Propaganda is Just Bad Worldbuilding
There is a fine line between worldbuilding and propaganda. In both instances subcreation occurs, the procession from a human intellect of some new intelligible form, in excess of physical reality. In worldbuilding (or “enchantment”[1] as Tolkien deems it) this occurs for the sake of the form itself, its self-contained beauty: worldbuilding in “its purity is artistic in desire and purpose”. Propaganda (or “magic”) is subcreation for the purpose of what Maritain calls a “thesis”[2]: an end in competition with the good of the work, whether it “claims to demonstrate some truth or to touch the heart, it is for art a foreign importation”. It reduces art to “technique”, a means to “achieve power in the world, the domination of things and wills” (or the reversion of the “fine arts revert to the generic type of art and to its lower species, the mechanical arts”[3]).
References:
Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories (https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf)
https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art7.htm
https://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/etext/art6.htm