There is a kind of numbness that precedes violence. Not the numbness of ignorance, exactly, but something more like the numbness of reduction, when another human being stops being perceived in their full complexity and becomes, instead, a symbol, a threat, a problem to be solved. This perceptual collapse is not merely a psychological event. It is a spiritual one.
We are living through a moment when the preconditions for that collapse are everywhere visible. Not only in the obvious theaters of geopolitical tension, but in the texture of ordinary cultural life. In the way we consume information, perform identity, and relate to those who differ from us. Something is failing at the level of perception itself. To name what that something is, we need to recover a the transcendentals.
The transcendentals — truth, goodness, and beauty — are not decorative concepts. In the long tradition of philosophical and theological reflection that stretches back to Plato, they describe the fundamental structure of reality. They are not values we project onto the world. They are what the world is when we encounter it honestly. To perceive truly is to receive reality as it is. To act with goodness is to act in a way that honors the genuine value of what is there. To recognize beauty is to be arrested by the irreducible complexity and worth of what stands before you. These three are not separate achievements. They belong together. When one collapses, the others follow.
We are witnessing their coordinated collapse. And no method in modern life has accelerated that collapse more deliberately, or more skillfully, than the art of propaganda.
Truth, in the current cultural environment, has been largely replaced by narrative management. This does not mean that no one believes anything. People believe intensely within their bubbles, and with great passion. It means that the question guiding public discourse is no longer “what is actually the case?” but “what story best serves our side?” Information becomes ammunition. Evidence is selected, shaped, and deployed not to illuminate but to persuade. Propaganda has always understood this. Its genius, from the poster campaigns of the First World War to the algorithmic content ecosystems of the present, is not the lie, lies are fragile and easily exposed. Its genius is the selective truth, the image stripped of its context, the grievance amplified until it drowns out every other signal, the partial picture presented with the confidence of the whole. It’s a systematic habit of objectifying reality, of treating the world as raw material for the construction of preferred fictions. When truth becomes a tool, the capacity to genuinely receive the world as it is begins to atrophy.
Beauty has suffered a parallel fate. Spectacle has taken its place. Beauty involves receptivity and the willingness to be addressed by something outside yourself, to let its complexity register on you, to be changed by the encounter. Spectacle works in precisely the opposite direction. It is beauty evacuated of the demand for response, beauty is rendered for consumption. Propaganda has always been in the business of spectacle. The Nuremberg rallies were not ugly events, but rather, by every aesthetic measure, overwhelming. Leni Riefenstahl’s camera found genuine grandeur in them. That is precisely what made them dangerous. They offered the experience of beauty, the soaring music, the geometric precision of massed bodies, the sense of belonging to something vast, while systematically destroying the conditions for genuine aesthetic receptivity. They trained participants to feel without perceiving, to be moved without being opened. Contemporary propaganda has refined this further. The aesthetics of violence, the reduction of human faces to pixels, the transformation of suffering into shareable content are not failures to find the beautiful. They are the active replacement of beauty with its counterfeit. And the counterfeits are not neutral. They train perception. They habituate us to encountering the world without being affected by it. They make us, in the precise sense of the word, aesthetically numb.
Goodness, meanwhile, has been quietly redefined as dominance. The question “what is the right thing to do?” has been increasingly displaced by the question “what would a strong person do?” Propaganda accelerates this shift with particular efficiency, because its fundamental message is one of threat and rescue. A propaganda system needs an enemy and not just a competitor with differing goals, but an existential threat. This menace serves to validate your own virtue with stark contrast. The enemy is not merely wrong. The enemy is dangerous, subhuman, corrupting. Goodness becomes the will to eliminate the threat. Care, restraint, and the recognition of the enemy’s humanity are reframed as weakness, naivety, or even collaboration. When goodness collapses into dominance, the other person ceases to be a moral subject whose wellbeing places claims on you. They become an obstacle, a mere category.
Now consider what happens when these three failures converge on the question of war.
War requires, as a psychological and cultural precondition, the dehumanization of the enemy. This is not incidental to war, it is constitutive of it. Soldiers have always known this, which is why every military culture develops rituals of reduction. The enemy is given a name that strips them of individuality, their suffering is categorized as acceptable, their deaths are rendered in the language of statistics and objectives rather than loss. What propaganda adds to this ancient dynamic is scale and speed. It industrializes the perceptual habits of war and distributes them to civilian populations before the first shot is fired. We rehearse the reduction of the other in peacetime. We flatten them into an image that can be hated, feared, or dismissed. We do it with the effortless fluency of people who have been trained, by years of spectacle and narrative management, to receive the world that way. By the time war begins, the hardest perceptual work has already been done. The person has already become a symbol. The symbol must be wholly destroyed.
This is where the language of beauty becomes not merely aesthetic but urgent.
To perceive another human being in their beauty is not to find them attractive or agreeable. It is to receive them as irreducibly complex, as a center of experience and value that cannot be collapsed into a narrative about them. It is to have your prior categories interrupted by the sheer fact of their existence. This kind of perception is what the philosophical tradition calls aesthetic receptivity, and it is the enemy of war. Not because it makes conflict impossible, genuine conflicts of interest and value are real, but because it makes the particular barbarism of war, with its systematic reduction of persons to targets, psychologically and morally untenable.
Propaganda knows this. Which is why every serious propaganda apparatus targets aesthetic receptivity directly. It does not simply argue that the enemy is dangerous. It trains you to stop seeing them. It replaces the complex human face with the icon, the archetype, the cartoon. It fills the perceptual field with images designed to close rather than open, to confirm rather than interrupt. The sophistication of modern propaganda lies precisely in how seamlessly it accomplishes this through the ambient, continuous, algorithmically personalized curation of what you see, hear, and feel. The result is a population that has lost, or is losing, the habit of being genuinely arrested by the other. A population that encounters the world through the filter of pre-formed images rather than direct perception is not an accident. It is the intended product designed to numb the senses.
The capacity for genuine perception is not automatic. It is cultivated. It depends on habits of attention formed over time, through practices that keep the full reality of the other in view. With the need for practices like genuine listening, art that resists easy consumption, and religious formation that insists on the sacred worth of every person. When these practices are healthy, they create a culture of perception, a shared ability to see each other with accuracy and depth. When they erode, what replaces them is not neutral blankness but a trained incapacity, a tendency to encounter the other as symbol rather than person. Propaganda finds it, cultivates it, and puts it to use.
A theology attentive to this moment will not be content to condemn war in general while leaving the perceptual habits that enable it untouched. It will ask harder questions. It will ask what it means to cultivate beauty, a beauty as a practice of genuine receptivity. It will ask what forms of community, worship, and attention make it possible for people to go on seeing each other as irreducibly real. It will take seriously that propaganda is not merely a political problem but a spiritual one. A problem that is an assault on the image of God in the other. It will insist that these are not luxury questions for times of peace but urgent questions for times of crisis, because the path to war runs through the imagination before it runs through any battlefield.
The transcendentals belong together and fall together. They can also be recovered together. The recovery of truth as an encounter with reality, of goodness as a responsiveness to the other’s worth, of beauty as a receptivity to the other’s complexity are one project. It is deeply spiritual. It requires different habits of perception, formed in community, over time, against the grain of a culture that profits from our numbness. It insists we move against the grain of a propaganda apparatus whose continued operation depends on our numbness, never recovering the ability to actually feel.
War is a failure of beauty, is a metaphysical claim. The violence we do to each other in armed conflict is always preceded by the violence we do to each other in perception. When we accept the reduction of the complex to the safely simple, we are accepting the image for the person. To work against war is to work for the recovery of genuine sight. And propaganda’s great lie is that such recovery is naive. We answer that lie by insisting that the real world is precisely what propaganda prevents us from seeing, a world populated by actual persons, each one a center of irreplaceable worth, each one created in the image of God.
That work begins in the ordinary, daily, countercultural practice of actually seeing the people right in front of us