Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitude

  • Page v Ellul regards propaganda as a sociological phenomenon rather than as something made by certain people for certain purposes.
  • Page v modern propaganda has long disdained the ridiculous lies of past and outmoded forms of propaganda. It operates instead with many different kinds of truths- half truth, limited truth, truth out of context. Even Goebbels always insisted that Wehrmacht communiqués be as accurate as possible.
  • Page vi it aims to intensify existing trends, to sharpen and focus them, and, above all, to lead men to action (or, when it is directed at immovable opponents, to non- action through terror or discouragement, to prevent them from interfering).
  • Page vi Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of "judging for themselves." They literally need propaganda. Preface
  • Page x To study anything properly, one must put aside ethical judgments.
  • Page x Perhaps an objective study will lead us back to them, but only later, and with full cognizance of the facts.
  • Page xi "Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations."* 4
  • Page xii To study propaganda we must turn not to the psychologist, but to the propagandist; we must examine not a test group, but a whole nation subjected to real and effective propaganda.
  • Page xv Modern man worships "facts"- that is, he accepts "facts" as the ultimate reality. He is 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.
  • Page xv In my opinion, necessity never establishes legitimacy; the world of necessity is a world of weakness, a world that denies man. To say that a phenomenon is necessary means, for me, that it denies man: its necessity is proof of its power, not proof of its excellence.
  • Page xvii Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world.
  • Page xviii In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace.

    Chapter I-The Characteristics of Propaganda

  • Page 5 Stalinist propaganda was in great measure founded on Pavlov's theory of the conditioned reflex. Hitlerian propaganda was in great measure founded on Freud's theory of repression and libido American propaganda is founded in great measure on Dewey's theory of teaching. 1. External Characteristics
  • Page 6 Any modern propaganda will, first of all, address itself at one and the same time to the individual and to the masses. It cannot separate the two elements.
  • Page 7 the individual never is considered as an individual, but always in terms of what he has in common with others, such as his motivations, his feelings, or his myths. He is reduced to an average; and, except for a small percentage, action based on averages will be effectual.
  • Page 7 the individual must never be considered as being alone; the listener to a radio broadcast, though actually alone, is nevertheless part of a large group, and he is aware of it.
  • Page 7 all individuals are accomplices and influence each other without knowing
  • Page 7 although apparently one deals here with a single individual, one deals in reality with a unit submerged into an invisible crowd composed of all those who have been interviewed, who are being interviewed, and who will be interviewed, because they hold similar ideas and live by the same myths, and especially because they are targets of the same organism.
  • Page 7 To be effective, it must give the impression of being personal, for we must never forget that the mass is composed of individuals, and is in fact nothing but assembled individuals.
  • Page 8 Thus all modern propaganda profits from the structure of the mass, but exploits the individual's need for self-affirmation; and the two actions must be conducted jointly, simultaneously. Of course this operation is greatly facilitated by the existence of the modern mass media of communication, which have precisely this remarkable effect of reaching the whole crowd all at once, and yet reaching each one in that crowd.
  • Page 9 The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass: it is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.
  • Page 11 It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.
  • Page 11 Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence.
  • Page 12 The enemy (while still remaining the enemy, and because he is the enemy) is converted into a supporter of the regime. This is not simply a very useful and effective means of propaganda.
  • Page 12 the propaganda of self-criticism
  • Page 13 Educational methods play an immense role in political indoctrination
  • Page 15 No direct propaganda can be effective without pre-propaganda, which, without direct or noticeable aggression, is limited to creating ambiguities, reducing prejudices, and spreading images, apparently without purpose.
  • Page 15 The spectator will be much more disposed to believe in the grandeur of France when he has seen a dozen films on French petroleum, railroads, or jetliners.
  • Page 15 We must also distinguish between covert propaganda and overt propaganda. The former tends to hide its aims, identity, significance, and source. The people are not aware that someone is trying to influence them, and do not feel that they are being pushed in a certain direction. This is often called "black propaganda." It also make use of mystery and silence. The other kind, "white propaganda," is open and aboveboard. There is a Ministry of Propaganda; one admits that propaganda is being made; its source is known; its aims and intentions are identified. The public knows that an attempt is being made to influence it.
  • Page 15 Overt propaganda is necessary for attacking enemies; it alone is capable of reassuring one's own forces, it is a manifestation of strength and good organization, a token of victory. But covert propaganda is more effective if the aim is to push one's supporters in a certain direction without their being aware of
  • Page 17 Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference.
  • Page 17 He must not be allowed a moment of meditation or reflection in which to see himself vis-à-vis the propagandist, as happens when the propaganda is not continuous.
  • Page 18 It is always surprising that the content of propaganda can be so inconsistent that it can approve today what it condemned yesterday.
  • Page 19 none of the great techniques of propaganda can be effective in two weeks.
  • Page 20 continuous agitation produced artificially even when nothing in the events of the day justifies or arouses excitement. Therefore, continuing propaganda must slowly create a climate first, and then prevent the individual from noticing a particular propaganda operation in contrast to ordinary daily events.
  • Page 20 No propaganda is possible unless psychological influence rests on reality,*11 and the recruiting of individuals into cadres or movements goes hand in hand with psychological manipulation.
  • Page 21 It is too often believed that propaganda serves the purpose of sugar-coating bitter pills, of making people accept policies they would not accept spontaneously. But in most cases propaganda seeks to point out courses of action desirable in themselves, such as helpful reforms. Propaganda then becomes this mixture of the actual satisfaction given to the people by the reforms and subsequent exploitation of that satisfaction.
  • Page 22 We can hardly expect great results from a simple dissemination of words unless we prepare for it by education (pre-propaganda) and sustain it by organization and action.
  • Page 22 All propaganda that makes false promises turns against the propagandist.
  • Page 23 Propaganda, then, is no longer mere words; it incites an enormous demonstration by the masses and thus becomes a fact-which gives strength to the words outside the frontiers.
  • Page 25 The aim of modern propaganda is no longer to modify ideas, but to provoke action.
  • Page 26 the injection of propaganda into the mechanism of popular action actually suppresses liberal democracy, after which we are no longer dealing with votes or the people's sovereignty; propaganda therefore aims solely at participation. The participation may be active or passive: active, if propaganda has been able to mobilize the individual for action; passive, if the individual does not act directly but psychologically supports that action.
  • Page 27 To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision.*18 It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious.
  • Page 27 if the classic but outmoded view of propaganda consists in defining it as an adherence of man to an orthodoxy, true modern propaganda seeks, on the contrary, to obtain an orthopraxy-an action that in itself, and not because of the value judgments of the person who is acting, leads directly to a goal, which for the individual is not a conscious and intentional objective to be attained, but which is considered such by the propagandist.
  • Page 30 But we must divide propaganda into two phases. There is pre-propaganda (or sub-propaganda) and there is active propaganda.
  • Page 30 The essential objective of pre-propaganda is to prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective; it has nothing to do with an opinion, an idea, a doctrine. It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes. It must be continuous, slow, imperceptible. Man must be penetrated in order to shape such tendencies. He must be made to live in a certain psychological climate.
  • Page 31 Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual by training him so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions.
  • Page 31 A real psychic re- formation must be undertaken, so that after months of patient work a crowd will react automatically in the hoped- for direction to some image. But this preparatory work is not yet propaganda, for it is not yet immediately applicable to a concrete case.
  • Page 31 the propagandist tries to create myths by which man will live, which respond to his sense of the sacred. By "myth" we mean an all-encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desirable objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become strongly colored, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the conscious all that is not related to it.
  • Page 31 Without giving a metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Führer, of Communist society, of productivity. Eventually the myth takes possession of a man's mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it.
  • Page 32 Once he is ready, he can be mobilized effectively in very different directions-but of course the myth and the reflex must be continually rejuvenated and revived or they will atrophy. That is why pre-propaganda must be constant, whereas active propaganda can be sporadic when the goal is a particular action or involvement.*23

    2. Internal Characteristics

  • Page 34 Methods and arguments must be tailored to the type of man to be reached.
  • Page 34 The technique of propaganda consists in precisely calculating the desired action in terms of the individual who is to be made to act.
  • Page 34 never make a direct attack on an established, reasoned, durable opinion or an accepted cliché, a fixed pattern.
  • Page 35 Attacking an established opinion or stereotype head on would make the propagandee aware of basic inconsistencies and would produce unexpected results.*27 The skillful propagandist will seek to obtain action without demanding consistency, without fighting prejudices and images, by taking his stance deliberately on inconsistencies.
  • Page 35 Thus, existing opinion is not to be contradicted, but utilized.
  • Page 36 propaganda cannot create something out of nothing. It must attach itself to a feeling, an idea; it must build on a foundation already present in the individual.
  • Page 36 The conditioned reflex can be established only on an innate reflex or a prior conditioned reflex.
  • Page 36 Action cannot be obtained unless it responds to a group of already established tendencies or attitudes stemming from the schools, the environment, the regime, the churches, and so on. Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material; it does not create it.
  • Page 36 All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, peace, security, work) or a psychological need.*32
  • Page 37 The group must need something, and the propaganda must respond to that need.
  • Page 38 Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.
  • Page 38 must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end.*33 Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.
  • Page 39 By presuppositions we mean a collection of feelings, beliefs, and images by which one unconsciously judges events and things without questioning them, or even noticing them.
  • Page 40 it must always go in the same direction as society; it can only reinforce society.
  • Page 40 A propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation would have no audience at all.
  • Page 40 No propaganda can succeed if it defends outdated production methods or obsolete social or administrative institutions.
  • Page 41 propaganda will turn a normal feeling of patriotism into a raging nationalism. It not only reflects myths and presuppositions, it hardens them, sharpens them, invests them with the power of shock and action.
  • Page 43 A man will become excited over a new automobile because it is immediate evidence of his deep belief in progress and technology.
  • Page 44 propaganda can succeed only when man feels challenged. It can have no influence when the individual is stabilized, relaxing in his slippers in the midst of total security.
  • Page 44 addition, he obviously has a very limited capacity for attention and awareness; one event pushes the preceding one into oblivion.
  • Page 45 It is impossible to base a propaganda campaign on an event that no longer worries the public; it is forgotten and the public has grown accustomed to
  • Page 45 propaganda for peace can bear fruit only when there is fear of war.
  • Page 46 The terms, the words, the subjects that propaganda utilizes must have in themselves the power to break the barrier of the individual's indifference. They must penetrate like bullets; they must spontaneously evoke a set of images and have a certain grandeur of their own.
  • Page 46 To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect.
  • Page 46 One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought. And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them.
  • Page 49 Propaganda is effective not when based on an individual prejudice, but when based on a collective center of interest, shared by the crowds.
  • Page 50 propaganda: the more intense the life of a group to which an individual belongs, the more active and effective propaganda is.
  • Page 51 (1) The propagandist must place his propaganda inside the limits of the foci of interest,
  • Page 51 (2) The propagandist must understand that his propaganda has the greatest chance for success where the collective life of the individuals he seeks to influence is most intense. (3) The propagandist must remember that collective life is most intense where it revolves around a focus of interest.
  • Page 52 We have not yet considered a problem, familiar but too often ignored: the relationship between propaganda and truth or, rather, between propaganda and accuracy of facts. We shall speak henceforth of accuracy or reality, and not of "truth," which is an inappropriate term here.
  • Page 52 The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of tall stories, a tissue of lies, and that lies are necessary for effective propaganda.
  • Page 52 self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.
  • Page 53 so. For a long time propagandists have recognized that lying must be avoided.*46 "In propaganda, truth pays off"-this formula has been increasingly accepted.
  • Page 53 Goebbels's insistence that facts to be disseminated must be accurate.*
  • Page 53 The truth that pays off is in the realm of facts. The necessary falsehoods, which also pay off, are in the realm of intentions and interpretations. This is a fundamental rule for propaganda analysis.
  • Page 54 Similarly, there is no good reason to launch a propaganda campaign based on unbelievable or false facts.
  • Page 55 propaganda can effectively rest on a claim that some fact is untrue which may actually be true but is difficult to prove.
  • Page 55 most of the time the fact is presented in such a fashion that the listener or reader cannot really understand it or draw any conclusions from it.
  • Page 56 the publication of a true fact in its raw state is not dangerous.
  • Page 56 When it would be dangerous to let a fact be known, the modern propagandist prefers to hide it, to say nothing rather than to lie.
  • Page 56 Silence is also one way to pervert known facts by modifying their context.
  • Page 56 there is the use of accurate facts by propaganda. Based on them, the mechanism of suggestion can work best.
  • Page 56 Americans call this technique innuendo. Facts are treated in such a fashion that they draw their listener into an irresistible sociological current.
  • Page 56 The public is left to draw obvious conclusions from a cleverly presented truth,*
  • Page 58 Propaganda by its very nature is an enterprise for perverting the significance of events and of insinuating false intentions.
  • Page 58 the propagandist must insist on the purity of his own intentions and, at the same time, hurl accusations at his enemy.
  • Page 58 The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit.
  • Page 58 He who intends to establish a dictatorship always insists that his adversaries are bent on dictatorship.
  • Page 58 the public cannot see this because the revelation is interwoven with facts.
  • Page 58 The second element of falsehood is that the propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts: government, party chief, general, company director. Propaganda never can reveal its true projects and plans or divulge government secrets.
  • Page 59 Propaganda must serve instead as a veil for such projects, masking true intentions.*55 It must be in effect a smokescreen.
  • Page 59 Propaganda is necessarily false when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.
  • Page 60 it is possible that when the United States makes its propaganda for freedom, it really thinks it is defending freedom;
  • Page 61 When the eyeglasses are out of focus, everything one sees through them is distorted.
  • Page 61 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.

    3. Categories of Propaganda

  • Page 61 Types of propaganda can be distinguished by the regimes that employ them.
  • Page 62 First we must distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda.
  • Page 62 the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus to impose itself on other groups.
  • Page 62 We call this phenomenon "sociological" propaganda, to show, first of all, that the entire group, consciously or not, expresses itself in this fashion; and to indicate, secondly, that its influence aims much more at an entire style of life than at opinions or even one particular course of behavior.*58
  • Page 63 The propaganda of Christianity in the middle ages is an example of this type of sociological propaganda;
  • Page 63 Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context.
  • Page 64 Sociological propaganda produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things, a certain concept of human relations, which unconsciously molds individuals and makes them conform to society.
  • Page 64 Sociological propaganda springs up spontaneously; it is not the result of deliberate propaganda action.
  • Page 64 Sociological propaganda expresses itself in many different ways-in advertising, in the movies (commercial and non-political films), in technology in general, in education, in the Reader's Digest; and in social service, case work, and settlement houses. All these influences are in basic accord with each other and lead spontaneously in the same direction;
  • Page 64 Unintentional (at least in the first stage), non-political, organized along spontaneous patterns and rhythms, the activities we have lumped together (from a concept that might be judged arbitrary or artificial) are not considered propaganda by either sociologists or the average public.
  • Page 65 Such activities are propaganda to the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a certain general conception of society, a particular way of life.
  • Page 66 sociological propaganda will appear to be the medium that has prepared the ground for direct propaganda;
  • Page 66 becomes identified with sub-propaganda.
  • Page 67 Sociological propaganda, involuntary at first, becomes more and more deliberate, and ends up by exercising influence.
  • Page 67 leads people to believe that the civilization representing their way of life is best.
  • Page 68 Mass production requires mass consumption, but there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are.
  • Page 68 Thus conformity of life and conformity of thought are indissolubly linked.
  • Page 68 Americans seek to define the American way of life, to make it conscious, explicit, theoretical, worthy. Therefore the soulsearching and inflexibility, with excessive affirmations designed to mask the weakness of the ideological position. All this obviously constitutes an ideal framework for organized propaganda.
  • Page 69 Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Agriculture. Other groups aim at social and political reforms: the American Legion, the League of Women Voters, and the like. These groups employ lobbying to influence the government and the classic forms of propaganda to influence the public; through films, meetings, and radio, they try to make the public aware of their ideological aims.
  • Page 69 The agitator is especially active in the most unorganized groups of the United States. He uses the anxiety psychoses of the lower middle class, the neo-proletarian, the immigrant, the demobilized soldier-people who are not yet integrated into American society or who have not yet adopted ready-made habits and ideas. The agitator uses the American Way of Life to provoke anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Negro, and xenophobic currents of opinion. He makes groups act in the illogical yet coherent, Manichaean universe of propaganda, of which we will have more to say.
  • Page 69 these agitators do not work for a political party; it is not clear which interests they serve. They are neither Capitalists nor Communists, but they deeply influence American public opinion, and their influence may crystalize suddenly in unexpected forms.
  • Page 70 The second great distinction within the general phenomenon of propaganda is the distinction between propaganda of agitation and propaganda of integration.
  • Page 71 Propaganda of agitation, being the most visible and widespread, generally attracts all the attention.
  • Page 71 It is led by a party seeking to destroy the government or the established order.
  • Page 71 Spartacus relied on this kind of propaganda, as did the communes, the Crusades, the French movement of 1793, and so on.
  • Page 71 Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost.
  • Page 72 Mao was perfectly right in saying that the enemy is found within each person.*
  • Page 72 Propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the individual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach.
  • Page 72 Agitation propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration.
  • Page 73 The individual cannot be made to live in a state of perpetual enthusiasm and insecurity.
  • Page 73 This subversive propaganda of agitation is obviously the flashiest: it attracts attention because of its explosive and revolutionary character. It is also the easiest to make; in order to succeed, it need only be addressed to the most simple and violent sentiments through the most elementary means. Hate is generally its most profitable resource.
  • Page 73 Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment; it consists of attributing one's misfortunes and sins to "another," who must be killed in order to assure the disappearance of those misfortunes and sins.
  • Page 73 difference. Propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided that he is not too powerful.
  • Page 73 hatred once provoked continues to reproduce itself.
  • Page 74 the less educated and informed the people to whom propaganda of agitation is addressed, the easier it is to make such propaganda.
  • Page 74 In contrast to this propaganda of agitation is the propaganda of integration-propaganda of conformity.
  • Page 75 one needs total adherence to a society's truths and behavioral patterns.
  • Page 75 He must share the stereotypes, beliefs, and reactions of the group; he must be an active participant in its economic, ethical, esthetic, and political doings.
  • Page 75 he is often reminded, he can fulfill himself only through this collectivity, as a member of the group.*
  • Page 75 such propaganda is confined to rationalizing an existing situation, to transforming unconscious actions of members of a society into consciously desired activity that is visible, laudable, and justified-
  • Page 75 Integration propaganda aims at stabilizing the social body, at unifying and reinforcing it.
  • Page 76 integration propaganda is much more subtle and complex than agitation propaganda. It seeks not a temporary excitement but a total molding of the person in depth.
  • Page 76 the more comfortable, cultivated, and informed the milieu to which it is addressed, the better it works. Intellectuals are more sensitive than peasants to integration propaganda.
  • Page 76 When a revolutionary movement is launched, it operates, as we have said, with agitation propaganda; but once the revolutionary party has taken power, it must begin immediately to operate with integration propaganda
  • Page 76 But the transition from one type of propaganda to the other is extremely delicate and difficult.
  • Page 77 integration propaganda acts slowly, gradually, and imperceptibly. After the masses have been subjected to agitation
  • Page 77 propaganda, to neutralize their aroused impulses with integration propaganda without being swept away by the masses is a delicate problem.
  • Page 79 Classic propaganda, as one usually thinks of it, is a vertical propaganda-in the sense that it is made by a leader, a technician, a political or religious head who acts from the superior position of his authority and seeks to influence the crowd below. Such propaganda comes from above. It is conceived in the secret recesses of political enclaves; it uses all technical methods of centralized mass communication; it envelops a mass of individuals; but those who practice it are on the outside.
  • Page 81 This propaganda can be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader.
  • Page 81 such propaganda therefore always seeks "conscious adherence."
  • Page 81 The leader, the propagandist, is there only as a sort of animator or discussion leader; sometimes his presence and his identity are not even known-for example, the "ghost writer" in certain American groups,
  • Page 81 The individual's adherence to his group is "conscious" because he is aware of it and recognizes it, but it is ultimately involuntary because he is trapped in a dialectic and in a group that leads him unfailingly to this adherence. His adherence is also "intellectual" because he can express his conviction clearly and logically, but it is not genuine because the information, the data, the reasoning that have led him to adhere to the group were themselves deliberately falsified in order to lead him there.
  • Page 83 horizontal propaganda is identity between propaganda and education.
  • Page 84 information is addressed to reason and experience-it furnishes facts; propaganda is addressed to feelings and passions-it is irrational. There is, of course, some truth in this, but the reality is not so simple.
  • Page 85 It is unusual nowadays to find a frenzied propaganda composed solely of claims without relation to reality.
  • Page 85 Modern man needs a relation to facts, a self-justification to convince himself that by acting in a certain way he is obeying reason and proved experience.
  • > Page 85 Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda text leads ultimately to less conviction and participation than does a more "informative" and reasonable text on the same subject.
  • > Page 86 What makes him act is the emotional pressure, the vision of a future, the myth. The problem is to create an irrational response on the basis of rational and factual elements.
  • > Page 87 A surfeit of data, far from permitting people to make judgments and form opinions, prevents them from doing so and actually paralyzes them. They are caught in a web of facts and must remain at the level of the facts they have been given. They cannot even form a choice or a judgment in other areas or on other subjects.

    Chapter II -- The Conditions for the Existence of Propaganda

  • > Page 89 Present-day propaganda meetings no longer bear any relation to past assemblies, to the meetings of the Athenians in the Agora or of the Romans in the Forum. Then there is the scientific research in all the other fields -- sociology and psychology, for example.
  • > Page 89 The findings of social psychology, depth psychology, behavorism, group sociology, sociology of public opinion are the very foundations of the propagandist's work.
  • > Page 89 reach the enemy, one must use his weapons; this undeniable argument is the key to the systematic development of propaganda.

    1. The Sociological Conditions

  • Page 90 For propaganda to succeed, a society must first have two complementary qualities: it must be both an individualist and a mass society.
  • Page 91 An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups.
  • Page 91 Nor is the organic group sensitive to psychological contagion, which is so important to the success of mass propaganda.
  • Page 92 Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was left substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment, generally urban, and thereby "uprooted." He no longer had a traditional place in which to live; he was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry.
  • Page 92 The common error was to believe that if the individual were liberated from the smaller organic groups he would be set free. But in actual fact he was exposed to the influence of mass currents, to the influence of the state, and direct integration into mass society.
  • Page 93 the men of a mass society have the same preoccupations, the same interest in technical matters, the same mythical beliefs, the same prejudices.*
  • Page 96 The leader must be a sublimation of the "ordinary man." He must not seem to be of a different quality. The ordinary man must not feel that the leader transcends him.
  • Page 102 without the mass media there can be no modern propaganda.
  • Page 103 Only through concentration in a few hands of a large number of media can one attain a true orchestration, a continuity, and an application of scientific methods of influencing individuals.
  • Page 104 The fact is even more striking with regard to the newspapers, for the reader buys a paper he likes, a paper in which he finds his own ideas and opinions well reflected. This is the only paper he wants, so that one can say he really wants to be propagandized. He wants to submit to this influence and actually exercises his choice in the direction of the propaganda he wishes to receive.
  • Page 104 the propagandist need no longer beat the drum and lead the parade in order to establish a following. This happens all by itself through the effects of the communication media -- they have their own power of attraction and act on individuals in such a fashion as to transform them into a collective, a public, a mass.
  • Page 104 The buying of a TV set, though an individual act, inserts the individual into the psychological and behavioral structure of the mass. 2. Objective Conditions of Total Propaganda
  • Page 106 In Western countries propaganda addresses itself to the large average mass, which alone represents a real force.
  • Page 106 For propaganda to be effective, the propagandee must have a certain store of ideas and a number of conditioned reflexes. These are acquired only with a little affluence, some education, and peace of mind springing from relative security.
  • Page 106 all propagandists come from the upper middle class,
  • Page 107 That is why adjustment has become one of the key words of all psychological influence. Whether it is a question of adaptation to working conditions, to consumption, or to milieu, a clear and conscious intent to integrate people into the "normal" pattern prevails everywhere. This is the summit of propaganda action.
  • Page 108 The creation of normalcy in our society can take one of two shapes. It can be the result of scientific, psycho-sociological analysis based on statistics -- that is, the American type of normalcy. It can also be ideological and doctrinaire -- that is, the Communist type. But the results are identical: such normalcy necessarily gives rise to propaganda that can reduce the individual to the pattern most useful to society.
  • Page 108 People used to think that learning to read evidenced human progress; they still celebrate the decline of illiteracy as a great victory; they condemn countries with a large proportion of illiterates; they think that reading is a road to freedom. All this is debatable, for the important tiling is not to be able to read, but to understand what one reads, to reflect on and judge what one reads.
  • Page 108 The vast majority of people, perhaps 90 percent, know how to read, but do not exercise their intelligence beyond this. They attribute authority and eminent value to the printed word, or, conversely, reject it altogether.
  • Page 109 the most obvious result of primary education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to make the individual susceptible to super-propaganda.*
  • Page 111 Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever.
  • Page 112 As noted earlier, poor and uncultured populations are appropriate objects of propaganda of agitation and subversion. The more miserable and ignorant a person is, the more easily will he be plunged into a rebel movement. But to go beyond this, to do a more profound propaganda job on him, one must educate him. This corresponds to the need for "political education." Conversely, an individual of the middle class, of good general culture, will be less susceptible to agitation propaganda but ideal prey of integration propaganda.
  • Page 112 to distinguish exactly between propaganda and information is impossible.
  • Page 112 for propaganda to succeed, it must have reference to political or economic reality.
  • Page 112 It grafts itself onto an already existing psychological reality.
  • Page 114 propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality.
  • Page 114 The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist. Chapter III -- The Necessity for Propaganda
  • Page 118 A common view of propaganda is that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people, cheats and authoritarian rulers who want to dominate a population; that it is the handmaiden of more or less illegitimate powers. This view always thinks of propaganda as being made voluntarily; it assumes that a man decides "to make propaganda," that a government establishes a Propaganda Ministry, and that things just develop from there on. According to this view, the public is just an object, a passive crowd that one can manipulate, influence, and use. And this notion is held not only by those who think one can manipulate the crowds but also by those who think propaganda is not very effective and can be resisted easily.
  • Page 119 This view seems to me completely wrong. A simple fact should lead us at least to question it: nowadays propaganda pervades all aspects of public life. We know that the psychological factor, which includes encirclement, integration into a group, and participation in action, in addition to personal conviction, is decisive.
  • Page 121 For propaganda to succeed, it must correspond to a need for propaganda on the individual's part.
  • Page 121 Propagandists would not exist without potential propagandees to begin with.
  • Page 121 To understand that propaganda is not just a deliberate and more or less arbitrary creation by some people in power is therefore essential. It is a strictly sociological phenomenon, in the sense that it has its roots and reasons in the need of the group that will sustain it. We are thus face to face with a dual need: the need on the part of regimes to make propaganda, and the need of the propagandee. These two conditions correspond to and complement each other in the development of propaganda.
  • Page 123 Theoretically, democracy is political expression of mass opinion. Most people consider it simple to translate this opinion into action, and consider it legitimate that the government should bend to the popular will. Unfortunately, in reality all this is much less clear and not so simple. More and more we know, for example, that public
  • Page 124 opinion does not express itself at the polls and is a long way from expressing itself clearly in political trends.
  • Page 124 Democracy is based on the concept that man is rational and capable of seeing clearly what is in his own interest, but the study of public opinion suggests this is a highly doubtful proposition.
  • Page 126 The democratic State, precisely because it believes in the expression of public opinion and does not gag it, must channel and shape that opinion if it wants to be realistic and not follow an ideological dream.
  • Page 131 When a decision seems to meet with resistance or is not fully accepted, propaganda is addressed to the masses to set them in motion; the simple motion of the mass is enough to invest the decisions with validity: it is only an extension of the plebiscite.
  • Page 137 Any politically oriented education which creates certain "special values" is propaganda.

    2. The Individual's Necessity

  • Page 140 The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion:
  • Page 140 this gives them the feeling of participation. For this they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a "key" that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions.
  • Page 140 Never have men worked so much as in our society. Contrary to what is often said, man works much more nowadays than, for example, in the eighteenth century. Only the working hours have decreased. But the omnipresence of the duties of his work, the obligations and constraints, the actual working conditions, the intensity of work that never ends, make it weigh much more heavily on men today than on men in the past. Every modern man works more than the slave of long ago; standards have been adjusted downward. But whereas the slave worked only because he was forced to, modern man, who believes in his freedom and dignity, needs reasons and justifications to make himself work. Even the children in a modern nation do an amount of work at school which no child was ever asked to do before the beginning of the nineteenth century; there, too, justifications are needed.
  • Page 142 But modern man is not only forced to make sacrifices in his work; he is also saddled by his government with other sacrifices, such as ever-increasing taxes.
  • Page 143 Aside from all these sacrifices, man is not automatically adjusted to the living conditions imposed on him by modern society. Psychologists and sociologists are aware of the great problem of adjusting the normal man to 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 difficulty of accepting the never-changing daily routine, the lack of personal accomplishment, the absence of an apparent meaning in 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. What can one do?
  • Page 145 The news is only about trouble, danger, and problems. This gives man the notion that he lives in a terrible and frightening era, that he lives amid catastrophes in a world where everything threatens his safety.
  • Page 146 absurd and incoherent world (for this he would have to be heroic, and even Camus, who considered this the only honest posture, was not really able to stick to it);
  • Page 146 nor can he accept the idea that the problems, which sprout all around him, cannot be solved, or that he himself has no value as an individual and is subject to the turn of events.
  • Page 146 the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be;
  • Page 147 News loses its frightening character when it offers information for which the listener already has a ready explanation in his mind, or for which he can easily find one.
  • Page 147 let us accept as a premise that he is more susceptible to suggestion, more credulous, more easily excited. Above all he is a victim of emptiness -- he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing -- something to fill his inner void. To fill this void he goes to the movies -- only a very temporary remedy.
  • Page 148 loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; that loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances.
  • Page 148 Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.
  • Page 149 But man cannot stand being unimportant; he cannot accept the status of a cipher. He needs to assert himself, to see himself as a hero. He needs to feel he is somebody and to be considered as such. He needs to express his authority, the drive for power and domination that is in every man.
  • Page 152 man always has a certain need to hate, just as he hides in his heart the urge to kill. Propaganda offers him an object of hatred, for all propaganda is aimed at an enemy.*
  • Page 152 Moreover, propaganda points out enemies that must be slain, transforming crime into a praiseworthy act.
  • Page 152 Propaganda can also provide release through devious channels. Authoritarian regimes know that people held very firmly in hand need some decompression, some safety valves. The government offers these itself. This role is played by satirical journals attacking the authorities, yet tolerated by the dictator (for example, Krokodil),*23 or by a wild holiday set aside for ridiculing the regime, yet paid for by the dictator (for example, the Friday of Sorrows in Guatemala). Clearly, such instruments are controlled by the regime. They serve the function of giving the people the impression that they are free, and of singling out those about to be purged by the government as guilty of all that the people dislike.
  • Page 154 With regard to real and conscious threats, a frequent reaction is to expand them with fables. Americans create fables about the Communist peril, just as the Communists create fables about the Fascist peril -- and at that moment anxiety sets in. It is tied to rumors, to the fact that the real situation is inassessable, to the diffuse climate of fear, and to the ricocheting of fear from one person to the next.
  • Page 154 demonstrate factually in a climate of anxiety that the feared danger is much smaller than it is believed to be, only increases anxiety; the information is used to prove that there is reason for fear.
  • Page 154 Man also feels himself the prey of the hostile impulses of others, another source of anxiety. Besides, he is plunged into conflicts inherent in our society which place him in conflict with himself, or rather place his experiences in conflict with the social imperatives.
  • Page 155 one of man's greatest inner needs is to feel that he is right. This need takes several forms. First, man needs to be right in his own eyes. He must be able to assert that he is right, that he does what he should, that he is worthy of his own respect.
  • Page 155 Then, man needs to be right in the eyes of those around him, his family, his milieu, his co-workers, his friends, his country.
  • Page 155 Finally, he feels the need to belong to a group, which he considers right and which he can proclaim as just, noble, and good.
  • Page 155 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 or has done. Of course, the whole process is unconscious.*
  • Page 157 It is difficult, if not impossible, to accept reality as it is and acknowledge the true reasons for our behavior, or to see clearly the motivations of a group to which we belong. If we practice a profession, we cannot limit ourselves to its financial rewards; we must also invest it with idealistic or moral justification.
  • Page 158 Propaganda attaches itself to man and forces him to play its game because of his overpowering need to be right and just.
  • Page 158 In every situation propaganda hands him the proof that he, personally, is in the right, that the action demanded of him is just, even if he has the dark, strong feeling that it is not. Propaganda appeases his tensions and resolves his conflicts. It offers facile, ready-made justifications, which are transmitted by society and easily believed. At the same time, propaganda has the freshness and novelty which correspond to new situations and give man the impression of having invented new ideals.
  • Page 159 Man, eager for self- justification, throws himself in the direction of a propaganda that justifies him and thus eliminates one of the sources of his anxiety.
  • Page 159 propaganda also eliminates anxieties stemming from irrational and disproportionate fears, for it gives man assurances equivalent to those formerly given him by religion. It offers him a simple and clear explanation of the world in which he lives -- to be sure, a false explanation far removed from reality, but one that is obvious and satisfying.
  • Page 160 The development of propaganda is no accident. The politician who uses it is not a monster; he fills a social demand. The propagandee is a close accomplice of the propagandist. Only with the propagandee's unconscious complicity can propaganda fulfill its function; and because propaganda satisfies him -- even if he protests against propaganda in abstracto, or considers himself immune to it -- he follows its route.
  • Page 160 Human Relations in social relationships, advertising or Human Engineering in the economy, propaganda in the strictest sense in the field of politics -- the need for psychological influence to spur allegiance and action is everywhere the decisive factor, which progress demands and which the individual seeks in order to be delivered from his own self. Chapter IV -- Psychological Effects of Propaganda
  • Page 161 A person subjected to propaganda does not remain intact or undamaged: not only will his opinions and attitudes be modified, but also his impulses and his mental and emotional structures. Propaganda's effect is more than external; it produces profound changes.
  • Page 162 If one looks at a propaganda campaign conducted by radio, it is almost impossible to divide its effects into those produced by the campaign and those produced by radio broadcasts in general.
  • Page 162 To study the psychological effects of propaganda, one would therefore have to study the effects of each of the communications media separately, and then the effects of their combination with the specific propaganda techniques.
  • Page 162 Once propaganda begins to utilize and direct an individual's hatreds, he no longer has any chance to retreat, to reduce his animosities, or to seek reconciliations with his opponents. Moreover, he now has a supply of ready-made judgments where he had only some vague notions before the propaganda set in; and those judgments permit him to face any situation. He will never again have reason to change judgments that he will thereafter consider the one and only truth.
  • Page 163 propaganda standardizes current ideas,*2 hardens prevailing stereotypes, and furnishes thought patterns in all areas. Thus it codifies social, political, and moral standards.*3 Of course, man needs to establish such standards and categories.*4 The difference is that propaganda gives an overwhelming force to the process: man can no longer modify his judgments and thought patterns. This force springs, on the one hand, from the character
  • Page 164 of the media employed, which give the appearance of objectivity to subjective impulses, and, on the other, from everybody's adherence to the same standards and prejudices.*5
  • Page 165 Through such a process of intense rationalization, propaganda builds monolithic individuals. It eliminates inner conflicts, tensions, self-criticism, self-doubt. And in this fashion it also builds a one-dimensional being without depth or range of possibilities. Such an individual will have rationalizations not only for past actions, but for the future as well.
  • Page 166 One can almost postulate that those who call every idea they do not share "propaganda" are themselves almost completely products of propaganda. Their refusal to examine and question ideas other than their own is characteristic of their condition.
  • Page 166 One might go further and say that propaganda tends to give a person a religious personality:*8 his psychological life is organized around an irrational, external, and collective tenet that provides a scale of values, rules of behavior, and a principle of social integration.
  • Page 167 In a society in the process of secularization, propaganda responds to the religious need, but lends much more vigor and intransigence to the resulting religious personality, in the pejorative sense of that term (as liberals employed it in the nineteenth century): a limited and rigid personality that mechanically applies divine commandments, is incapable of engaging in human dialogue, and will never question values that it has placed above the individual. All this is produced by propaganda, which pretends to have lost none of its humanity, to act for the good of mankind, and to represent the highest type of human being. In this respect, strict orthodoxies always have been the same.
  • Page 169 To be alienated means to be someone other (alienus) than oneself; it also can mean to belong to someone else. In a more profound sense, it means to be deprived of one's self, to be subjected to, or even identified with, someone else. That is definitely the effect of propaganda.*10 Propaganda strips the individual, robs him of part of himself, and makes him live an alien and artificial life, to such an extent that he becomes another person and obeys impulses foreign to him. He obeys someone else.*11
  • Page 170 The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another; this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-à-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself.*
  • Page 171 When he expresses public opinion in his words and gestures, he no longer expresses himself, but his society, his group.
  • Page 173 The propagandee finds himself in a psychological situation composed of the following elements: he lives vicariously, through an intermediary. He feels, thinks, and acts through the hero. He is under the guardianship and protection of his living god; he accepts being a child; he ceases to defend his own interests, for he knows his hero loves him and everything his hero decides is for the propagandee's own good; he thus compensates for the rigor of the sacrifices imposed on him. For this reason every regime that demands a certain amount of heroism must develop this propaganda of projection onto the hero (leader).
  • Page 178 propaganda, to reduce the tension it has created in the first place, offers him one, two, even three possible courses of action, and the propagandee considers himself a well-organized, fully aware individual when he chooses one of them.
  • Page 181 propaganda
  • Page 181 psychological manipulation designed to produce action,
  • Page 189 Propaganda seeks to deprive the enemy of confidence in the justice of his own cause, his country, his army, and his group, for the man who feels guilty loses his effectiveness and his desire to fight. To convince a man that those on his side, if not he himself, commit immoral and unjust acts is to bring on the disintegration of the group to which he belongs.
  • Page 192 The stereotype, which is stable, helps man to avoid thinking, to take a personal position, to form his own opinion. Man reacts constantly, as if by reflex, in the presence of the stimulus evoking the stereotype.

    1. Propaganda and Ideology

  • Page 193 society rests on certain beliefs and no social group can exist without such beliefs.
  • Page 194 Moreover, to the extent that members of a group believe their ideology to represent the truth, they almost always assume an aggressive posture and try to impose that ideology elsewhere. In such cases ideology becomes bent on conquest.
  • Page 197 The point is not to ask oneself whether some economic or intellectual doctrine is valid, but only whether it can furnish effective catchwords capable of mobilizing the masses here and now.

    2. Effects on the Structure of Public Opinion

  • Page 203 the questions that propaganda takes upon itself cease to be controversial: "truths" are pronounced that do not bear discussion; they are believed or not believed, and that is all.
  • Page 203 In a propagandized milieu, communications no longer take place in interpersonal patterns, but in patterns set by the propaganda organization.
  • Page 204 propaganda also affects the individual, reducing his field of thought and angle of vision by the creation of stereotypes.
  • Page 205 propaganda that plays on opinion influences that opinion without offering proof; latent opinion subjected to such propaganda (if it is well made) will absorb everything, believe everything, without discrimination.
  • Page 205 Details and nuances disappear The more active the propaganda, the more monolithic and less individualized public opinion will be. ... by the process of simplification, propaganda makes it take shape more rapidly.
  • Page 205 Without simplification no public opinion can exist anyway; the more complex problems, judgments, and criteria are, the more diffuse opinion will be. Nuances and gradations prevent public opinion from forming; the more complicated it is, the longer it takes to assume solid shape. But in the case of such diffusion, propaganda intervenes with a force of simplification.
  • Page 206 reducing them to primitive patterns, propaganda was able to present the complex process of political and economic life in the simplest terms…. We have taken matters previously available only to experts and a small number of specialists, and have carried them into the street and hammered them into the brain of the little man."*8
  • Page 206 propaganda reinforces and even creates stereotypes and prejudices.
  • Page 207 propaganda aims less at modifying personal opinions than at leading people into action. This is clearly its most striking result: when propaganda intervenes in public opinion, it transforms the public into an acting crowd or, more precisely, into a participating crowd.
  • Page 208 The great feat of propaganda is to cause the progression from thought to action artificially.
  • Page 209 The individual who burns with desire for action but does not know what to do is a common type in our society. He wants to act for the sake of justice, peace, progress, but does not know how. If propaganda can show him this "how," it has won the game; action will surely follow.
  • Page 209 Man subjected to propaganda would never act if he were alone.
  • Page 211 propaganda replaces the leader of the group.
  • Page 211 a group without a leader, but subjected to propaganda, the sociological and psychological effects are the same as if there were a leader. Propaganda is a substitute for him. 3. Propaganda and Grouping
  • Page 212 All propaganda has to set off its group from all the other groups. Here we find again the fallacious character of the intellectual communication media (press, radio), which, far from uniting people and bringing them closer together, divide them all the more.
  • Page 212 When I talked about public opinion, I stressed that everybody is susceptible to the propaganda of his group. He listens to it and convinces himself of it. He is satisfied with it. But those who belong to another milieu ignore it.
  • Page 213 Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance.
  • Page 213 such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group.
  • Page 213 This double foray on the part of propaganda, proving the excellence of one's own group and the evilness of the others, produces an increasingly stringent partitioning of our society.
  • Page 213 propaganda suppresses conversation; the man opposite is no longer an interlocutor but an enemy.
  • Page 214 Thus, we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly reviews his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others -- a world in which nobody listens to anybody else, everybody talks, and nobody listens. And the more one talks, the more one isolates oneself, because the more one accuses others and justifies oneself.
  • Page 217 the agent looks upon the mass of potential voters or sympathizers as objects. He manipulates them, works on them, tests them, changes them psychologically or politically. They no longer have any personal importance, especially when one realizes that good propaganda must be objective and anonymous, and the masses are considered as merely an instrument for attaining some objective. They are treated as such; this is one of the elements of the profound contempt that those making real propaganda have for all those on the outside, even -- and often particularly -- for their sympathizers.
  • Page 225 As in all propaganda, the point is to make man endure, with the help of psychological narcotics, what he could not endure naturally, or to give him, artificially, reasons to continue his work and to do it well. This is a task of propaganda, and there is no doubt that if it is done well, it will make possible the integration of the working class and make it accept its condition happily.
  • Page 229 For it seems that people manipulated by propaganda become increasingly impervious to spiritual realities, less and less suited for the autonomy of a Christian life.
  • Page 229 the religious element, through the means of the myth, is being absorbed little by little by propaganda and becoming one of its categories. 4. Propaganda and Democracy
  • Page 234 To think that democracy must triumph because it is the truth leads man to be democratic and to believe that when the democratic regime is opposed to regimes of oppression, its superiority will be clear at first sight to the infallible judgment of man and history.
  • Page 237 Some will say: "Freedom of expression is democracy; to prevent propaganda is to violate democracy." Certainly, but it must be remembered that the freedom of expression of one or two powerful companies that do not express the thoughts of the individual or small groups, but of capitalist interests or an entire public, does not exactly correspond to what was called freedom of expression a century ago. One must remember, further, that the freedom of expression of one who makes a speech to a limited audience is not the same as that of the speaker who has all the radio sets in the country at his disposal, all the more as the science of propaganda gives to these instruments a shock effect that the non-initiated cannot equal.
  • Page 240 Finally, the democratic propagandist or democratic State will often have a bad conscience about using propaganda. The old democratic conscience still gets in the way and burdens him; he has the vague feeling that he is engaged in something illegitimate. Thus, for the propagandist in a democracy to throw himself fully into his task it is necessary that he believe -- i.e., that he formulate his own convictions when he makes propaganda.
  • Page 250 propaganda has also become a necessity for the internal life of a democracy. Nowadays the State is forced to define an official truth.
  • Page 250 the growth of information inevitably leads to the need for propaganda. This is truer in a democratic system than in any other.
  • Page 251 This system must become a complete answer to all questions occurring in the citizens' conscience. It must, therefore, be general and all-valid: it cannot be a philosophy or a metaphysical system -- for such systems appeal to the intelligence of a minority.
  • Page 251 if the citizens were to work only three or four hours a day and devote four hours daily to personal reflection and cultural pursuits, if all citizens had a similar cultural level, if the society were in a state of equilibrium and not under the shadow of tomorrow's menace, and if the moral education of the citizens enabled them to master their passions and their egotism. But as these four conditions are not fulfilled, and as the volume of information grows very rapidly, we are forced to seek explanations hic et nunc, and publicly parade them in accordance with popular demand.
  • Page 251 when one speaks to us of "massive democracy" and "democratic participation," these are only veiled terms that mean "religion."
  • Page 251 Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies. Thus we return by another route to the problem of intolerance and the suppression of minorities.*26
  • Page 252 The civic virtues created by the mass media will guarantee the maintenance of democracy. But what remains of liberty?
  • Page 253 What will be the effect on democracy of the use of TV for propaganda? One can see the first effects: TV brings us close to direct democracy. Congressmen and cabinet members become known; their faces and utterances come to be recognized; they are brought closer to the voter. TV permits political contact to extend beyond election campaigns and informs the voters directly on a daily basis. More than that, TV could become a means of control over public servants: In his capacity as TV viewer, the voter could verify what use his representatives make of the mandate with which he has entrusted them. Certain experiments conducted in the United States showed that when sessions of Congress were televised, they were much more dignified, serious, and efficient; knowing that they were being observed, the congressmen took greater pains to fulfill their function. But one must not hope for too much in this respect:* 27 there is little chance that governing bodies will accept this control. In reality, statesmen fully understand how to use it for their propaganda, and that is all. In fact, TV probably helped Eisenhower to win over Stevenson, the Conservatives to win over Labour.* 28 The problem is first one of money, second of technical skill. But the use of TV as a democratic propaganda instrument entails the risk of a profound modification of democracy's "style."
  • Page 253 The instruments of propaganda, particularly press and radio, are made for words. Conversely, democratic propaganda made by motion pictures is weak.
  • Page 254 A government official giving a speech is not a spectacle. Democracies have nothing to show that can compare with what is available to a dictatorship. If they do not want to be left behind in this domain, which would be extremely dangerous, they must find propaganda spectacles to televise.
  • Page 254 We have also seen that the existence of two contradictory propagandas is no solution at all, as it in no way leads to a "democratic" situation: the individual is not independent in the presence of two combatants between whom he must choose. He is not a spectator comparing two posters, or a supreme arbiter when he decides in favor of the more honest and convincing one. To look at things this way is childish idealism. The individual is seized, manipulated, attacked from every side; the combatants of two propaganda systems do not fight each other, but try to capture him. As a result, the individual suffers the most profound psychological influences and distortions. Man modified in this fashion demands simple solutions, catchwords, certainties, continuity, commitment, a clear and simple division of the world into Good and Evil, efficiency, and unity of thought. He cannot bear ambiguity.
  • Page 255 He cannot bear that the opponent should in any way whatever represent what is right or good. An additional effect of contradictory propagandas is that the individual will escape either into passivity or into total and unthinking support of one of the two sides.
  • Page 255 Here is the hub of the problem. Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas but also democratic behavior -- the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist.
  • Page 255 The question is not to reject propaganda in the name of freedom of public opinion -- which, as we well know, is never virginal -- or in the name of freedom of individual opinion, which is formed of everything and nothing -- but to reject it in the name of a very profound reality: the possibility of choice and differentiation, which is the fundamental characteristic of the individual in the democratic society.
  • Page 255 Conversely, what gives propaganda its destructive character is not the singleness of some propagated doctrine; it is the instrument of propaganda itself. Although it acts differently, according to whether it promulgates a closed system or a diversity of opinions, it has profound and destructive effects.
  • Page 256 With propaganda one can lead citizens to the voting booth, where they seemingly elect their representatives. But if democracy corresponds to a certain type of human being, to a certain individual behavior, then propaganda destroys the point of departure of the life of a democracy, destroys its very foundations. It creates a man who is suited to a totalitarian society, who is not at ease except when integrated in the mass, who rejects critical judgments, choices, and differentiations because he clings to clear certainties. He is a man assimilated into uniform groups and wants it that way.
  • Page 256 With the help of propaganda one can do almost anything, but certainly not create the behavior of a free man or, to a lesser degree, a democratic man. A man who lives in a democratic society and who is subjected to propaganda is being drained of the democratic content itself -- of the style of democratic life, understanding of others, respect for minorities, re-examination of his own opinions, absence of dogmatism.
  • Page 256 The means employed to spread democratic ideas make the citizen, psychologically, a totalitarian man.
  • Page 256 The word democracy, having become a simple incitation, no longer has anything to do with democratic behavior. And the citizen can repeat indefinitely "the sacred formulas of democracy" while acting like a storm trooper.
  • Page 257 The only truly serious attitude -- serious because the danger of man's destruction by propaganda is serious, serious because no other attitude is truly responsible and serious -- is to show people the extreme effectiveness of the weapon used against them, to rouse them to defend themselves by making them aware of their frailty and their vulnerability, instead of soothing them with the worst illusion, that of a security that neither man's nature nor the techniques of propaganda permit him to possess.