The Decoding Culture Foundation is dedicated to the study of cultural engineering in the entertainment industry. Broadly speaking, cultural engineering refers to attempts to change the values or worldview of any segment of society through mass media. In this sense, the concept is comparable to that of “propaganda,” and there is no question that, in practice, cultural engineering and propaganda are deeply entangled.
Propaganda in a narrow sense, however, seeks to change or reinforce the political opinions and ideological affiliations of its target audience, and it tends to operate in forms of media that are recognized as political, like cable news. Cultural engineering, by contrast, seeks to alter people in more profound and enduring ways, at the level of their basic values and ways of perceiving the world—even their own identity. It operates, furthermore, primarily through media like movies and popular music that are seen as cultural or commercial as opposed to political.
Indeed, much of the special power of cultural engineering lies in its stealth, in the fact that few people suspect the agendas driving many cultural productions. Most assume that culture, at least in the liberal West, is largely organic, a spontaneous outgrowth of human creativity and market forces. The public underestimates the degree to which culture is actually synthetic or manufactured, and this lack of awareness makes people highly vulnerable to the techniques employed by cultural engineers. Our mission is to inform the public concerning the agencies and individuals who engage in cultural engineering as well as their agendas and the techniques they use to promote those agendas.
The first technique of virtually all cultural engineering campaigns is to disguise calculated, synthetic creations as spontaneous, organic cultural productions. This disarms the public’s critical defenses and makes them more suggestible. In the case of movies and literature, there is abundant evidence that the narrative form itself, storytelling, induces in the audience a more suggestible state. For in the entertainment industry, just as in the advertising industry, advanced psychological knowledge, sometimes combined with experimental audio-visual techniques, is used to affect the consciousness of the audience. We believe that, by exposing these sorts of techniques to the public, they will be less effective, and this in turn will promote a more honest public dialogue and a less manipulative culture.