Our Propaganda Machine: On Broken Kettles and Leaky Buckets

Freud once wrote the enigmatic phrase, “Where id was, there ego shall be.“ One way of interpreting this is by saying – where an explosion of our unconscious emotions occur, there the ego will rush in to provide justifications. In other words, the ego will retroactively justify the outburst. Here the ego takes on the role of propaganda in our being. The department receives word of the explosion and gets to work finding ways of excusing, and even validating, the act.

What Freud describes in these words is something we all encounter all the time. Yet it often goes unnoticed by us, especially when we engage in it ourselves.

While the behaviour cannot be directly identified, it is glimpsed indirectly when someone engages in the “broken kettle” fallacy. This fallacy describes the way an individual employs multiple, contradictory arguments to justify their position. For example,

Person 1 – I hate all these immigrants coming into our country. They’re lazy, devious and take our welfare without contributing to society

Person 2 – But the latest statistics show that immigrants benefit the economy. They work hard at every level of society

Person 1 – Exactly! They come here and steal our jobs

Here the first person has a deeply embedded xenophobia that seeks justification by any means. If one argument is knocked down, she simply constructs another.

A second common fallacy that indirectly reveals the same phenomenon goes by the name “leaky buckets.” This is a common strategy employed by conspiracy theorists and creationists that involves putting forward a whole array of weak arguments in the hope that together they will gain the aura of legitimacy. While it’s obvious that any one of the arguments in isolation doesn’t hold any water, gathering them together creates the illusion that they do.

The most obvious way we see professor ego protect baby id is played out is in the life of children. Most parents are all too familiar with the situation that plays out when they ask their child to do something the child would rather avoid. In asking whether their child has put out the bins we can imagine the child getting irritated and saying, “I was just about to do it!”

What’s interesting in these situations is the way that the child will often succeed in pulling the wool over their own eyes. While they are unlikely to fool the parents, they are able to suspend their own disbelief.

And intelligence doesn’t offer any protection against engaging in this type of act. While a child might justify their hatred of a classmate by saying, “they smell.” A philosopher will justify their unconsciously motivated attack by saying, “they engage in a totalising metanarrative that obliterates alterity.”

Tad DeLay, author of God is Unconscious, has recently written about this phenomenon on his blog in the context of the violence taking place at Trump rallies. After quoting Freud he comments,

While many by November will equivocate and find clever ways to trick themselves into thinking there could be a morally coherent reason to support an implicitly fascist and overtly white supremacist candidate, he is only popular because he is their truth, their id. One could only cheer for this out of a lack of information or a poverty of morals, and the ignorance excuse is quickly fading.