"In the long run, illusions will aggravate what they provisionally obscure." - Reinhold Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires (1959), p. 216
"As I observe the facts, I realize that man is terribly malleable, uncertain of himself, ready to accept and follow many suggestions, and is tossed about by all the winds of doctrine." - Jacques Ellul, from his introduction to Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (Vintage, 1962), p. xv.
Ellul's
sociological survey of state
propaganda - its methods, goals and consequences - remains a foundational classic on the topic even after half a century. Only
Edward L. Bernays'
Propaganda (
1928) is more widely cited, and deals more with the mechanics of
manipulation than wider questions of ethics or democracy;
PR is one thing, after all, manoeuvring an entire polity something else. Or is it?
Though many other scholars have examined the techniques of public
manipulation in particular regimes (e.g.
Richard Evans on Nazi Germany,
Czeslaw Milosz1 on Soviet-occupied Poland,
Aldous Huxley2 on post-war Britain,
Morris Berman on modern corporate America), Ellul begins from the crucial premise that all governments must engage regularly in propaganda exercises; that objectively speaking, the active shaping of thought across the
body politic represents an indispensible tool of
government in urban, industrial society.
"The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action. It is no longer to change adherence to a doctrine, but to make the individual cling irrationally to a process ... It is no longer to lead to a choice, but to loosen the reflexes. It is no longer to transform an opinion, but to arouse an active, mythic belief." (25)
Ellul comes to this overarching view of administrative
manipulation honestly; he was dismissed from his academic post by
Vichy officials and enrolled in the
French Resistance. He then watched as the same communication techniques of political persuasion used by an occupying
totalitarian regime were adopted by a nationalist democratic government like
De Gaulle's as it wrestled with
separatism and post-colonial violence. When it comes to propaganda,
plus ca change.
Ellul examines the methods and motives of the 'convincing state', its publications and announcements, only to conclude most governments seek not to "win over" their citizenry so much as to utilize their traditional fears and prejudices for unstated, more pragmatic ends. Goals like economic advancement, military success, civil peace or cultural diversification.
"In a society where propaganda - direct or indirect, conscious or subconscious - absorbs all the means of communication or education, propaganda informs culture and, in a certain sense, is culture." (110)
That may sound like a
post-modern truism now, but fifty years ago when Ellul was first translated into English it struck Anglo-American thinkers like
Neil Postman3 (
Amusing Ourselves to Death),
Marshall McLuhan (
The Medium is the Message) and
Noam Chomsky (
Manufacturing Consent) as vitally important. The ascent of
commercial television, glossy advertising and
Madision Avenue (not to mention
the Rand Corporation and
public broadcasting, or the dinner-time war news from Vietnam contrasted against the
Pentagon Papers) seemed to confirm subtle strands of invisible influence behind most
popular culture.
Arguably, one of the most important sections (pp. 115-130) describes what we now call "
astroturfing", namely the role of propaganda in stimulating public demand for government
intervention. That distinction is vital, given the prevailing view of what propaganda seeks to achieve.
Mistakenly, many pundits critical of government (on both the ideological right and left) hew to the vague notion that senior officials and administrators want to 'tell people what to think'. This is simply inaccurate; few senior bureaucrats spend much time considering (or caring about) general
public opinion when matters of policy or
statecraft are debated. However, political
expedience can work wonders if public demand is engineered, provoking calls for those actions government had already planned. On that front, skillful use of
sympathetic media, off-the-record sources, anonymous leaks, funded
think tank research and strategic opinion polling can be crucial. That is the real power of propaganda. Or as Ellul puts it:
Democracy is based on the concept that man is rational and capable of seeing clearly ... this is a highly doubtful proposition ... Public opinion is so variable and fluctuating that government could never base a course of action on it ... Only one solution is possible: as the government cannot follow opinion, opinion must follow the government. The democratic State, precisely because it believes in the expression of public opinion and does not gag it, must shape and channel that public opinion if it wants to be realistic." (124-125)
The logic of this diagnosis, once established, leads to a succession of other unpalatable truths about democratic process: that the 'will of the people' and 'consent of the governed' is largely planned (p. 132); that education and media services offer up propaganda en masse, even if it has a generally
humanist bent (p. 138); that facts, values, statistics and context are often provided by government only to muddy the thinking of citizens and voters (p. 170), and; ultimately,
private life,
secure communications and
personal space are anathema to the propaganda efforts of the state.
That last point is worth mulling over:
privacy allows an individual the rational space and objective distance necessary to cultivate skepticism of government claims (p. 191). So read on, good citizen, but be mindful. The concept of the
noble lie is an ancient notion, found as far back as Plato's
Republic, but consider rather the implications of
ignoble truth. At its core, that is propaganda.
Notes:
1 On early Communist Party efforts in 1940s Warsaw, Milosz noted dryly that "propaganda - pushed often to the point of the ridiculous - does not indicate a high degree of self-confidence." (From The Captive Mind, Vintage edition 1990, p. 35)
2 Huxley was wholly ambivalent about modern communications and the potential effects on thoughtful culture, stating that "in regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies, the development of a vast communications industry concerned in the main with neither the true nor the false, but with the unreal." (Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, p. 295)
3 Postman argued convincingly in the early Reagan era that political discourse had devolved into a form of forced amnesia, writing that "we do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember ... the politics of image and instantaneous news provides no such context and is, in fact, hampered by attempts to provide any. A mirror reflects only what you are wearing today. It is silent about yesterday." (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985, p. 137)