As the success of socialism, fascism or any other coercive ideology requires the use of propaganda, every adherent is so only due to heavy exposure to that propaganda. Sometimes this is voluntary and with that I have no quarrel. More often though, including in democracies, the exposure is often coerced, and what better way to thoroughly coerce exposure to propaganda without hundreds of millions of targets being aware, than compulsory attendance in government schools for every individual from ages 6 through 17, generation after generation. To draw contrast, it is unnecessary to use the word “libertarianism” or even “individualism” in fact, I believe it’s a mistake. Whatever the “ism” du jour may be, it will become yet another poorly understood ideology adding to the noise. The contrast I would like to draw is between propaganda and education.
The long-term peaceful prosperity of a social people requires education. This is because for any individual, education is required to know one has rights, to understand what those rights are, to ponder why they are there, to understand they derive from no temporal authority, to understand no such authority cannot rescind but only violate them, and to know everyone they have ever met, will ever meet, or will never meet, possess each one of those same rights, no more and no less. This knowledge, the willingness to pass it on, and defend it is the best weapon available against coercive authority whether from the left or the right, imposed by minority or majority.
Education, regardless of source, subject, or venue occurs when a mind is free to do two things, to acquire any available knowledge (that is not another individual’s private business), and to enquire, to ask “why?” regarding any aspect of that knowledge, even or perhaps especially if no satisfactory answer is produced. This process must necessarily include individual, free expression of both knowledge and enquiry for a variety of reasons, the most basic being the following: In the face of coerced exposure to propaganda, one who might believe they can see through the lies and remain unaffected, might also believe this lie: “Not everyone is capable of understanding the reality of things as they are, and misinterpretation of certain knowledge by too many people would be a threat to our societal stability.” As a result, they declare propaganda to be a “public good” or “a necessary evil.” The same person might also content themselves with, “At least they can’t control my thoughts. I know better. My thoughts are my own. I am not affected.” To some degree this might even be true but to what degree? Author and educator, John Taylor Gatto once said, “I arrive at abstraction by arguing with myself through writing…I don’t really know what I…believe until I argue with what I think I believe.” In other words, whatever the process, ideas can only be thoroughly explored through the interaction between thought and expression. Whenever expression, in whatever form, venturing outside official boundaries becomes at all dangerous to the individual, there is precious little education but abundant indoctrination, it is that simple.
Therefore, since effective propaganda requires an exclusivity of message called censorship, a self-serving authority, democratic or totalitarian, that promotes certain expression and suppresses others, does necessarily control an individual’s thoughts by simple truncation if nothing else. Acceptance of this truncation (in recent years often called “dumbing down”), as status quo is unsustainable and will eventually underpin a society’s undoing whatever historians deem the ultimate causes to have been.