It should be added to recent thoughts on propaganda that there are aspirational and therefore active aspects of the propaganda itself that bear thinking about. It doesn't do to just state that propaganda describes a certain suggested reality in a manipulative way. In a real way it also contributes to the construction of that reality by making something so in its very action. What I mean is that to engage in any sort of collective action in a given direction, you have to have an agreed upon worldview and theory of action which inspires the participants to put in the effort to move in that direction. Past a certain scale, complexity, and amount of time - and even in simpler shorter intervals - knowing the future is very difficult if not impossible without first acting on the present and receiving that feedback. The aspirational aspect of propaganda is such that it seeks to push and pull whole states of affairs in the desired direction of those that produce and control it, and oftentimes it does work, including the bad and despicable variety of it. The total reality is the accumulation of the activities of those moving in concert with a given regime and its propaganda, and those of everyone else, including those moving against it, possessed by the "true reality" so to speak.
