Manufacturing Militarism: A Fresh Look at Propaganda
2022-01-03 · Guest: Abigail Hall (Associate Professor of Economics at Bellarmine University) · 52:28
US government propaganda and manufacturing militarism
Bob Zadek interviews economist Abigail Hall about her book, Manufacturing Militarism, which explores how the U.S. government uses propaganda to shape public opinion on foreign policy. They discuss the definitions of militarism and propaganda, the dangers of the “noble lie,” and how these practices undermine the foundations of a free society.
Topics: Propaganda, Militarism, War on Terror, Noble Lie, Foreign Policy, Department of Defense Speakers: Bob Zadek (Host), Abigail Hall (Guest)
The Ethics of the Noble Lie [00:00]
Bob Zadek: You’re listening to the Bob Zadek Show, a full hour of libertarian discussion for the smartest guests on radio. Live, spontaneous, and thoughtful. It’s the show of ideas, not attitude. Now, your host, Bob Zadek.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Every Sunday morning we—we are here with ideas, never once attitude. We are the show of ideas. We don’t encourage attitude one tiny bit. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
I’d like to open today’s show with a provocative question that occurred to me as I learned from this morning’s guest, whom I will introduce in a moment, as I learned from her writings. The question is—the provocative question, which will be lurking in the background for the next hour, is—and my friends, it is a hard question, at least it is to me: Is it ever acceptable? Is it ever appropriate for our government to lie to us?
More specifically, if government perceives that and concludes with a very high level of confidence that it is correct that a course of conduct which government must undertake is essential for the continued well-being of the country—think of Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and the like—assuming that government has concluded we must attack Iraq; assuming government concludes that there is not likely to be the groundswell of support for that that is essential for the mission to succeed; government just says the country will never be behind us, irrespective of how we recite the facts. Therefore, in order to get the country behind us so that we can succeed in our mission, we must lie to them. We must manipulate the country. We must withhold facts and state facts that are not really true in order to get the country behind us so that we can succeed in this mission.
With that introduction, I’m delighted and honored to welcome to the show this morning Abigail Hall. Abby is an associate professor of economics. Her scholarship is in economics, not in politics. That will become important to us during the hour. She is an associate professor of economics at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is an affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason. She’s also a scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education, AKA FEE. She’s also a senior fellow at the Pegasus Institute in Louisville, and also a research fellow with the Independent Institute, one of my very favorite think tanks located in Oakland, California. Abby holds her PhD in economics from GMU. The book which we will spend the next hour discussing and learning from is her recent book, which she has co-authored with Christopher Coyne, is Manufacturing Militarism, subtitled U.S. Government Propaganda. There’s a loaded word.
Abigail Hall: Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Defining Militarism and Propaganda [05:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, Abby, the book title, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror. Let’s start with the following multipart but not complex question. Who is the manufacturer of the militarism? What is militarism as you use it in the book? And what is propaganda as used in the subtitle?
Abigail Hall: So, a few different things to latch onto there. So when we talk about militarism, what we’re referring to is this tendency toward and this putting the military or putting the structure of the military up on a pedestal. And for a lot of individuals, for a lot of agencies, this tendency to try to move toward this military structure—I mean, really, in a lot of cases, placing the military beyond reproach and adopting progressively more military or militaristic characteristics over time. So, recognizing that that is a relatively broad definition or not necessarily one that’s particularly clear.
And what do we mean by propaganda? Once again, in terms of defining definitions, there are lots of people who can have, and I am sure will, quibble with us on the definition that we employ. But propaganda almost universally in a contemporary context has a negative connotation. And so we adopt that as well. But for our purposes, propaganda has to satisfy three criteria. So first, it is purposefully biased, misleading, or false information. Second, it is used to promote some sort of political cause. And third, it’s bad from the perspective of the recipient because it inhibits them from engaging in rational decision making. So that’s the definition that we employ. And then we take this definition and we develop a framework for understanding propaganda within the context of democracy.
Bob Zadek: And your book draws attention to the many ways in which government, or those militaristic segments of government, have used misleading statements, perhaps outright misstatements—propaganda as you have defined it—have used propaganda to promote militarism. And you are in the book—I think this is a fair summary; if not, please correct me—that government has been using propaganda, which is a negative word, obviously, misleading, misstating, of being untruthful, using propaganda to promote militarism.
Now, one of the questions I had, Abby, in learning from the book is you are hoping to draw the public’s attention to these bad behavior, this promoting propaganda for a militaristic end. Would you be writing this book? Would you be complaining if, for example, government—a different government than we have, to be sure—government used propaganda to promote the disarming of the world, to discourage military force? If government was using propaganda, your definition, to promote free markets, limited government, federalism, is it the use of propaganda per se that you object to, or the use of propaganda to promote militarism? Is propaganda ever something you could support if propaganda was in furtherance of ends you support?
Abigail Hall: So propaganda in and of itself is a tool to be despised, and propaganda used to promote the types of ends that it has been used to promote is particularly nefarious. So, in thinking about the question you just asked, and then also thinking about the question that you opened with up at the top of the hour, this idea of, “Well, what if propaganda is being used to promote some kind of quote-unquote good end, however we want to define good?” or what is oftentimes referred to as the idea of a noble lie or noble deception.
So we can think about this within a number of contexts. I think there’s a quote in the book that we look to pointing out that, look, there may be different people who can handle different types of information. So I’m not going to explain something to my toddler in the same way that I’d explain it to my college students, and I would tell different information to say, maybe my colleagues or something like that. And so the argument would go that in a similar way, sometimes maybe government needs to lie to its citizens in order to achieve particular ends.
But there’s a problem. Actually, there are three problems with thinking about propaganda in this way. The first problem is that there’s absolutely no reason for us to believe that the incentives exist so that individuals within government will consistently promote these good or noble outcomes over time. In fact, one of the things that we point out over and over again in the book is that there’s actually the complete opposite incentive for people within, particularly this security state, to try to protect this monopoly control that they have over information. And so essentially by granting officials the opportunity or empowering them to try to achieve these noble ends, we also simultaneously empower them to achieve these ignoble ends. But there’s absolutely no reason for us to believe that that is actually the case.
But what we have now is a scenario where citizens are effectively unable to—they’re prevented from getting the necessary information that they need to be able to make an informed opinion or an informed decision. And then the last reason that this is particularly problematic is because it actually fundamentally neglects the damage that propaganda does to the foundations of a free society. So mentioning the idea of, “Would you be talking about propaganda if it was being used to promote liberal causes?” But propaganda is fundamentally illiberal. Its entire purpose is to cloud or to obfuscate reality. And so those types of behaviors, whether they are done benevolently or they’re done malevolently, ultimately work to undermine those foundations of a free society that we’re purporting to want to promote.
Bob Zadek: Now, rather than continue the conversation in the abstract, your book is so valuable in giving the tangible examples—of course Iraq. You mentioned the story of Pat Tillman, which we might get into during this hour.
The TSA and the Framework of Propaganda [13:34]
Bob Zadek: So pick any one of the examples in your book and use that as, if you will, the poster child—as the example, as the clearest example of the government using propaganda as defined earlier in the show—using propaganda to promote militarism and to, um, subtly manipulate the American public.
Abigail Hall: Okay, so it might be helpful for me to put the chapters in context, and then I’ll definitely go into a case study in, in more detail. So what we do in the book is we produce this, or we present this idea of propaganda, we define it, and then we have a framework for understanding propaganda within democracy—in particular, understanding propaganda within the context of a democratic society and a democratic system, and the how some of the features of a democratic society may actually make us as a member of, or as members of, a democratic society particularly susceptible to propaganda.
So we take that framework and then we apply it to a number of case studies within the post-9/11 context. Some of those chapters are looking at propaganda as a means to foster a particular policy choice. So namely, like the war in Iraq, for example, we dedicate two chapters to that: so the pre-invasion and then the post-invasion. But then we also dedicate several chapters to looking at this fostering of a broader culture of militarism as a result of propaganda. And so with that, uh, we look at things like the use of paid patriotism, so related to propaganda and sport. And you mentioned Pat Tillman, which is included in that chapter. We also look at the use of propaganda in film. And then we also look at the use of propaganda in terms of the Transportation Security Administration, or the TSA.
So that’s, that’s the example that I’ll hone in on in more detail. So when we think about flying, um, assuming we’re flying—as I tell my students now, like in the “before time” before the pandemic where people got on planes—so if you think about flying now, imagine what happens. So let’s say that you’re in New York, you get on the subway, the MTA is blasting you, “See something, say something” over the speaker. You get to the airport, you arrive, it’s the same thing, and then here’s the TSA. What you are receiving over and over and over again is this consistent message that flying is unsafe, terrorism is a real and salient threat, and it is necessary for not only citizens to be hyper-vigilant, but for the TSA to be there to search your person, to search your property, um, sometimes multiple times in order to keep you safe. So that’s the message: that you’re unsafe and government is the solution to the problem.
So when we take a look at what is being put out to the American public versus the reality, we start to see something very, very different. So within this chapter, we build on the work of a number of different individuals, particularly the work of John Mueller at Ohio State University and the Cato Institute, who’s done some remarkable work, particularly along, uh, with his, uh, co-author Mark Stewart, looking at the relative risk of things like terrorism. And what they find is that the risk of terrorism to someone in the United States is remarkably low. What do I mean by remarkably low? You’re more likely to be killed by a dog or by bees, snakes, than you are to be killed in an act of terrorism. This is true even within the context of 9/11. In fact, you could repeat 9/11 over and over and over again for like several years, and it would still not even register on the top 10, like number of, uh, or top 10 in terms of causes of death for the US public.
So we walk through that, and then after that, what we do is we discuss the incidents, the incidents that have occurred post-9/11. So think like the “underwear bomber,” think the “shoe bomber.” There are a few instances that we can look at in detail as being thought of as having, quote-unquote, “targeted” or had to do with an airport or an airline. So we walk through each of those, we talk about the security measures that are implemented after that. So think things like the body scanners. Think things like taking off your shoes if you don’t have TSA PreCheck, like every time you have to scan your shoes before you go through. So we talk about the incidents that inspired those. And then again, we talk about whether or not the policies that have been put in place are actually effective or not. We spend a good amount of time talking about the body scanners. We also spend a decent amount of time talking about the Federal Air Marshals program, and we see the same type of thing over and over and over again, that the reality of the actual threat is remarkably small. In some cases, not really statistically different from zero. But the language that is being used or the message that is being sent is one that you are not safe, uh, your families are not safe, and government and its agents and its policies are necessary in order to protect you.
Bob Zadek: Is, uh, is the the mere existence of the security theater, aka TSA—is its creation and existence, is that in and of itself propaganda?
Abigail Hall: So, in terms of “is its very existence propaganda,” I don’t think that you could say maybe that security is all security theater, or that it’s all necessarily bad. Um, I mean, we had security at airports prior to the Transportation Security Administration. Um, and in fact, the data suggests that that, uh, pre-2000 security actually performed better than our contemporary TSA. I don’t think that the, that necessarily the existence of something like the TSA is in and of itself propaganda, but in its current incarnation, I would say that it is absolutely, uh, an agency that is largely predicated on a propagandist message.
Bob Zadek: So you wouldn’t go so far as to say TSA itself is an example of propaganda, but rather it does cause as government’s reminder of something which probably isn’t even true, which is: you are in great danger, and thank heaven we have, uh, a benevolent government to protect us.
Hollywood and the Department of Defense [19:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, you mentioned the book is wonderful in explaining all of the tools—kind of scary but fascinating—that government has always used in order to promote its governmental point of view. And of course, you mention and you do a wonderful job discussing the government’s relationship to the motion picture industry. It was fascinating. Summarize that strange relationship between government and movie making. And Abby, when you do, I’ll just mention that about five years ago, I just stumbled upon a wonderful documentary called, I think it was something like Five Came Back. And it was about five movie directors—Capra, um, and four others, um, who went about, who visited, who spent the time overseas during World War II filming the Army’s and the armed forces’ activities. It was a wonderful documentary. Uh, but, but tell us that relationship, because it is so important in our everyday lives. When we go to the theater, we don’t realize that we are being indoctrinated by our government in a way that we are not, uh, that hasn’t been explained to us to help us understand that very strange symbiotic relationship between the motion picture industry and the federal government.
Abigail Hall: So this chapter was probably one of my favorite chapters to research, um, but it was also one of the chapters where I found myself just consistently getting very angry, um, because I had no idea that the relationship that I’m about to tell you about was one that existed, um, and has existed for so long. So I’ll start maybe with, with an example and then talk a bit more about what it is that we cover in the chapter in more detail.
So, um, really well-known children’s program—my guess would be that probably a lot of listeners maybe watched this at some point, either themselves or maybe with their kids—Lassie, right? So we all know Lassie and Timmy, and Lassie’s always there to save the day. There was an episode of Lassie, where the, uh, our canine heroine, um, was going to be solving a mystery regarding a military aircraft. Um, the military aircraft was supposed to crash. And Lassie, through her work, was going to figure out that a design flaw in this military aircraft had, uh, caused, caused this plane to crash. Um, however, this script of Lassie was sent to the powers that be at the DOD because they were requesting support for, for the show. And in response to sending in this script, the folks at the DOD said, “We don’t like this.” They didn’t like the way that it was being portrayed, that there was a design flaw in one of their aircraft. And so they insisted on having the script changed or wouldn’t offer their support unless the script was changed. And so instead of the plane being brought down by a design flaw, instead it was uncontrollable icing on the wing of the aircraft. So it completely changed the storyline. But this is the storyline that ran. So it wasn’t anything that the military had done; it was something that was beyond their control.
Hollywood and the Department of Defense [25:04]
Abigail Hall: So this dynamic of sending scripts to the Department of Defense for commentary and then changing scripts to reflect the DoD’s preferences is something that not only happens, but if you want to make a film today in the United States that has any kind of military hardware involved, basically, if you want to be profitable, you’re going to essentially need the DoD’s support.
So if we start looking back at the relationship between the Department of Defense and Hollywood, we have to go back really, really far. In fact, the film The Birth of a Nation—so 1915, if that film is ringing a bell—is because it’s now an infamous film which portrays the Ku Klux Klan, or the KKK, as this crime-fighting group of heroes. But what you might not know about that movie is that it was only made possible through the use of equipment and cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point. So starting from there, you start to see this relationship develop between Hollywood and the Department of Defense.
We see through the war, World War I, particularly World War II, you see this intense cooperation. There is a guide that comes out suggesting how it is that Hollywood film studios portray different aspects of the war. For instance, talking about portraying people who don’t follow the government’s guidelines in terms of things like rationing as being the equivalent of the enemy; same thing for people who engaged in black market transactions—that they were basically against the war effort.
And then you move into the Cold War period where these relationships that have already been established continue to solidify. So now what you have—and I’m glossing over quite a bit of detail here, but folks can get the idea—what you have now is this relationship where if I am making a movie, and let’s say that I want to have military aircraft, or I want to have a tank or something like that, I can get that equipment from the U.S. military, sometimes without having to pay for it, but I have to submit my script to them and ask them if it’s okay. And they can then make suggestions about what they like and what they don’t like.
And so you will see things like entire plot lines being changed. So the Lassie example at the beginning, entire characters being changed or scrubbed, including sometimes eliminating elements which are an absolute matter of historical fact, but don’t make the military look good. So this is taking place in a variety of things that people have probably seen. So children’s programming—so Lassie is just but one example. Everything from cooking shows—so if you’ve watched, as my husband and I have quite frequently, things like Gordon Ramsay and his cooking shows, they’ve been subjected to this process or have engaged in this process. If you’ve seen the Transformers movies, they feature a cornucopia of military hardware, and they have also been through this process.
Unless we think that this is something where films that are critical of the U.S. military still get through—the person who’s now since retired, but we talk about in quite a bit of detail, excuse me, in the book, is Phil Strubb, and he’s on record as saying that he won’t offer his support to films or other projects that are critical of the military. So, in putting a bow on this or thinking about what this means from the perspective of someone who is taking in this type of entertainment, you don’t get any kind of thoughtful or critical messages about the U.S. military or U.S. foreign policy, or it makes it exponentially more difficult to make those kinds of thoughtful projects. But oftentimes—and not only that, but oftentimes, or I would say probably most of the time—when people are sitting in films or people are watching TV, you’re not paying any attention to the tiny little credits at the back. Assuming that the DoD is mentioned or thanked, you’re not paying attention. And so ultimately people don’t know that this is happening, and it’s a big part of the media that they’re consuming.
Private Interests vs. Government Propaganda [31:12]
Bob Zadek: Now, a couple of thoughts come to mind. Let us imagine that a Hollywood project has as its plot line something involving a Boeing aircraft. Many movies have his aircraft as a central feature. So this project involves a Boeing aircraft, and they would love to have access to the inner workings of Boeing—the factory, the head office, whatever—for the purpose of enhancing the quality of the movie. And they approach Boeing, and Boeing says, “Well, sure, we will give you lots of valuable access, which is worth money to you, the producers of the movie. In exchange, we want to take a glance at the script. We don’t want to be harming our company.”
And Boeing does that and makes requests and says, “Okay, we’re going to jiggle with the script a little bit so we come out looking a little bit better.” And the producers of the movie make a crass economic judgment. The compromise in the quality of the storyline is worth X dollars. The value of what Boeing is giving us is worth much more than that. Therefore, as a pure dollars-and-cents—no lofty principles involved—as dollars and cents, the producers say it’s worth it. And they do it. They’re behaving in their economic self-interest, as are the producers.
So why, if I’m right about my assumption, why is the behavior of Boeing—if it is, I’m not suggesting you have to reach my conclusion—why is the behavior of Boeing benign, simply economic? It’s a business decision. And yet the behavior of the government offends you and prompts the use of the word “propaganda.” Help us understand the principle that causes you to reach two different conclusions. Because that principle is important in the storyline of your book.
Abigail Hall: Yeah, so I would say that a couple of things there are important to note. So the incentives facing the DoD are clear. I mean, if anybody wants to write a movie about me, it would be a box office flop because I’m really boring. But if somebody came to me and they’re like, “Hey,” I’d be like, “Well, you know, I’d lend you my support, but I don’t want to look terrible in your movie.” That’s understandable. It’s also completely understandable from the perspective of the producers of the film, because you’re right, at the end of the day, they’re in this game to make money. And so if getting military aircraft is essential to making their movie marketable and profitable, then they have an incentive to acquiesce to what it is that the DoD is wanting to do.
I think the primary difference between what you’re talking about with respect to your example with Boeing and the U.S. military is that the private company in question is not the group that is attempting to or executing U.S. foreign policy. And so one of the things that is really important here to think about is this distinction or these different groups that are relevant for us to discuss.
There are some people, by the way, who would say that that example that you just laid out is an example of propaganda. So one thing that is important, and we do note in the book, is that our definition is one that people may not agree with, but we also don’t deny that propaganda might not exist in other contexts. There are people who argue, for example, that all advertising is propaganda. And I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful definition because it explains everything and nothing at the same time. But there are people who do make that argument. We don’t deny that that is the case, that propaganda can come from other areas, but we limit our focus to looking at government propaganda.
Bob Zadek: Government, from your book, has a different relationship with its audience than does the rest of society—business and the like, and unions, etc. So government has a different relationship, inherently different, because government is, of course, as we often say, the only institution that is allowed, if not encouraged, to kill people. Other elements besides other than government do not have that privilege or that exemption.
Now, so the government has information, as you mentioned on the show, and you also mentioned with great emphasis in your book, the government often has exclusive access to information. And that information affects public opinion and therefore affects the vote, and therefore—applying what you do in your book, and as an economist, you apply all the time—is what’s called public choice theory, which is governmental actors behave in their own self-interest just like non-governmental actors. Of course, I’m simplifying.
But the question is, so now you have government about to make a decision. Let’s take, because it’s still in everybody’s memory, I believe, the issue of WMD. Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? And if they do, what should be done about it? That was a broad question, which we were discussing a couple of decades ago to justify governmental behavior.
Asymmetric Information and the Security State [36:50]
Bob Zadek: Now, is the duty of government—government has information, imperfect, imprecise; it believes one set of information, but there is somewhat persuasive information the other way. Is the duty of government, if government were to follow the, uh, encouragement in your book and the message in your book—government believes the weapons exist and military action is called for. Assuming that in doing so, government strongly believes the public better be behind military action. The good faith belief that military action is required. Should government take the chance that the public will not be behind that action, and they will be through the political process, uh, discouraged from taking action that they believe in performing the job they were elected or hired to do? They have to behave in a way different than they believe is in the best interest because the public didn’t support them. Is the government’s job to present balanced information or to try to make their case as if they are the prosecutor trying to persuade a jury that the defendant is guilty?
Abigail Hall: So let me, let me pull that back a little bit, um, because you mentioned the framework; you mentioned that we draw very heavily on public choice. And so what I’d like to do, and um, to get to the answer to that question, is to talk a little bit more about the framework that we develop and particularly what we’re responding to within the literature.
So when people talk about—and when I say people, I’m meaning within, like, academic discourse, um, but also too within broad public discourse, because this is how a lot of people genuinely picture the functioning of democratic government—so in an ideal democratic government, you have different groups, as you mentioned. So we can think about voters, elected officials, we can also think about, uh, bureaucracies or bureaucratic agents, a variety of special interest groups and so on. When we characterize, when we think about democratic engagement, there’s this presumption that information is what’s referred to as symmetric. So officials have information, voters know that these officials have this information, and they know that we know. So everybody’s on the same page in terms of who has what information, and everybody knows that this information is possessed by the other party.
The other things that we assume are that there are appropriate mechanisms in place to reward good behavior and to punish bad behavior or deviations from what it is that the relevant group wants. So, for example, we think about the voting booth as being a disciplinary tool so that voters can reward politicians for doing what it is that they want, but then also punish politicians for not doing what they want. So we can vote people out of office. There are presumed to be similar mechanisms in other relationships as well. So we think about this often within the context of politicians or elected officials being able to effectively discipline bureaucrats or government bureaus.
But the reality of the situation is that information is not symmetric. And in fact, these disciplinary mechanisms may be weak or may not actually work very well at all. So voting actually may be a relatively weak check. There are a variety of different reasons why politicians may not be able to effectively discipline bureaucrats if they don’t behave particularly well. So you have what are called overlapping—these asymmetric information problems. So as opposed to everybody knowing this information, it’s really lopsided.
You add on to that, within the context of defense and national security, this layer of secrecy. So you mentioned security classification, which is something that we go into in more detail in the book, talking about that system, its original intention, and then what it is now. So essentially, World War II, you have this change where now it’s much, much easier to classify information. And so things which we’d have a really difficult time making the argument that they are actually sensitive pieces of information wind up being classified.
So you now wind up with a scenario where government effectively has this monopoly control over this information; they are able to prevent the citizenry from obtaining that information or they are purposefully obfuscating it. So maybe they do release information, but they only release a piece of it, or they only release it so many years post, and then they can say, “Oh, well, that deck—that data is a decade old. So it’s better now.” And we have examples of this throughout the book. We see stuff like that all the time.
And so taking this then to your question, particularly to the case of Iraq: If we are wanting to function within a democratic system, the information is prevented. And the job of the government is to do what it is that is in the best interest of the citizens, but the citizens know what is in their best interest. And so we talk about the case of Iraq, for instance, and you mention like the weapons of mass destruction. I mentioned earlier that we actually apply to, or we offer, two different discussions of the war in Iraq, so pre-war and post-invasion. And in that first chapter, we discuss the primary arguments that were used for invading Iraq. So discussions about Saddam Hussein having close ties to terrorist organizations, particularly Al Qaeda, which on its face is just absurd because he was a secularist. And so the idea that he was in cahoots with this group was just, um, kind of boggles, if you think about it.
Um, that was known at the time, by the way. One of the things that’s important throughout this whole exercise is that we present the information as was known at that period of time, um, not looking at it 20 years post. Um, but particularly in talking about things like aluminum tubes and weapons of mass destruction, within the security state, there was this large pushback. Um, this discussion that there is no evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction prior to the US invasion of Iraq. Um, we spent some time talking about maybe what the incentives were facing some of the actors who are responsible for or interested in making that particular decision.
Um, and so in terms of thinking things like, uh, a good faith effort—because the example people would flip back on me and say, “Well, assume that it’s, you know, people are genuine and that they thought he had weapons of mass destruction, does that make a difference?” We provide the information, and if that information turns out to be correct, and you do the right thing—you being the elected official—you’re rewarded for that. And if you don’t, then you’re punished. But what the obfuscation does or what the propaganda does is effectively prevents that information from being shared in the first place and then prevents people from making informed decisions.
Rational Ignorance and the Uninformed Electorate [42:10]
Bob Zadek: Um, the—and I agree with the premise of the book, so I’m not challenging it in any way. Uh, I agree with the conclusions, the premise. Um, but the problem I have is, um, it puts an awful lot of faith in the collective judgment of the voters. And as you have mentioned in the books, and as you know, as of course, and as you teach, uh, in economics, that, uh, voters have, uh, make a rational decision that it makes no sense for them to spend countless hours pouring over, uh, foreign policy papers in order to figure out the right foreign policy, which means in part militaristic decisions. After all, I hired guys, I voted guys into office or gals, I hired people into office to do that for me. I outsource that decision making so I can go play golf.
Um, so, uh, so the government having been hired to do the best it can, it says, “Okay, we are hired to do the best we can. We have to—we believe in good faith, not for self-interest, but there’s always self-interest, public choice—but we believe the national interest, our job requires us to invade Iraq. And if we attempt to educate the public, we will fail. We will lose their attention span. So we have to, because we are just trying to do the job we are elected to do, to do the best we can. The best we can is to invade Iraq. And the way to get the public behind us is to propagandize.”
For it to be wrong to propagandize would be to undo that they are hired to do their job, and the voter says collectively, “Don’t get us involved at that level.” I—I get worried about giving too much power, if you will, to the voters who have—who make collectively, including me, a rational decision not to wallow in foreign policy matters and just to have others who I have hired do the job. So I worry about giving too much power to an uninformed electorate. Um, that’s where I crash into my own support of your position.
Now we have only a—I’m raising what may be a semester’s worth of conversation in and needing about, uh, a 45-second response. And for that, I apologize, but I warned you in advance. I’m hooked on your book, and therefore it’s hard for me to stop talking about it.
The Citizenry and Noble Deception [49:04]
Bob Zadek: But if you can give us a really brief response to that, uh, would sure appreciate it.
Abigail Hall: Okay, I’ll do my best. So in terms of talking about the idea of rational ignorance of voters, if people are interested in a really nice, concise, readable book on that issue, I cannot suggest highly enough Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Bob Zadek: Bryan was on my show to talk about that book. Thank you. Well done.
Abigail Hall: They can look at—they can listen to the show and they can get the book and they can get a nice idea of what we’re talking about there in more detail. I would go a couple of directions here. So the first thing is that in terms of “we, being the government, need to propagandize in order to convince the citizenry because it’s in their best interest and we’re just trying to do our job”—I’d refer again to the discussion that we engage with earlier in the book, again about that idea of noble deception. Not only what we already discussed in terms of that makes the assumption that for whatever reason voters or the broader public uh can’t handle information, can’t process it, can’t make decisions, and so on.
Um, I would also too—well known to probably listeners of this particular program—um, I would also think about uh what we learn in or what Hayek talked about in Chapter 10 of The Road to Serfdom in terms of who are the people who are likely going to be putting out this information. Is it likely that they are going to be uh the people who are going to have the best interest of the public at heart, or are they not? Um, I think we don’t have to stretch too far to think that it’s probably the latter as opposed to the former.
But the other way that I’d answer that question very quickly, um, and it’s appropriate because it’s for the—the end of the book in the last chapter, um, is we do put a huge emphasis and a very large burden on the citizenry ultimately. So we conclude the book by looking at four different—
Bob Zadek: Abby, we—I’m sorry to interrupt, but I want to just remind the audience um about your book if you may. I’m sorry to have to do this, but I want to be sure they are aware of the book. So uh, this is Bob Zadek. I’ve been speaking with Abigail Hall, who has written an important book, Manufacturing Militarism: U.S. Government Propaganda in the War on Terror. It is a book which is provocative, which will invite you, if not urge you, to think about weighty subjects that I promise you you have never thought about before. Uh, Abby’s book is a must-read. It’ll get you off on an intellectual journey you will love.
So Abby, I’m sorry to have to cut you off, but I wanted to be sure the audience all has your book in their mind as they go about uh their life for the rest of this weekend.
Abigail Hall: If they read the conclusion, they’ll find out everything I was about to say. So don’t worry.
Bob Zadek: Thank you so much, Abby. Thank you for your time and thank you to my friends out there. This is Bob Zadek saying thanks again to Abigail Hall, and let’s hope 2022 promises us lots of relief, good health, and economic success. Happy New Year to everybody and thanks again to Abby.
Abigail Hall: Great, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.