Propaganda Disproves Libertarianism and the Enlightenment
I. The Enlightenment’s Delusion
Propaganda doesn’t oppose reason; it reveals that reason was never in charge.
I was raised on a lie. Not a blatant one, but a subtle, elegant illusion passed down as truth: that man is a rational actor. That he surveys the world with clear eyes, processes evidence, weighs arguments, and emerges with a sound opinion of his own. This, I was told, is the foundation of liberty. And liberty, of course, is the crown jewel of the Enlightenment.
Liberalism depends on this premise. Without it, its entire architecture collapses. The market assumes rational buyers. Democracy assumes rational voters. The courts presume rational agents who deserve autonomy and consent. All of it—every bill of rights, every ballot box, every open forum—is built on the fantasy of the self-aware, independent mind.
But no such mind exists. Not at scale. The Enlightenment built its temples on sand, mistaking isolated genius for common nature. It mistook the clarity of a few for the capacity of the many. And now, centuries later, that mistake is no longer innocent. It is a fraud.
Propaganda is the acid that reveals the false metal. When exposed to real influence—systematic, persistent, seductive—man does not emerge as a calculating thinker. He folds. He absorbs. He repeats. Not always, but reliably. And this collapse is not a bug. It is the default.
If reason were sovereign, propaganda would not work. But it does. It works so well that entire empires now rise and fall on its back. It works so well that truth no longer stands a chance without it.
II. The Rational Actor Never Existed
The myth of the rational actor dies the moment you ask him to explain himself.
Behavioral economists have known for decades what philosophers refused to admit: man is not a rational actor. He is a narrative sponge, an emotional mimic, a tribal creature shaped more by belonging than by logic. The Enlightenment painted him as a sovereign individual. In truth, he is a house with no doors—every window open to suggestion.
People rarely act from evidence. They act from fear, imitation, resentment, desire. Their opinions are not crafted—they are adopted. Watch a man speak with conviction and then ask yourself: where did his convictions come from? Trace them. You will find not books, not contemplation, but signals. Popularity. Media. Family. Fear of isolation.
Even memory fails the Enlightenment test. Study after study shows that recollection is fragile, emotional, and suggestible. Witnesses change stories. Consumers ignore data. Voters misremember facts to fit their party's line. And when confronted with contradiction, they double down, not reconsider.
The rational actor is a legal fiction, like the “reasonable man” in tort law. He exists only in textbooks and speeches. But in the real world, people are programmable. Not all, not always, but predictably. And if that is true, then liberalism cannot deliver what it promises.
Freedom presumes that people are capable of directing themselves. But if their thoughts are not their own—if their desires are installed—then freedom becomes theater. The real power belongs to those who control the inputs, not those who react to them.
III. Propaganda: The Art of Manufactured Consent
Propaganda doesn’t lie—it frames, repeats, and saturates until truth dissolves.
Propaganda is no longer posters and parades. It is not a blunt tool wielded by dictators in smoky rooms. It is ambient. Omnipresent. Invisible by design. It flows through newsfeeds, search engines, films, classrooms. It operates not by censorship alone, but by saturation—repeating a narrative until the silence around it feels like proof.
It is not about lies. It is about framing. The propagandist does not need to invent facts. He only needs to curate them. To arrange them. To wrap them in emotion. To give the audience a feeling of insight while actually stripping them of context. Propaganda is not a falsehood—it is a lens. And once you see through it, you cannot see anything else.
Consent, in this system, is manufactured. You believe because you were trained to. You agree because every voice around you agrees. And when a contrary view slips through, it feels alien, even dangerous. Not because it is false, but because it violates the emotional symmetry that propaganda has cultivated.
The Enlightenment imagined that truth would emerge from debate. But propaganda does not debate. It swarms. It repeats. It makes the truth irrelevant by making it unfashionable. By the time someone asks “Is this true?”, they’ve already been trained to recoil from the question.
And so, reason dies—not with a bullet, but with applause. Not because it was defeated, but because no one knew what it sounded like anymore.
IV. Mass Opinion Is Assigned, Not Chosen
The masses do not form opinions—they are issued them.
Ask the average person why they believe what they believe, and you will not receive a reason. You will receive a slogan. A fragment. A mood. Something memorized, not considered. Something received, not earned. This is the mark of the assigned opinion.
In theory, opinion is supposed to emerge from experience and dialogue. In reality, it is downloaded. Pre-formed takes, wrapped in moral language, delivered through endless repetition. You are not told what to think. That would be too obvious. You are taught how to feel, and then the thought arrives naturally. As if it were your own.
This is not persuasion. It is implantation. The propagandist does not need your conscious mind. He only needs your attention. Let the algorithm serve the same outrage ten times, and you will believe it. Not because it convinced you, but because it colonized your frame of reference. Once implanted, the opinion becomes armor. You will defend it, even when it no longer serves you.
This is how entire societies can adopt the same errors, cheer for the same lies, and punish the same heresies. The opinion does not spread. It is assigned. Disseminated like a software update. Delivered through comedy, headlines, hashtags. Accepted through fatigue, not reflection.
The Enlightenment man chooses his path. The modern man receives his script.
V. The Lie of Free Speech
The truth cannot compete with an algorithm optimized for outrage.
Liberalism promises that free speech will protect the truth. That in the open marketplace of ideas, the best argument wins. But what if the marketplace has been rigged? What if the loudest voices are funded? What if attention itself is engineered?
Speech, untethered from metaphysical truth, becomes chaos. It becomes noise, parody, manipulation. It becomes a flood of unmoored language—words without weight, arguments without stakes. The Enlightenment declared that more speech leads to more clarity. But in practice, more speech drowns meaning. It creates an arms race of impressions. A storm of language that overwhelms the ordinary man.
Worse, it allows the powerful to hide behind the illusion of openness. “See?” they say, “You’re free to speak.” But that speech is buried, ignored, demonetized, ridiculed. No one listens. And those who do are punished for it.
Free speech, in this regime, does not level the field. It gives cover to propaganda. It allows manipulators to flood the zone with trash while claiming neutrality. It hands the megaphone to the algorithm and the PR firm and calls it democracy.
Truth does not survive this storm. It gasps, flails, and finally retreats to the margins—where the honest voices go to be mocked.
VI. The Voter Is a Vassal
The voter picks between options he was trained to prefer.
The voter believes he is making a choice. But in truth, he is selecting between narratives pre-approved by those who shaped his worldview. He is not free. He is filtered. Conditioned. Given a ballot filled with illusions and told he is sovereign.
This is not agency. This is ritual. A ceremony of consent to decisions made elsewhere. Elections are no longer the expression of the public will. They are the performance of legitimacy. The public’s task is not to decide, but to affirm.
The Enlightenment pictured democracy as a rational body—millions of minds, weighing and judging together. But this body has been poisoned. Each mind filled with branded thoughts. Each judgment made under influence.
The voter does not know the candidate. He knows the image. He does not weigh the policy. He reacts to the slogan. And his reaction was anticipated, modeled, targeted weeks in advance. His agency is gone. Not because someone took it from him, but because no one told him how to defend it.
He is a vassal. A subject dressed in the costume of a citizen.
VII. Who Benefits from the Myth?
The more convinced you are that you think for yourself, the easier you are to manage.
The myth of the rational individual does not survive because it is true. It survives because it serves power. It allows the manipulators to operate unchallenged. If everyone believes they are thinking for themselves, then no one questions the source of their thoughts.
Media conglomerates, tech platforms, political consultants, intelligence agencies—these are the new priesthood. They do not govern by force. They govern by shaping perception. They do not declare war. They declare consensus.
They benefit most from a public that believes itself free while acting in pre-programmed ways. The consumer who buys out of suggestion. The voter who chooses from the script. The activist who repeats the party line. These are not threats. These are assets.
Liberalism pretends to empower the individual. In reality, it atomizes him—disconnects him from tradition, religion, family, and truth—then sells him to the highest bidder. It breaks his soul and offers him rights in return. It tells him he is free, so long as he obeys.
This is not liberty. It is the perfect system for managing a herd that thinks it’s wild.
VIII. Beyond the Enlightenment: Toward the Real
Post-liberalism begins with the admission that man is shaped, not sovereign.
The Enlightenment failed. Not because its dreams were evil, but because they were wrong. Man is not a floating brain, insulated from influence. He is porous, social, vulnerable. His opinions are shaped. His actions are guided. And when that shaping is left to market forces, or worse, to malicious actors, he becomes prey.
The answer is not more liberty. It is better formation. We must return to truth—not as a preference, but as a foundation. We must raise people not to believe they are immune to influence, but to discern it. Not to idolize choice, but to recognize what is worth choosing.
Propaganda proves that man is not rational. That he is not autonomous. That the Enlightenment project was based on fantasy. But that does not mean despair. It means clarity. It means we build new systems—not to flatter man’s ego, but to guide his soul.
The Enlightenment wanted freedom. What we need is formation. Not more speech, but more truth. Not more choice, but more wisdom. Not the illusion of sovereignty, but the reality of guidance.
The myth has collapsed. Let it burn.