How propaganda exploits unconscious desire

The propaganda we do not see

Muzamil opens the episode by framing a core paradox. Everyone knows propaganda exists. Everyone consumes it. Everyone feels the effect. Yet somehow, in the modern era, propaganda is done so elegantly that we miss it entirely. He notes that when he observes Western narratives spreading globally, he finds it fascinating precisely because Pakistan and countries like it have not yet understood that propaganda has evolved. In the West, the machinery is invisible.

Ali offers a terse answer to why humans succumb so easily. “Because they’re humans,” he says. Then he clarifies: humans are irrational. If you understand those irrational needs, the need to be attractive, to be wanted, to be liked, things almost all of us carry, then you can engineer demand for nearly anything.

Edward Bernays and the engineering of demand

Muzamil and Ali trace the lineage to Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, who worked with the U.S. government during World War I. Bernays theorized that it was not necessary to wait for demand to exist. “He said you could engineer demand,” Ali explains. Bernays documented this in his book Propaganda and applied it to convince Americans to enter World War I. Later, his methods spread globally and were adopted by Hitler’s regime.

The core idea was transgressive for its time: demand is not natural. It can be constructed.

The Torches of Freedom

The pair examine perhaps Bernays’ most famous campaign: convincing American women to smoke. In the 1920s, after women gained the right to vote and feminism entered its second wave, Bernays was hired by an American tobacco company. At the time, 99 percent of women over 45 did not smoke. Bernays did not target smokers. He targeted the desire for equality.

He engineered a parade called “Torches of Freedom” where women smoked publicly with men, framing cigarettes as symbols of liberation and power. Ali describes the genius: “He equalized a woman smoking to a woman being equal to a man. And he turned that into a commodity.”

The tobacco companies watched and replicated the strategy. A Lucky Strikes ad read: “Reach for a lucky instead of a sweet. It’s toasted.” The message was not about the cigarette. It was about staying slender, about attractiveness. Another ad tied smoking directly to the right to vote, which had only recently been secured. Muzamil notes the elegance of it all. “They commoditized that entire movement. They made a commodity out of everything that they were doing.”

Propaganda as anchoring

Muzamil gives a contemporary example from his own work. Years before the pandemic, he ran an assertiveness training workshop. The poster read “Assertiveness Training: Learning How to Say No.” The title was deliberately targeted at people with passive communication styles, who are the ones who struggle most with refusal. He was already anchoring the audience before the workshop began.

When he asked the room how many were passive communicators, 11 out of 12 people raised their hands. They felt seen. But what Muzamil had done was use basic principles of human psychology to pull people toward a predetermined outcome. “If you understand these basic human principles on how to pull or push people towards one thing or another, you can engineer,” he says. The mechanism looks like magic until you see the framework.

Modern propaganda is structural

The conversation turns to larger systems. Muzamil describes an internship he completed at an unnamed organization. Nearly 100 interns were asked to accumulate 1,000 Twitter followers. They were not asked to promote the organization explicitly. But because they knew they were being monitored, they began posting content aligned with the organization’s ideology. In six weeks, 100 interns had each assembled 1,000 followers posting supportive content. That is 100,000 people reached through an internship structure.

Ali adds another layer: scholarship programs. A country offers scholarships to high school and university students. The recipients study abroad, return as leaders, then participate in that country’s networks and conferences. On the surface it looks like human development. When you look deeper, the recipients are not free thinkers. They adhere to a particular worldview. There are no outliers.

Invisible propaganda versus visible outrage

Ali states a principle: “Good propaganda is propaganda you don’t see.” Most propaganda people now cite, cigarette ads linking smoking to female empowerment, is obvious in hindsight. But the machinery was invisible when it was being deployed. Modern Western propaganda, both agree, has evolved past obviousness. Pakistan still uses propaganda openly, with standard methods. The West has gone further.

The pair discuss Fair and Lovely’s rebrand to Glow and Lovely. The product was sold on lightening skin. The rebrand repositions it as celebrating natural skin color. Does rebranding redeem a product that perpetuated colorism for decades? Muzamil sees the strategic shift. Ali notes that brands do not have conscience. “It’s people’s job in these brands that if there’s such an incident, they have to make the best to manage the perception by the public,” Ali says.

Why societies may need propaganda

Toward the end, the conversation settles on a harder truth. Muzamil says plainly that he does not think functioning systems can exist without propaganda. “I do agree with that,” Ali responds. “You can’t have a functioning system of millions of people in the modern day all adhering to one thing without propaganda.” Pakistan is so ethnically and culturally diverse that unifying millions toward a single cause, nation building, collective action, requires narrative. Without it, there is only fragmentation.

The episode closes with the recognition that all of us have been shaped by propaganda we do not see, in ways we may never fully understand. But the machinery, once understood, cannot be unseen.