Propaganda is ubiquitous, and everyone uses propaganda. It's a kind of communication that makes a case for a goal, bypassing reason. Propaganda is a method to urge you to mobilize towards something while concealing from you things that you reasonably should think, should consider.

The word propaganda by itself is neither good nor bad because we talk of abolitionist propaganda. We talk about the propaganda that people use in social movements. Martin Luther King Jr. talked about the need for propaganda because you need to get people to reconsider their racist assumptions. The goal of propaganda is to connect neutral words to other things.

Propaganda will always be here. Our words always have these associations, any word I have. The goal is to have lots of different ways of living and lots of different ways of thinking and to recognize that we're not a threat to each other.

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About Jason Stanley:

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Before coming to Yale in 2013, he was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. Stanley is the author of Know How; Languages in Context; Knowledge and Practical Interests, which won the American Philosophical Association book prize; and How Propaganda Works, which won the PROSE Award for Philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. He writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, free speech, mass incarceration, and other topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Review, The Guardian, Project Syndicate and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications.

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