Abstract
This essay examines why, despite unprecedented access to information and evidence, people repeatedly make poor decisions in both political and consumer domains. Framed through two linked themes—the modern transformation of the concept of the person and the erosion of self-awareness—it argues that contemporary propaganda succeeds less by defeating facts than by reshaping the conditions under which facts are interpreted. The essay contends that an older model of personhood as a moral, deliberative agent is increasingly displaced by an operational model of the individual as a profile: a datafied, segmentable, and predictable target optimized for influence. In parallel, self-awareness is treated as a metacognitive safeguard; the reflective pause that enables individuals to notice manipulation, regulate emotion, and align action with values, yet this pause is systematically undermined by attention-engineered media environments that reward speed, arousal, and identity signaling. By comparing political propaganda and marketing persuasion, the essay highlights their shared influence architecture (segmentation, narrative, emotional priming, repetition) and addresses common counterarguments about efficiency, personal responsibility, and free speech. It concludes that restoring evidence-based decision-making requires more than supplying facts: it demands rebuilding both the internal capacities (self-awareness) and the external institutional conditions (transparency, accountability, and incentive alignment) that protect human agency in an age of pervasive influence.
It usually starts small.
You open your phone to check one thing—weather, homework, a message—and fifteen minutes later you’re in a different emotional climate entirely. A clip has made you angry. A headline has made you anxious. An ad has made you vaguely dissatisfied with your life. You haven’t decided to feel these things. They arrived first, and only afterward did your brain begin building reasons.
Later, if someone asks why you believe what you believe, or why you bought what you bought, you can give an answer. You can make it sound rational. Most of us can. But if we’re honest, we know there’s a gap between the story we tell about our choices and the machinery that actually produced them.
This is the puzzle of the contemporary world: we have more evidence than any previous generation, yet we keep making choices that don’t seem to match the evidence; choices that harm our communities, our future, sometimes even our own well-being. If facts alone were enough, we’d be living in a golden age of wise decisions.
We aren’t, because the real battle isn’t simply about what’s true. It’s about what kind of person gets to show up in the first place.
When “Person” Meant “Moral Agent”
There’s an older picture of a human being that still haunts our language. In that picture, a person is a moral agent: someone who can be reasoned with, who can make choices, who can be held responsible, who can claim rights. The public sphere assumes that if you present reasons and evidence, a person can weigh them and revise their view. It’s not that everyone is perfectly logical. It’s that the ideal is deliberation: argument in public, evidence on the table, persuasion through reasons.
That picture is why “being a person” feels like something more than being a body or a consumer. A person is not just acted upon. A person acts.
But in modern life, another picture has quietly replaced it.
Now, much of the world doesn’t meet you as a moral agent. It meets you as a profile.
Your “personhood” gets translated into data points: what you click, what you watch, how long you linger, what you buy, what you search, what you fear, what you might vote for, what makes you share. The system doesn’t ask, What is true? It asks, What works? What captures attention. What converts. What mobilizes. What keeps you coming back.
It is a shift from the person as someone who can be persuaded by reasons to the person as someone who can be influenced by design.
Counterargument: Some people say this is just efficiency. Personalization helps you find what you want. Targeting reduces noise.
Response: That sounds reasonable until you notice how often personalization doesn’t merely answer your desires but writes them. The most effective influence is not the loudest argument. It’s the quiet shaping of what feels urgent, what feels normal, what feels desirable, what feels threatening. When the goal is influence, truth becomes optional, because influence is measurable and truth is inconvenient.
And once you are treated as predictable, the world stops respecting you as deliberative.
Self-Awareness: The Pause That Makes You Free
If the first shift is about how the world sees you, the second is about what happens inside you.
Self-awareness is often sold as self-improvement: be mindful, know yourself, name your feelings. But in an environment built to push and pull you, self-awareness becomes a kind of sovereignty. It’s the ability to notice what is happening to your mind while it’s happening.
Self-awareness is the pause before the reaction:
Why am I angry right now? Why does this headline feel so satisfying? Why do I suddenly need this product? What is this story asking me to become?
That pause is fragile. It takes attention. It takes time. It takes a nervous system not constantly spiked by fear or desire.
Modern propaganda—political and marketing—doesn’t need to defeat self-awareness in a fair fight. It just needs to keep you from having the pause.
Counterargument: People will say, “Humans have always been irrational. We’ve always been biased. This isn’t new.”
Response: The biases aren’t new. The environment is. In the past, propaganda was often a broadcast: one message to many people. Today, persuasion is continuous, personalized, and experimentally refined. It is A/B tested. It is optimized. It learns which version of reality makes you most likely to react. Bias may be ancient, but modern systems can trigger it with a precision and persistence previous generations didn’t face.
This is why evidence can be present and still lose. Evidence requires a certain kind of inner space. Propaganda is designed to occupy it first.
How Evidence Loses Without Losing an Argument
Most people imagine propaganda as a contest of facts: truth versus lies. In that picture, if you show the evidence, the lie collapses.
But propaganda rarely fights evidence directly. It changes the conditions under which evidence is received.
Three moves show up again and again.
First: it binds belief to identity.
If a claim becomes a membership badge (something “people like us” know) then disagreement stops being intellectual and becomes social. Evidence isn’t processed as information; it’s processed as a threat. The mind becomes a defense lawyer for the tribe.
Second: it recruits emotion as the steering wheel.
Fear narrows attention. Outrage creates certainty. Disgust simplifies moral judgment. Aspiration makes you see what you want to see. When emotions are high, nuance feels like weakness. Propaganda loves high emotion because high emotion makes people fast.
Third: it exploits overload.
In an endless stream, people fall back on shortcuts: familiarity feels like truth, repetition feels like credibility, and social proof feels like safety. Propaganda doesn’t need to make you certain; it only needs to make you tired, so that the easiest story wins.
This is why evidence loses even when it’s available. The mind encountering evidence has been primed to reject it, not because the evidence is weak, but because the self has been placed in a posture of defense.
Counterargument: “If people cared, they’d verify. They’d check sources. They’d do the work.”
Response: Verification is not free. It costs time, energy, and sometimes social belonging. Propaganda raises those costs on purpose. It tells you that doubt is betrayal, that trusted institutions are enemies, that “everyone knows” the answer, that your side is the only honest one. It turns careful thinking into something that feels lonely and slow, and it turns reaction into something that feels brave.
In that environment, choosing truth can feel like choosing exile.
Two Antagonists, One Playbook: Political and Marketing Propaganda
It’s tempting to separate political propaganda from marketing as if they belong to different worlds. Politics is serious; advertising is just persuasion. Politics manipulates citizens; ads target consumers.
But in practice, they often run on the same rails.
Political propaganda aims for power: votes, loyalty, polarization, demobilization of opponents. It tells stories where the world is divided into good people and bad people, where the stakes are existential, and where compromise is weakness.
Marketing propaganda aims for profit: conversion, habit, desire, brand identity. It tells stories where the right purchase makes you admired, safe, attractive, successful; where your life becomes coherent through consumption.
Different goals. Same architecture: segmentation, narrative, emotional priming, repetition, and identity.
Both forms of propaganda treat the person as something to be shaped.
Counterargument: “Marketing isn’t propaganda. People know ads are biased. It’s harmless.”
Response: Modern marketing rarely looks like an obvious ad. It looks like a friend’s recommendation, an influencer’s lifestyle, a ‘relatable’ post, a trend, a community. More importantly, marketing doesn’t only sell products; it sells selves. It teaches you which insecurities are normal, which desires are respectable, which identities are aspirational. When the self is treated as something to be purchased, the person becomes easier to govern through identity and fear. The citizen and the consumer are not separate creatures; they live in the same mind.
A society trained to react quickly and buy identities is a society primed for political manipulation.
What This Does to Human Beings
The cost of propaganda is not only that people believe false things. The deeper cost is what it does to personhood.
When propaganda succeeds, shared reality fractures. People stop disagreeing about solutions and start disagreeing about what is even happening. The public sphere becomes a theater of certainty rather than a place of inquiry.
At the same time, the self shrinks. The constant demand to react—share, like, argue, buy—crowds out reflection. People become collections of triggers and talking points. It becomes harder to remember that others are full persons too. They become stereotypes: enemies, sheep, idiots, markets.
And once the “person” is reduced to a stereotype, propaganda has won. It can steer crowds more easily than it can persuade individuals.
Counterargument: “But freedom means tolerating persuasion. Any attempt to limit propaganda risks censorship.”
Response: The question isn’t whether persuasion exists; it’s whether the conditions are fair and transparent. Open debate assumes rough symmetry: claims are public, reasons are contestable, and people can respond to what’s said. But microtargeted persuasion, optimized with private data, delivered invisibly, designed to trigger specific vulnerabilities, doesn’t resemble open debate. It resembles behavioral engineering. Defending agency is not censorship; it is protecting the possibility of genuine choice.
The Way Back: Reclaiming the Pause, Rebuilding the Person
If this crisis is partly about what a person is allowed to be (agent or target) then the solution is not simply more information. Evidence matters, but evidence needs space to land.
That means reclaiming self-awareness: not as a luxury, but as a practice of freedom.
At the individual level, it can be as plain as interrupting the reflex:
- pausing before sharing a claim that flatters your side,
- noticing when outrage feels addictive,
- asking what emotion a headline is trying to manufacture,
- separating “this makes me feel right” from “this is well-supported.”
None of this makes you perfect. It makes you harder to steer.
At the social level, reclaiming personhood means demanding environments that respect agency:
- transparency around targeted persuasion,
- friction against virality when claims are unverified,
- incentives for accuracy rather than outrage,
- education that treats media literacy as agency training, not as humiliation.
Counterargument: “This is idealistic. The systems are too powerful. Nothing will change.”
Response: Systems are powerful because they are effective. They are effective because people are steerable. When people become less steerable, when they regain the pause, the incentives shift. The goal isn’t utopia. It’s restoring enough agency that evidence can matter again.
Closing: The Choice Beneath the Choices
In the end, the story is not only about propaganda. It is about the definition of a human being.
If a person is a moral agent, then politics and markets must address that agent with reasons, accountability, and respect. If a person is a profile, then politics and markets will treat that profile as a set of levers.
The tragedy of our moment is that we often still speak as if we live in the first world while we are increasingly governed by the second.
And the central task, quiet, difficult, urgent, is to defend the older idea of the person: a self-aware being capable of reflection, capable of doubt, capable of choosing truth over belonging and meaning over manipulation.
Because the evidence isn’t missing.
What’s at risk is the person who could live by it.
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