Most people on most issues hold several mutually exclusive beliefs, all weakly held. Both the societal base and superstructure have systems which work to passively affirm certain weakly held beliefs over others. They do this with the intent of allowing weakly held beliefs to influence the formation of more deeply held beliefs. The extent to which people have agency over this varies from person to person and system to system. A child being raised in a cult does not have the same autonomy over their beliefs that an adult oil executive does, for example.

I assume this post is about an argument you had or saw online about some various group in the imperial core not being responsible for their egregious actions because something something propaganda. I understand the frustration. At the same time, I wish that the D I S C O U R S E resulting from these conversations actually involved more discussion about how propaganda works and what the implications of that are. I rarely even see people acknowledge the superstructure exists when it comes to propaganda. Seems important, especially in the US.