Neema Parvini wrote for us a good theorists paper, How To Reject The Media’s False Binaries. Read all of it. It’s worth it.
I’m a practitioner. I have forced the system to reckon with itself, and set wars among the elites to influence events in a small area of social policy. I can say, from experience, that How to Reject is not a practitioners paper. The title promises us methods to reject false binaries, but it doesn’t really do that. Parvini exposits false binaries quite well. It should be read from that perspective, because it doesn’t give us good advice about how to escape propagandistic binaries in real life.
Gaps
In the end, How to Reject is what the dissident Right alway produces: a problem description rather than a method of action. I wish to extend Parvini’s essay for use by practical men.
Let’s look at the exposition. I find three gaps in How to Reject.
Organization. Parvini’s diagnosis tells us, correctly, the culture-war binary persists for lack of perduring organizations that can challenge the managerial class. The obvious remedy would be to build such organizations. How to Reject never says who, what, when, or how to do this. It does hint at why, but practical men need more that that.
Criterion. How to Reject never tells us how to tell a genuine dichotomy from a false one. For example, it gives us sensible advice to be suspicious of amplified voices. But we can’t be left with only a hermeneutic of suspicion. The propagandists say things that are mostly and probably true. They then connect your common sense understandings of these true things to fool you into inferring a false thing. Most of what’s amplified is in fact true. The man in the action needs a sieve to strain out the falsities.
Vicious loop. Parvini’s mechanism for rejecting binaries relies too much on assessments of artificial media elevation. This is understandable. As an online influencer and commercial concern himself, Parvini spends a lot of time trying to get his message out through the clutter of social media chaos. It’s a circular concern, though. On Parvini’s view, anyone who reaches an audience is suspect. The good guys are unreachable. Can you see that this is itself a false binary?
Uses of False Binaries
There is a particular omission in How to Reject that caught my attention. It doesn’t give a comprehensive description of why propagandists use opposed binaries. Parvini gives a glimpse. Binaries are “safe for the existing power structure.” Binaries do “not require every journalist to coordinate.” How to Reject doesn’t really explain in practical terms why binaries are effective.
It’s important to know why propagandists use dichotomies.
Jacques Ellul. Propaganda aims at action, and action requires the masses to make a simple choice. Binaries make the audience into a participant. It’s the difference between a video game and a movie. In a video game you make choices, but you are inexorably led to the game’s foregone conclusion. The easiest choice for the audience is one that confirms preexisting beliefs but nudges a bit farther.
Lasswell and Hoffer. The aim of propaganda is to inculcate hatred of the enemy, love of allies, and a desire to convert neutrals. The propagandist can unify by hatred much easier than by love. Movements need a devil, and the devil is in the binaries.
Lippmann. Our actions are driven by pictures in our heads, because the real world is too complicated to hold all at once. We instinctively aim at a parsimony of morality, intellect, and even action. A binary diptych is the simplest picture we can hold to make a decision. We are naturally drawn to it.
Burke. Cultural identity is created as much by shared enmity as shared loves. Once the propagandist binds a person to a choice, the bound person’s self-image and social status and sense of the future are also bound. The switching costs are very high. (Ask anyone who has ever publicly changed their mind.) The binary magnifies peer pressure by its simplicity. Everyone will know you are a deserter.
For men with practical motives involving action, I think my list gives a better description of why propagandists choose binaries and why they work. You can do something with that information.
Ploys
As practical men, not just academic theorists, we need to understand propaganda binaries in use. Here are some propagandist’s ploys.
Trade in existing beliefs. If the audience already thinks in binaries, systematically modify the categories until they accord with the actions desired. And you can be sure the audience does think mostly in binaries. It’s an artifact of average IQ and below.
Tell partial stories. Let the audience’s priors “fill in” the blanks with common sense. To keep it simple, tell one side about the devils. The audience will naturally fill in itself on the side of the angels. Most people deeply want to conceive themselves as good. Rejecting the fill-in-the-blank dichotomy requires something most men don’t have: honesty about themselves.
Control attention. This is where Parvini’s ideas about elevated influencers can be applied the right way. The purpose of social media elevation is precisely to crowd out alternatives beyond the false binary.
Divert human behavior. Make one choice easy to do and the other hard. How convenient if the easy choice creates a preference cascade and herd following behavior according to the propagandist’s binary. Multiple choices would diffuse the cascade.
Create stress and shared emotion. Present an urgent moral and existential crisis. Make choice A accord with the group sentiment and choice B one that diverges. Under stress, people sort quickly and mostly according to group sentiment.
Settle the question. Make one side of the binary seem settled by the group, as though further attention is wasting time. Make attention to the disfavored binary seem like beating a dead horse. Those who do it become droll outcasts standing in the corner at the propaganda party while the popular people mingle.
Countermeasures
Now that you have an adequate description and a basic understanding of the propaganda ploys, you can probably devise countermeasures yourself. But here’s some ideas, anyway.
Test the joins not the choices. Plato (Phaedrus 265e) advises us to divide kinds like a good butcher, at the natural joints. Ask whether the two choices on offer differ by kind or by degree. If by degree, it’s not a binary. If by kind and there’s more than one natural joint, you have broken the false dichotomy.
Turn choices into claims. Each side of the binary smuggles in claims. Consider them separately rather than as a bundle. This breaks the operant condition for the bundle. Bundling is the main weapon of the propagandist.
Ask what and who? Instead of conceiving the binary as a choice, ask who is asking me to do what? That breaks the spell because no one likes to be bossed around.
The alarm bell should set off an alarm bell. Urgency is a signal to slow down. someone wants you to use group dynamics to make a decision. Just slow down, and you won’t do that. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Pull the bow’s string. The story ends too neatly. Everything sorts nicely, and in the end it’s neatly packaged for you and tied with a bow. Pull the string on that bow, and look inside. Things usually don’t sort out neatly. Even easy things.
Keep “unknown” as an option. You can always add “unknown” to a binary to break it and create a cause for deeper scrutiny.
When you think about organizing, these need to be built into your organization’s external analysis filters.
Do Something
Go and do something. You’ve read enough.