God damn it, I hate my education system. I thought NATO was the peacekeeper of the world — a valuable residue of WWII. One sided propaganda-based education developed to fuel a belief in American exceptionalism and nationalistic egoism. This education-level propaganda is pretty effective because you don’t actually know what details to question, and so you grow up with some pretty bold assumptions about how the world works (and don’t even realize it). They had me believing Christopher Columbus was some kind of messiah-explorer too.

How does this happen? My anti-conspiracy brain wants to believe there’s no such thing as an evil man behind the curtain, twisting his mustache and orchestrating these details like ”meh, we need to make sure all the kids believe in this propaganda such that we have an imperialistic society.” So, short of that, how does this happen so effectively?

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 month ago

2 major factors: In any given society, the mode of production is reinforced by the culture, laws, and ideology of said mode of production. Secondly, people license themselves to believe that whatever they think benefits them is good. Capitalism reinforces ideas like individualism, NATO is good, etc, and we go along with it until our material conditions force us into seeing a new reflection of reality, be it at the workplace, or seeing hard evidence online, being the victim of a bombing campaign, etc. It isn't a man behind the curtain, but capital and the capitalist class.

[–] TankieTanuki@hexbear.net 7 points 1 month ago

It happens because it makes rich people richer