Seeing Through Propaganda

These days there is so much disinformation around that it is really hard to distinguish what is really going on most of the time. There is an excellent cartoon of Brave New World vs 1984 going around that depicts it all very well. Just click on the image to see the whole thing or go to www.recombinantrecords.net. This excerpt from Brave New World Revisited gives us guidelines for feeling what is authentic or not.

The value, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry–the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.

This set of values will provide us with a criterion by which propaganda may be judged.

The propaganda that is found to be both nonsensical and immoral may be rejected out of hand. That which is merely irrational, but compatible with love and freedom, and not on principle opposed to the exercise of intelligence, may be provisionally accepted for what it is worth. -p 107

Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

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