Speaking of Elon Musk, the fucking moron #2

“Propaganda does not provide information that is meant to be believed by the people it is addressing. Propaganda mostly provides signals of in-group loyalty.

To be effective at this, propaganda often has to be implausible. Information that is true is believable on its own. But propaganda has to be so patently false and far-fetched, so exaggerated and misleading, that repeating it sends the right signal to other people: the signal that one feels committed to a certain group.

Propaganda provides the masses with traits that allow them to recognise each other. But beyond this, fighting propagandistic falsehoods with the truth actually reinforces the signal’s reliability by implicitly telling people who want to prove themselves faithful precisely what not to say. Propaganda acts as a badge to express which group we belong to.
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--- Hanno Sauer. “The Invention of Good and Evil”, 2024.