I'VE RECENTLY SPENT a lot of time and focus on email propaganda, which may seem to be a tangential sort of subject for a site like the daily mull.
"We are finally realizing that language can only be really effective when it's honest."
But it really isn't.
The central point about email propaganda, or any propaganda for that matter, is that it presents a great temptation to the author.
At root it's a spiritual matter—a matter of the American spirit, of the national character, but also of personal spirit and personal character.
I'm not sure that it would would be in keeping with the emerging natural spirituality to talk about either sins or commandments. We seem to be returning to the wisdom tradition, and abandoning the legal tradition, so don't take this literally.
But if there were ten commandments about how to be successfully human, one of them would probably read like this:
Thou shalt not allow the effect of your words to be more important to you than the truth of your words.
Two recent events have driven this home for me.
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A reader alerted me to a post about Lou Pritchett, of "Open Letter to Obama" fame, on maven&meddler.
You can visit that site for the whole story, but the gist is that a reader of that site happens to be in the field of "Change Management", which Pritchett claims, both in the email and on his web-page, to be "one of the foremost experts" in.
The reader points out that she has never heard of Pritchett, and that, upon pulling out a book "introducing and discussing the leading theories in change" she found no mention of him. -
A recent edition of the Rachel Maddow Show featured a clip of former Senator Norm Coleman speaking at a conservative convention in Missouri:
"We need to cultivate our grass e-roots. Grass e-roots...That‘s grass, space, E-hyphen roots. We have a new phenomenon in American politics that I call grass e-roots. In this new world, the one with the most cell phone numbers, E-mail addresses, and YouTube hits wins. Despite the fact that we had superior tickets and issues in November, we never caught up on the Democrats on the ability to raise funds fast and cheap, and communicate with millions of people in milliseconds."
What do these two events have in common?
They both point to something more than cynicism. I doubt that Pritchett, or most other propagandists, think while writing: "This stuff is dishonest, misleading, and inconsistent—but the suckers will buy it."
Unfortunately, it's worse than that.
Pritchett's career in "change management" was actually a career in sales. In sales the purpose of language, of rhetoric, is to... well, sell. As long as what you say or do gets more people to buy more stuff, no one asks, or cares, whether it's true.
Truth is is not secondary, it's irrelevant.
This is a classic example of what I've called political rhetoric elsewhere—and it's a spiritual matter: a matter of character. It's no surprise when a person lives and breathes that atmosphere, successfully, his entire life, if he ends up using language the same way in his propaganda emails.
The deeper problem is that this use of thought and language penetrates to a person's inner processes. The question is never "is it true?", always "is it effective?"—even in one's own thought processes.
I'm quite sure that Pritchett believes everything he put in that email. Why wouldn't he? It's very effective.
Likewise, I'm quite sure that Coleman believes that the last election had nothing at all to do with a record of lying to the American people, dragging us into an unnecessary and illegal war, instituting policies of torture, or bankrupting the country.
He never even considers that possibility. Such thoughts would be ineffective. They're not going to help him win votes tomorrow or raise money today.
No. He really believes what he says, without any thought for whether it's true. He really thinks that the only point that matters is the political question of who got more votes (did we sell the soap?), and that in the end it must be a matter of how effective the rhetoric was (not how true).
The good news is that both these people represent the remains of a diminishing movement—the same movement that, for purely political reasons, doesn't want the truth about biology or birth control or sexual preferences or corporate power to be known.
The last election is only one of many indications that we are moving in a different direction, that we are embracing a view of language that puts truth first, and effectiveness second.
We are finally realizing that language can only be really effective when it's honest.
We're finally growing up.
At least, that's what I think today.
