Really been mulling this over a lot lately.
Transcript of Tiktok by stevetomjohn, in response to a stitch that says “but I am not going to hang onto every CNN breaking news…”:
This is one of the few times when I’m actually going to weigh in with my expertise, I did my PhD dissertation on North Korean propaganda. North Korea is, contrary to popular belief, a right wing authoritarian ethnostate, and there are a lot of reasons why that is that I’m not going to get into in this video.
But as someone who thought a lot about propaganda, I have some things that I want to share. The main thing is exactly this point, that it’s a bad idea to pay attention to every little thing that you see. A lot of people think of propaganda as something that’s trying to teach you something that you end up believing, so it’s like “profits are great now, profits are great now, profits are great now!” and then all of a sudden the audience is like “oh yeah, profits are great now,” but that’s actually not the case most of the time.
One of the articles that really broke my brain about this is, again, this is a very academic article in 20th century music, called “Stalin and the Art of Boredom” by Marina Frolova-Walker who specializes in soviet propaganda of sort of the mid 20th century. And she argues that the point of a lot of propaganda is not actually to convince you of anything, but to bore you into submission by basically filling up your brain to the point where nothing else can take up that space. So like, if you see a statue of Stalin in the courtyard, it doesn’t actually inspire any feelings about Stalin, but what it does do is fill up that “statue” position with something of Stalin so you cannot image something else being there.
So, if you’re someone who wants to see a different world, staying on this outrage wheel, obsessing over the people that you don’t want in that position, actually has that effect on you, it prevents you from sort of imagining and planning what you would actually want the world to look like, because you’re spending too much time obsessing over the way that it looks now. Just one of the many ways that I would advise you to protect your mental health in the world and help you build the world that you want to see.