Education vs. Manipulation

It seems that there may be a point in campaigning where parties and candidates must choose between educating the public about their position, i.e. information-based propaganda, and relying on pure emotion-based propaganda. The line is admitably blurred, and also very subjective, but I do feel that it exists. Perhaps the distinction comes when the goal is no longer to present information and allow the public to make up its mind, and instead tries to persuade the public into believing that there is only one possible choice, and that all other choices will lead, essentially, to certain damnation.

By the time that John Kerry was officially chosen as the Democratic party's presidential candidate, the left-wing propaganda machine (it does exist, despite what us liberals would like to believe) began to direct this emotion-based propaganda at anyone, from both ends of the political spectrum, if they did not support their candidate without question. Randi Rhodes on Air America radio, for example, was ruthless in her berating of Nader supporters, and even of Kerry supporters who were merely simpathetic to Nader supporters. It was not enough to allow individuals to make up their own minds, to her it became necessary to assure them of their imminent demise if they did not agree with her.

Conservative instances of manipulation are even more prevalent, and so due to their overwhelming abundance, I will not mention them here. For some examples, please refer to any of my previous blog entries.

Both strategies will be effective among certain groups of people, and completely innefective among other groups. It may seem intuitive that the education approach will be more successful with more educated individuals, however I do not believe this is necessarily true. Even the most educated can still be swayed by emotion-based propaganda, and even for those who will choose to further investigate a candidate's claims, this approach will have the added advantage of helping to create an initial bias in most individuals, aside from those who are automatically sceptical of all of the candidates claims.

It is far from a clear moral decision which approach is better. The emotion-based propaganda approach may have lately proven to be more effective, and so the essential question becomes: is it justifiable to use these manipulative techniques to accomplish your goals as a candidate? I am certain that just about every candidate is assured of their own moral superiority, so from a relativistic perspective, can it be considered wrong for a candidate to choose manipulation over education, as long as they have what they consider to be society's best wishes in mind?

The choice for liberals then becomes: is it justifiable to choose manipulation if the opposition is already using it, and it would be impossible to accomplish our goals without it. A good example would be the anti-war protests leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The participants always included both the rational, education-oriented individuals, and the irrational individuals who were there to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, and often did not even fully understand what they were protesting against. The irrational ones were easy to spot. They were the ones, for example, getting arrested for closing down Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Many of them carry signs with vastly oversimplified, although memorable, sayings such as "No Blood for Oil," etc. When the protests recieve press coverage, the focus is naturally on these individuals because they are seen as more newsworthy and exciting. Aside from the massive demonstrations whose size alone is enough to attract attention, these irrational individuals may be necessary in order to attract any attention at all.

There is value in oversimplified, essentially propagandized, expressions of dissent, however, I believe there must be a balance. It may be permissible to oversimplify as long as the whole evidence is made so easily available that there can be no misrepresentation of the general movement as being uninformed or irrational.