Perception and Propaganda

With capitalism, the freedoms enjoyed and the results produced are evidence enough of its merits; whereas with communism perception relies on a delicate balance of power and persuasion, convincing the public of tales and theories, and the consequences of questioning them. Propaganda is that which seeks to place in the imagination that which is not experienced in reality, whereas market forces dictate to men what little they know about what they imagine they can design. 

This is, perhaps, at the very core of the debate between these two schools of thought: whether society ought to be brought into conformity around designs imagined — notwithstanding the lack of evidence, foresight and basis in reality, notwithstanding the force required to pursue their ill-defined ends — or whether society ought to be permitted to function through the voluntary expressions of individuals left to entertain their own theories, to develop their own visions and explore their own imaginations, to determine for themselves the ends served by their own individual lives. 

This is not only a matter of one of these schools being more pragmatic, more effectual and sustainable in the results produced; it is a matter of morals and ethics, a matter of determining the ends and priorities of life, whether those ends are determined by the individual or elsewhere, the latter being, to the former, functionally invisible and out of reach, functionally unaccountable to the individuals condemned by that determination voiced from on high. 

This is, ultimately, a matter of distinguishing man from machine, feeling beings from factors of production, sovereign man from part of the whole, self-determination from slavery. 

Far from academic, the consequences coming from this debate — the ideas that prevail, whether by acquiescence or approbation — are to decide the future that we have, the nature of our associations, and the world inherited by our heirs; just as importantly, perhaps even more so, is the effect all of this has on the individual’s perception of life and his place in it.

We mustn’t allow skewed perceptions or political propaganda to prevail over the honest and the practical; we mustn’t allow the weight of acquiescence to trample the lives of individuals; and we mustn’t, as a consequence, allow the individual to be reduced in either relevance or autonomy, the very manner in which he factors into his own life, the very extent to which he carries his own destiny, the very freedom he maintains to decide the form and function of his own life, and the very reality of whether he can be said to truly own himself and the product of his labor.