DW's Blog

The Propoganda of the Mind

by DW Green — November 19, 2025

“The propaganda techniques governments and media use? Your mind uses them all.”

I spent years studying political science, fascinated by the mechanics of power, persuasion, and public opinion. I learned about propaganda—how it works, how it shapes perception, how it can turn entire populations toward a particular viewpoint through selective presentation of information and emotional manipulation.

But it took me decades to realize I was living under the most sophisticated propaganda system of all: my own mind.

We’re quick to spot bias in the media we don’t like. We can identify propaganda when it comes from the “other side”—the selective facts, the emotional manipulation, the way context gets stripped away to support a predetermined narrative. We pride ourselves on seeing through it, on being the informed ones who know better.

And yet, we rarely notice that our own minds are running the exact same operation, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with far more influence over our experience than any news channel could ever achieve.

THE MINISTRY OF CONFIRMATION

Your mind is not a neutral observer reporting objective reality. It’s more like a state-run media outlet with a very specific agenda: confirm what you already believe, maintain your existing identity, keep your worldview intact at all costs.

Watch how it works:

You hold a political position. Your mind becomes a filter that highlights every piece of evidence supporting that position and dismisses, minimizes, or simply doesn’t notice evidence that contradicts it. Not because you’re stupid or dishonest, but because that’s what minds do. They curate reality to match existing beliefs.

You believe someone doesn’t like you. Suddenly every interaction gets interpreted through that lens. A neutral comment becomes evidence of hostility. A forgotten greeting becomes proof of dislike. The mind is a propaganda master—it can take the most ambiguous data and spin it to support the narrative it’s already committed to.

You identify as a certain type of person—successful, struggling, artistic, practical, spiritual, skeptical, whatever. And your mind becomes a relentless publicist for that identity, selecting which experiences to feature, which to minimize, which to spin, all in service of maintaining the story of who you are.

This isn’t occasional. This is constant. Every waking moment, the mind is running its propaganda operation, filtering reality through layers of conditioning, preference, fear, and identity, presenting you with a highly edited version of what’s actually happening and calling it “the truth.”

THE TECHNIQUES ARE FAMILIAR

The propaganda techniques governments and media use? Your mind uses them all:

Selective Presentation:

Just like a biased news outlet, your mind shows you the facts that support its position and conveniently forgets the ones that don’t. You remember every time someone let you down but forget the times they showed up. You notice every flaw in people you disagree with but overlook similar flaws in people you like.

Emotional Manipulation:

Your mind knows how to push your buttons. It associates certain ideas with fear, others with comfort. It links specific outcomes with safety or danger. It creates emotional charge around particular beliefs so that questioning them feels threatening, even dangerous.

Repetition:

Propaganda works through repetition—tell people the same thing enough times and it becomes “true.” Your mind is a master of this. The same thoughts loop over and over: “I’m not good enough,” “People can’t be trusted,” “The world is going to hell,” “Things used to be better,” “I’ll be happy when…” Repeat it enough and it becomes your reality, regardless of whether it’s actually true.

Us vs. Them:

Every propaganda system needs an enemy. Your mind is happy to provide one—or many. Liberals or conservatives. Young or old. This generation or that one. People who get it and people who don’t. The mind loves division because division simplifies reality into manageable categories and, conveniently, puts you on the “right” side.

Appeal to Authority:

Your mind will cite “experts” who agree with it while dismissing experts who don’t. It will reference your past experiences as proof of future outcomes. It will invoke tradition, science, religion, common sense—whatever authority supports its position—while questioning the credentials of any authority that challenges it.

Fear-Based Messaging:

This might be propaganda’s most reliable tool, and your mind wields it expertly. “If you don’t do this, something terrible will happen.” “If you question that belief, you’ll lose your identity.” “If you consider this other perspective, you’re betraying your values.” The mind governs through fear more effectively than any authoritarian regime.

THE AUDIENCE OF ONE

Here’s what makes the mind’s propaganda operation so effective: you’re both the broadcaster and the entire audience.

When you watch biased news, you can turn it off. When you encounter propaganda, you can seek other sources. But the mind’s propaganda? You’re immersed in it. You are it. The broadcaster and the receiver are the same consciousness, which is why it’s so hard to see what’s happening.

The thoughts feel like your thoughts. The interpretations feel like your interpretations. The conclusions feel like your conclusions. You don’t experience them as propaganda—as selective, biased presentations designed to maintain a particular worldview. You experience them as reality itself.

This is why people can be so certain about things that contradict other people’s equal certainty. Both are living in their mind’s propaganda bubble, both experiencing their thoughts as truth, both unable to see the editing process that’s creating their version of reality.

WHEN THE BROADCAST BREAKS

But sometimes—if you’re lucky, if you’re paying attention—you catch it happening.

You notice yourself interpreting someone’s action in the most negative possible light, and suddenly you realize: wait, that interpretation isn’t the only possibility. That’s just one story my mind generated. There could be ten other explanations, several of them completely innocent.

You’re absolutely convinced someone is angry with you, and then you discover they were just distracted by personal crisis you knew nothing about. And in that moment, you see how your mind created an entire narrative from minimal data, how it spun a complete story that felt true but was actually just… speculation.

You find yourself in an argument, certain you’re right, marshaling your evidence, preparing your counterpoints—and then something shifts. You notice you’re not really listening to the other person. You’re just waiting for openings to make your case. You’re not interested in truth; you’re interested in winning. Just like any good propagandist.

These moments of seeing are precious because they reveal the machinery in operation. They show you that what you’ve been calling “reality” is actually a highly produced broadcast, and you’ve been consuming it uncritically.

THE LIBERATION IN SEEING

Here’s the remarkable thing: you don’t have to stop the propaganda to be free of it. You just have to see it for what it is.

When you recognize a thought as propaganda—as your mind’s biased presentation rather than objective reality— it loses some of its power. Not because you fight it or replace it with better propaganda, but because you’re no longer taking it as gospel truth.

You can notice: “Ah, there’s my mind doing its us-vs-them thing again.” Or “There’s the fearbased messaging.” Or “There’s the selective memory highlighting all the times I failed and ignoring all the times I succeeded.”

You’re not stopping these processes—good luck with that. But you’re recognizing them as processes rather than truth. You’re seeing the propaganda machinery in operation rather than being hypnotized by its output.

This is what “seeing clearly” actually means. Not having perfect knowledge of objective reality—that’s not available to humans. But seeing that you’re seeing through filters. Recognizing that your mind is not a neutral observer but an active storyteller with its own agenda.

THE UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE

This isn’t about you being particularly deluded or particularly propagandized. This is the human condition. Every mind does this. Conservative minds and liberal minds. Religious minds and atheist minds. Educated minds and uneducated minds. Young minds and old minds.

The content varies—the stories are different, the identities are different, the fears and preferences are different—but the process is identical. Every human mind is running its propaganda operation, filtering reality through conditioning, maintaining identity through selective attention, governing through fear and desire.

Which means the division we feel—the sense that some people “get it” and others are lost in delusion—is itself propaganda. It’s the mind’s us-vs-them technique keeping you identified with your particular propaganda system and certain that you’re on the side of truth while they’re on the side of delusion.

But from outside the system—from the place that can see all minds doing this—there’s no side. There’s just consciousness expressing itself through billions of filtering systems, each one creating its own version of reality, each one absolutely convinced it’s seeing clearly.

LIVING WITH CLEARER SEEING

So what do you do with this recognition?

You don’t become a nihilist who thinks everything is just propaganda and nothing is true. You don’t become paralyzed by uncertainty, unable to act or decide or hold positions.

You just become… less certain. More curious. More willing to question your own interpretations. More able to hold your beliefs lightly rather than defending them to the death.

You start to notice when your mind is doing its propaganda thing:

Painting everyone on “the other side” with the same brush

Filtering evidence to support what you already believe

Using fear to keep you from questioning certain ideas

Interpreting ambiguous situations in the way that most confirms your existing story

And when you notice, you don’t have to believe the broadcast quite so completely.

You can still have positions, preferences, opinions. But you hold them differently—with awareness that they’re positions rather than absolute truths, with recognition that your mind is generating them through a filtering process, with humility about your own certainty.

You become able to hear other perspectives without immediate defensiveness because you know your own perspective is also partial, also filtered, also propaganda. Not false, not worthless—but not the whole truth either.

You become less interested in being right and more interested in seeing clearly. Less invested in maintaining your identity and more curious about what’s actually true. Less governed by the mind’s fear-based messaging and more able to act from genuine discernment.

THE REAL NEWS

Here’s what I’ve discovered in my years of studying non-duality: the mind isn’t the enemy. Propaganda isn’t the problem. The problem is unconscious consumption—believing the broadcast without recognizing it as a broadcast.

When you see clearly—when you recognize the mind’s propaganda operation for what it is— something remarkable happens. You’re still receiving the broadcast (thoughts keep arising, interpretations keep forming, the mind keeps spinning its stories), but you’re no longer hypnotized by it.

You can use the mind without being used by it. You can think without being identified with thoughts. You can have opinions without being trapped in them. You can hold positions without defending them as if your life depends on maintaining them.

This is freedom—not from propaganda, but from unconscious belief in propaganda. Not from bias, but from blindness to your own bias. Not from the mind’s storytelling, but from taking those stories as gospel truth.

The real news—the only news that matters—is this: you are not your thoughts. You are not your mind’s propaganda. You are the awareness in which all of it appears, the consciousness that can recognize propaganda as propaganda, the seeing that’s always already free of what it sees.

And from that recognition, you can engage with the world—including the external propaganda of biased media and manipulative messaging—with much more clarity. Because you’ve seen through the internal version first. You’ve recognized the propaganda machinery in your own mind, which means you can recognize it operating outside as well.

Not with superiority or judgment. Not with the certainty that you’re enlightened and they’re deluded. But with the humility of knowing that all minds do this, including yours, and the compassion that comes from recognizing we’re all struggling to see clearly through our various filtering systems.

You become interested in truth rather than confirmation. In seeing rather than believing. In clarity rather than certainty.

And that changes everything.