Jacque Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitude translated Conrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1965).
Why do we care about this old book? It predicts our present and makes this dire warning: “Propaganda is one of the most powerful factors of deChristianization in the world through the psychological modifications that it affects, through the ideological morass with which it has flooded the consciousness of the masses, through the reduction of Christianity to the level of an ideology, through the never-ending temptation held out to the church – all this is the creation of a mental universe foreign to Christianity. And this deChristianization through the effects of one instrument – propaganda – is much greater than through the anti-Christian doctrines.” 231-2.
Working definition of propaganda: “Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.” 61
Thus, “the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of the technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into the technological world. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of the regime (it is that also) than the effect of the technological society that embraces the entire man...” xvii
Ellul says that he will “devote much space to the fact that propaganda has become an inescapable necessity for everyone.” This is the case just because progressive modern people worships “facts” – that is, they accept “facts” as the ultimate reality. They are convinced that what is, is good. “He believes that facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress. The stereotyped ideological attitude inevitably results in a confusion between judgments of probability and judgments of value. Because fact is the sole criterion, it must be good.” xv
The problem is that there is a practical infinity of facts and whenever one appeals to facts one is in reality making a selection which is determined by a judgment of value. Namely the value of relevance to a particular agenda. It is easy to conceal the hidden value judgments behind a selection of facts claiming relevance. Propaganda conceals this value laden agenda-driven selection.
Ellul has a unique and compelling interpretation of secularization as the rise of technocracy
There are four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world… i.e, all the world that shares in modern technology and is structured into nations: that 1) “man’s aim in life is happiness, 2) that man is naturally good, 3) that history develops in endless progress, and 4) that everything is matter.” 39 Consequently, “the average individual, the ordinary man of our times… is not sensitive to what is tragic in life; he is not anguished by a question that God might put to him; he does not feel challenged except by current events, political or economic.” “At present, only isolated individuals are interested in religion. It is part of their private opinions, and no real public opinion exists on the subject.” 49.
The privatization of religion is an accommodation to mass society and the technological era. Religious conscience would interfere with the routinization of life required by the technological juggernaut claiming to organize all of society. The process of atomization wears down conscientious resistance by integrating people into cogs of its machine. See Paul R. Hinlicky, “Complicity and the Truth of the Christological Path of Ecclesial Resistance: Summons to a New Catechesis for a Time of Despair” in Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance edited by Christine Helmer (Lexington /Fortress Academic, 2021) 47-62.
Atomization. “In actual fact, an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move towards liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process the individual frees himself completely from family, village, parish, or brotherhood bonds – only to find himself directly vis-à-vis the entire society. When individuals are not held together by local structures, the only form in which they can live together is in an unstructured mass society. Similarly, a mass society can only be based on individuals – that is, on men in their isolation, whose identities are determined by their relationships with one another. Precisely because the individual claims to be equal to all other individuals, he becomes an abstraction and is in effect reduced to a cipher.” 90
Mass society has, consequently, the great problem of “adjusting the normal man into a technological environment – to the increasing pace, the working hours, the noise, the crowded cities, the tempo of work, the housing shortage, and so on. Then there is the lack of personal accomplishment, the absence of an apparent meaning of life, the family insecurity provoked by these living conditions, the anonymity of the individual in the big cities and at work. The individual is not equipped to face these disturbing paralyzing traumatic influences. Here again he needs a psychological aid; to endure such a life, he needs to be given motivations that will restore his equilibrium. One cannot leave modern man alone in a situation such as this.”
The propagandist provides a needed service! 143
Thus the rise of identity politics
A delusion: “In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not the master of his own life.” 91. In reality, the atomized individual is forced to find a new identity/social cohesion over against mass society as a whole and other factions within it. The loneliness of modern people who feel “the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and effective communication. The loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; the loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of the community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology…. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.” 148. There is a felt need for the propaganda as identity politics.
But the resulting delusion of resistance by identity politics is that one “can resist one particular propaganda, not the general phenomenon of propaganda, for the development of the groups takes place simultaneously with the development of propaganda. These groups develop inside of society propagandized to the extreme; they are themselves the loci of propaganda; they are instruments of propaganda and are integrated into its techniques.” 97
One utterly misunderstands Ellul’s argument, or deliberately misunderstands it, if one thinks that it is the other side, one’s opponents, who indulge in propaganda while my side objectively states the facts. Propaganda is a system embracing all.
The modernity of propaganda.
The myth of the Big Lie: “Therefore, propaganda must start with current events; it would not reach anybody if it tried to base itself on unhistorical facts.” 44 Yet there is an infinity of facts. Someone presents you with “the facts” which that someone has selected to call to your attention for a reason. This is what Ellul calls “integrative propaganda,” which serves to align you to an interest group by exploiting your modern belief in facts as truth.
Modern man, therefore, welcomes this service of propaganda. The best defensive of modern man against the infinity of information bombarding him in mass media is propaganda, it is “a necessary protection against being flooded with facts without being able to establish a perspective.” “News loses its frightening character when it offers information for which the listener already has a ready explanation in his mind, or for which she can easily find one. The great force of propaganda lies in giving modern man, all embracing, simple explanations and massive, doctrinal causes, without which he could not live with the news… Just as information is necessary for awareness, propaganda is necessary to prevent this awareness from becoming desperate.” 147.
Note: this is why as an educator I always required students to look for the difficulties, i.e. the facts that work against any thesis they were arguing. The quality of any genuine argument is shown by striving to deal with all the evidence, especially the evidence that goes against one’s thesis, and providing an argument that anticipates disagreement and speaks to the bad facts, even if the accomplishment is finally only achieving a qualitatively better disagreement with an opponent. Genuine educators do not simplify but in this way “complexify.” I have noticed with much dismay how certain current models of education reject precisely this procedure as “traumatizing” when educators for “liberation,” claim to be working to reinforce a fragile identity in a hostile environment. That move would be the triumph of transforming education into high brow propaganda.
Modern man thus pays a high price for this palliative of propaganda. Addiction to propagandistic news helps him “to forget the preceding event. In doing so, man then denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today’s events his life by obliterating yesterday’s news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.” 47cf.
Witness Alastair McIntyre’s story of Paul LeMann the Belgian émigré who had a celebrated career at Yale as a postmodern literary critic, forgetting his deep collaboration with the Nazi occupation in the persecution of the Jews. He was simply able to shed his past as if it was no longer continuous with his present. Postmodernism as a propaganda liberated him for this chameleon behavior.
Deep Complicity. Thus “the propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provokes the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely lends himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without this previous, implicit consent, without this need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread. There is not just a wicked propagandist at work who sets up means to ensnare the innocent citizen. Rather, there is a citizen who craves propaganda from the bottom of his being and the propagandist to respond to this craving.” 121
Let me here simply quote from the Bible, Mark 13: "Take heed that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will come in my name, saying, `I am he!' and they will lead many astray… And then if any one says to you, `Look, here is the Christ!' or `Look, there he is!' do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.”
The hypocrisy of propagandistic self-justification
“Finally, as a result of all the threats and contradictions in contemporary society, man feels accused, guilty. He cannot feel that he is right and good as long as he is exposed to contradictions, which placed him in conflict with one of his group’s imperatives no matter which solution he adopts…”
The rise of the concept of “intersectionality” reflects Ellul’s analysis but what the concept uncovers in truth is a moral morass of multilayered levels of oppression from which there is no exit or solution. Revolutionary violence inevitably emerges as the need for a cathartic purge from all the entanglements in injustice and this flame is fueled by increasingly more strident propaganda.
“Man needs to be right in his own eyes… He feels the need to belong to a group. What matters is not to be just, or to act just, or that the group to which one belongs is just – but to seem just, to find reasons for asserting that one is just, and to have these reason shared by one’s audience. This corresponds to man’s refusal to see reality – his own reality first of all – as it is, for that would be intolerable; it also corresponds to his refusal to acknowledge that he may be wrong. Before himself and others, man is constantly pleading his own case and working to find good reasons for what he does and has done. Of course, the whole process is unconscious… What American psychologists call rationalization…” 155.
This too is the fruit of our secularization: one no longer fears the judgment of God but wants to be on the so-called “right side of history,” as if history were God.
Note: if the foregoing is right, how mistaken is the theological cliché that modern man no longer asks the question of justification. In fact, the question of justification is urgent but also unanswerable in the total world of modern propaganda just because the answers which propaganda provides cannot allow anyone to see the truth about themselves which comes from the scrutiny of the Father in heaven according to Jesus, who sees in secret and knows in secret the hidden desires of the human heart. Preaching to the modern man, therefore, would excavate hermeneutically this divine pressure on the human creature which is experienced in the felt need for some justification and to expose all the false answers to that need provided by propaganda. It would penetrate to this underlying hopelessness of finding justification by surrender to propaganda and its group identities. It would raise the very provocative question that it is in fact God who is accusing the man who “needs to be right in his own eyes.” In this way it would challenge all the foregoing assumptions of the world of modern propaganda about happiness in this life, the authority of “facts,” the moral goodness of humanity and the myth of human progress.
The Churches: “Obviously, church members are caught in the net of propaganda and react pretty much like everyone else. As a result, an almost complete disassociation takes place between their Christianity and their behavior. Their Christianity remains a spiritual and purely internal thing. But their behavior is dictated by various appurtenances, and particularly by propaganda.” 228 “They take the panorama of the various propagandas for living political reality, and do not see where they can insert their Christianity in that fictitious panorama. Thus, like all the others, they are stumped, and this fact removes all weight from their belief. At the same time, because of its psychological effects, propaganda makes the propagation of Christianity increasingly difficult. The psychological structures built by propaganda are not propitious to Christian beliefs.…” 229
Propaganda faces the church with the following dilemma: either not to make propaganda – but, then, while the church slowly and carefully wins a man to Christianity, the mass media quickly mobilize the masses, and churchmen gain the impression of being “out of step,” on the fringes of history, and without power to change a thing. Or to make propaganda – this dilemma is surely one of the most cruel with which the churches are faced at present for it seems that people manipulated by propaganda become increasingly impervious to spiritual realities, less and less suited for the autonomy of Christian life.” 229
“Propaganda is a total system that one must accept or reject in its entirety. If the church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all, Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity.… Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all of its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times there appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by adjusting to the mileu.” 230
The moral of the story: “No one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his goods unless he first ties up the strongman.” Breaking free within the world of modern propaganda will require a deep reformation for churches who have spent everything for the last several centuries on accommodating themselves to it. Such a church will not “take sides” in the world of modern propaganda, but make sides. Propagating the gospel will not be an exercise of propaganda, but a proclamation in word and deed of the God of the gospel who has his own agenda which cuts through the claims and counterclaims of identity politics to create beloved community inclusive of those polarized or alienated by the technocratic juggernaut.