Action Snack: How to Jam the Circuits of Authoritarian Propaganda

Working with “overwhelm”

Photo by Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

Hey there everyone –

We haven’t done an Action Snack for some time now, so I thought it might be nice to mix things up and focus on a strategy you can use to combat the psychological effects of propaganda.

I’m sidestepping the question of what constitutes propaganda and what differentiates it from fact, because that’s a very complex subject. My purpose today is to explore the emotions that propaganda generates and show you how you can stop feeling overwhelmed and return to your own power.

The goal of propaganda is simple: to defeat the opposition. Its genius is that it makes the enemy do the work. The question is: how? 

Propaganda harnesses the mind, filling it with stories that generate images, arguments, and feelings. If the stories are powerful enough, they’ll supplant the person’s own mental content. They’ll also generate feelings so consuming and powerful that the person will be immobilized. 

Which feelings, you ask? Here’s a representative sample: despair, powerlessness, disgust, contempt, futility, avoidance, terror, hopelessness, detachment, and cynicism. 

Part of what inspired today’s post was my curiosity about why so many people are using the term “overwhelm” to describe how they feel right now. I wanted to understand better what they meant when they said it. Also, I wanted to think through the relationship between feeling overwhelmed and the capacity to act. So, being a word nerd, I looked it up. Here’s how the American Heritage dictionary defines overwhelm:

• To surge over and submerge; engulf. "waves overwhelming the rocky shoreline."

• To defeat completely and decisively. "Our team overwhelmed the visitors by 40 points."

• To affect deeply in mind or emotion. "Despair overwhelmed me."

• To present with an excessive amount. "They overwhelmed us with expensive gifts."

• To turn over; upset. "The small craft was overwhelmed by the enormous waves."

• To cover over completely, as by a great wave; to overflow and bury beneath; to engulf; hence, figuratively, to immerse and bear down; to overpower; to crush; to bury; to oppress, etc., overpoweringly.

I’m struck by how much the definitions describe being incapacitated by force. I also noticed how much of the imagery is about water and waves—to be brought almost to a state of drowning—or about burial in the ground.

I felt like a detective, having come across an important clue. The definition describes exactly the result that successful propaganda seeks to create. What, then, is the collective effect of so many people telling one another that they’re overwhelmed? (To be clear, I’m not advising you to clam up and not share your feelings with others; I’m pulling back a bit to look at this emotion as a social phenomenon.) 

Who or what benefits from our overwhelm? What would change if we saw our collective overwhelm less as an authentic feeling state and more as an implanted one? Would that provide us more distance from and curiosity about our own feelings? Would it diminish its power?

I don’t know about you, but when I feel overwhelmed, I want to flee, or shut down. If I take my overwhelm as a cue that my safety is threatened, I’m going to either scan the enemy for threats, or retreat, to stay safe. In either scenario, I’m spellbound by the other, frozen in place. 

What I’m describing is the activation of the brain’s limbic system, which “fires first” because it’s responsible for our physical survival. It overrides the slower, more thoughtful part of our brain, the part that gives us mind, consciousness, thinking. The limbic system throws us almost immediately into action or reaction to a threat. This reactivity works well if we’re physically attacked, or we have to run from a fire. What’s difficult about our present moment, as almost every book on stress will tell you, is that our bodies cannot differentiate between a fire and the promise that our future will be marked by disaster and pain. 

If I can write propaganda that throws you into a state of permanent limbic system arousal; if I can hijack your brain and fill it with my own picture of a reality so horrifying that you are paralyzed with fear, or filled with disgust and contempt for those I tell you are creating it, then I have a significant amount of control over your body and your brain. If I can keep you in the limbic response, I’ve successfully shut down your power to reason, to create, to imagine, to act in ways that don’t depend on maintaining your survival.

One of the most difficult things to do in this situation is to turn away from the perceived threat. It goes against our most primal and powerful responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. When our animal selves and our brain’s limbic systems are driving the bus, it’s almost impossible to resist their commands. And this is in the best of circumstances. When we’re under chronic stress from structural violence and oppression; when our bodies are already taxed from poor nutrition, lack of sleep, physical pain, overwork and too many responsibilities; or when we’re in families or intimate relationships where domestic violence and abuse is happening, mustering the effort to combat propaganda is even more challenging.

I say all of the above not to induce a different kind of despair, but rather to give credit to why authoritarian propaganda is so successful. It works because it harnesses our fear. It also works because it answers the uncertainty of the present moment. No matter how awful, propaganda gives us the safety and security of knowing what is to come. It tells us what to do. It gives us meaning and purpose: there’s a powerful enemy, a horrifying threat, and our entire being should be launched against it, in heroic struggle. It’s a paradox: no matter how terrible and nihilistic its vision, propaganda provides certainty, futurity, meaning, and a focal point for our time and effort. It removes existential groundlessness from our being.

So what can we do? 

One way to jam the circuits of propaganda is to use the very emotions it is designed to generate as signals—as calls to pay attention. We can pause and ask when it was that we started to feel that way and why. 

Another is to pay attention to how much of what we are consuming in media and elsewhere is speculative: a story that tells us, implicitly or explicitly, what is going to happen to us or to people and ecosystems we care about. That it knows which group will be victorious over another group and why. That it has identified the correct threats and the correct solutions to those threats. 

When we notice and identify these feelings; when we get curious about the stories we read and tell ourselves, we are moving from passive consumers to active agents. We are reminding ourselves that we have consent in these situations. Consent to consume; consent to believe; consent to investigate; to trust or distrust. 

It is not that we have two choices: to constantly scan for threat or to tune out and disconnect. Instead, we can use our power and agency to stay “in” and at the same time have a certain detachment, not only to what we are consuming, but to our own thoughts and feelings. In that distance we can ask how our responses, individually and collectively, may harm or benefit those seeking power.

Propaganda is simple. It’s repetitive. Its power comes from its relentlessness. To combat it, we can use the same strategy:

1. Identify

Make a list of the words in the fifth paragraph of this email. Add other feelings that you’d like to monitor. Set two reminders in your day to check in with your list of feelings. We can take our overwhelm as a signal that our emotional system has been breached, just the way we respond when we have a scratchy throat. We can take steps to identify which specific emotions are present, so that we’re not just “overwhelmed,” we’re feeling a particular thing for a particular reason.

2. Allow

Give in fully to the feeling state, to better understand its source and power. Don’t try to talk yourself out of it. Instead, notice its force. Ask: when did I start noticing this feeling? What was happening? How does this feeling contribute to or take away from my own sense of creativity, connection, and power? 

3. Recognize

It’s likely that our feelings of hopelessness and despair are linked not only to propaganda in the present moment, but also to our lifelong experiences of structural violence and domination. We can gather with others to combat our internalized oppression. We can refuse to allow propaganda to reinforce our sense that we are abnormal, unwanted, threatening, useless, and outside of the dominant culture’s story of success. We can step out of the distraction machine and into the silence and stillness that is always available and is one of the greatest threats to those who would control us, shut us down.

4. Move 

We can move our bodies, in whatever ways are possible for us, as a way of returning to our own power and control. Moving helps release the anxiety and stress, and taking deep breaths can freshen our minds for new ideas. Then we can move into action: we can ask whether we want to consent to the stories we just consumed; whether we want to find alternative stories of success to bolster our sense of possibility; whether we want to teach ourselves something new about a problem or issue that’s dear to our hearts. We can ask: how can I shift my attention from passively consuming information to instead actively creating it, or vetting it, alone and with others?

5. Repeat

Each of these steps is simple, but when practiced with regularly, they build strength and creativity. They remind us that we are not passive consumers but rather active agents, capable of making change.

I’m sure there’s lots of ways you are already working with overwhelm and propaganda, beyond the few I’ve described here. If you feel like sharing them in the comments, I’d love to hear about them.

Stay safe out there this week —

xo

Rebecca

P.S. If you want to read more about how propaganda works, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is really great. The first time I picked it up I was scared I wouldn’t understand it. But though it’s slow going, it’s very clear and direct and you don’t need to be a philosopher to get it. Also, there’s a great graphic edition of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny by Nora Krug.