plawolf
Lieutenant General
That’s a feature, not a bug.
To be peak effective at propaganda, one needs to be utterly without morals, principles, scruples, self respect or a sense of shame; yet at the same time one needs to be well educated, articulate and charismatic. Essentially, you need street-scum level bottom-feeder personality traits with ‘well-bred’ high-class education and upbringing.
These two aspects are usually contradictory and rarely found in the same individual, because while true street trash bottom feeders easily have all of the character flaws of the personal specification part of the job spec, they won’t have the educational and charisma requirements for the technical aspects of the job spec. High-borne elites have all the advantages of education and upbringing, but that education and upbringing generally also teaches them class and self respect so they will struggle to lower themselves to do street-scum level deeds.
And this is where humanities, media studies and other totally invented and utterly useless degrees comes in.
These worthless and useless courses are both a filtering process as well a prepping tool. To do well in these sorts of subjects, you need to be able to be mentally and morally ‘flexible’ to believe and say whatever is required to get the best grades. Objective truth and reality is actively discouraged. Any training on the use and interpretation of empirical evidence is focused more on twisting it to suit the required narrative than to try to extract any scientifically valuable insight and understanding.
At the end of their studies, the most suitable get cherry picked for government positions while the rest can ’mature’ some more in growing ever more desperate as student loan debts and lack of career opportunities and a never-ending media diet of influencers flaunting their millionaire lifestyles start to systematically erase their scruples, morals and anything else that might hold them back from being a well-educated sociopath, at which point they finally ready to start their career in propaganda by starting in the media.
China is bad at propaganda because they don’t put their best and brightest through such a crucible of moral eraser. Indeed, the Chinese system focuses on weeding out the sociopaths early and limiting their reach and influence, not produce them on an industrial scale and putting them in the top government and media jobs.
Another big factor is that while the press secretary is one of the most influential people in the White House, with a direct role in deciding how the government respond to issues and sets government policy on key national and international issues, in China, they actually decide policy and approach based purely on what is best for China’s national interest and try to sell that. So of course they are going to have a harder time winning social media points compared to western government policy set from the offset to generate likes instead of benefits for the country and people.
That is why while the west is supposedly ‘winning’ the propaganda war, their people grow ever more disillusioned and dissatisfied with their governments while Chinese people’s lives gets better and their trust and approval of their leaders increase as a result. You decide which approach and outcome you prefer.
