech true to actions.."
Top of examples of this bad language birthing the US that it is today is found in the Bible. It's pure voodoo! In contrast, the Chinese hanzi 汉字 language is always true to its terms: it can never lie, deceive much less. This is the essence in Wittgenstein’s Pictorial Theory of Language.
Here's that Dao Long parody on America/western societies 《羅剎海市》: https://youtu.be/1-suGKGFjus?si=XT45y2LAFWZy0oC0
sounds like one of the propaganda-ruled, an asshole bleating and farting at once...
fart, fart, fart what an asshole fart, a sore loser waiting to be cancelled. Pipe down donkey boy, you'll live.