Time, Commitment, and Propaganda
By: Chester Davis
Tags: Propaganda, Science Literacy, Critical Thinking, Social Policy

Photo by noor Younis on Unsplash

How many political issues do you try to keep track of? Think about crime, welfare, education, guns, climate change, drug addiction, and so on. People can choose to invest their time in understanding many, many issues. Some of those people will want to help out by voting for certain politicians, signing some petitions, joining protest marches, and so on.

Most of those people mean well and usually they make sensible choices. But not always. Social problems and their solutions aren’t always easy to understand or define. Sometimes this reality creates openings for politicians, scam artists, and activists to sell ideas that are bad ideas.

How do politicians and activists distort social science and statistics to sell us bad ideas? Well, they have a few strategies at their disposal. This article is about two of them — lack of time and lack of commitment.

A Flurry of Problems and Solutions

How many important causes and issues are there in the United States? It depends on your definition of ‘important’ doesn’t it? There must be 530 things in the United States that are important to one interest group or another. Many things probably come to mind if you stop and think. Probably one or more of these things crossed your mind:

No one has time to think about 530 things and what to do. This is a reality, one that offers an opportunity to slip bad ideas past our critical thinking faculties.

Lack of Time

So, why are those problems worth anyone’s time and attention? How do you evaluate them and decide what deserves your attention? Most of us have regular demands on our time and brainpower, like family, work, shopping, taxes, our side hustle, volunteering for some cause, and et cetera.

How much time can most people spend learning about various social problems? And what about the proposed solutions to those problems? What ideas are good ideas, and how does anyone know? For one thing, you have to invest time in learning the relevant facts and arguments.

Consider these top problems, from a 2019 Pew Research survey. How many of these top problems can you make time to read about in a given week?

The economy

2. Healthcare costs

3. Education

4. Terrorism

5. Social Security

6. Medicare

7. The poor and needy

8. Immigration

9. Environment

10. Jobs

You can learn more about the Pew Survey in question here:

Most people can’t find the time to study the full list of issues even if we don’t work. People logically tend to pick and choose what they pay attention to.

Level of Commitment

Everyday life makes it tough to carve out time to work on more than a few things a year. Well, that’s not entirely true. The more important some issue is to a person, the more likely they are to make time. But, again, most people with real lives can be truly committed to many causes. If you are a racial justice advocate or a gun rights advocate, you might have almost no time left for learning about other things.

No one can have a high level of commitment to social justice, racial reconciliation, sensible gun laws, recycling, climate change adaptation, recycling, teen suicide, sexism in the workplace, date rape, vaping, animal welfare, veganism, littering, freedom of speech, human trafficking, and cyberbullying. Clearly, we all have different interests. Some of those problems will inevitably fall off our radar screens. If we have the desire to learn more, we simply don’t have time. A month later someone likely forgot that they meant to learn more about cyberbullying.

Why are all of these problems, problems anyway? You may

How it Works

Politicians, pundits, and activists can exploit our shortage of time and our low commitment by using various propaganda tactics on people. First, lack of time creates the opportunity to sell an idea that sounds good if you don’t take the time to investigate. Banning “assault rifles” and high-capacity magazines to combat gun violence might work. We have to do something, don’t we? Those two related bans seem workable. You don’t have time to investigate every little thing, so you go along. A pollster asks you if you are in favor of banning so-called “assault weapons” and you say that you are.

Lack of Commitment

Lack of commitment could produce the same result. You have lots of issues that you think about. Gun violence is one of them, but gun violence comes about 14 or 15 on a list of social problems you think about sometimes. Your commitment to reduce gun violence in the nation is there, but just barely. The less emotional and scary a topic is, the more like a person’s level of commitment is low.

Your religion, political ideology, or life experience are going to drive your commitment to certain social problems, both learning about them and studying possible solutions. Before or after this, time is going to put a limit on what you can learn, and do.

Manipulation, Time, and Commitment

It is just possible that someone with an idea to sell or a cause to promote will use your lack of time or your low commitment against you. If you are short on time, you may accept any idea that SEEMS to be logical and backed by numbers. This fact offers an opening for propagandists. They can promote anti-capitalist, pro-feminist, or anti-gun ideas by using your lack of time against you. That ban on “assault rifles” seems to make sense, unless you take the time to investigate. If you had time, you might look up statistics on gun violence, and that might lead you to find out what types of firearms criminals tend to use.

If you are committed to gun rights, you are going to do the work. If not, you probably won’t. This pattern should repeat if the issue is sexual assault, bullying, drug addiction, human trafficking, or any other social problem. If most of the public has a low level of commitment to learning about most social problems, then interest groups and politicians can sell their own biased ideas. All it takes is a veneer of rationality, and maybe some emotional language.

To defend yourself against this kind of trickery, you either need more time, or new tools for thinking about social problems.