Posted on 11/02/2023 1:27:46 AM PDT by tired&retired
An overlooked classic of information warfare/operations, disinformation, and fake news is Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda:
"The Formation of Men’s Attitudes" (1965). Jacques Ellul was a French sociologist and philosopher who served as professor at the University of Bordeaux.
12 thoughts from Propaganda (1965) by Jacques Ellul
1. Breaking news is brainwashing you. Ellul: "To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection." When everything is urgent, you are forced to "remain on the surface of the event."
2. Jacques Ellul predicted echo chambers: "Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. We see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself."
3. Modern man can "never stop to reflect." He's not allowed to synthesize his information. Rather, Ellul writes: "One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones."
4. Clear thought has been replaced by vague feeling: "Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but be does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them."
5. Ellul on how the modern man lacks a center of gravity: "Lacking landmarks, he follows all currents." His soul is "discontinuous and fragmented." Life reduced to unconnected moments...
6. Everyone can read but not everyone can think. This makes propaganda more, not less, common. Ellul: "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...they are precisely on the level at which the printed word can seize and convince them without opposition."
7. Once a person is compromised...once they've acted out a lie...they are yours forever. Ellul: "He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable."
8. Propaganda works by channeling the energies of a society's "fundamentals myths." These are the central stories operating inside the collective mind: "The myth of happiness, the myth of progress, the myth of the nation." A skilled propagandist will always borrow from, and build on, the "current beliefs and symbols" of a society.
9. Propagandists set up "psychological levers." They ensure that "certain words, signs or symbols" start provoking certain reflex actions...and then they wait. The levers can now be turned when and how needed.
10. Indirect propaganda works best. Aggressive attempts at manipulation will fail as people's defenses will go up. But give a man plausible deniability, feed him convenient information, make him feel that he's "obeying reason" as he follows your command, and you have him where you want him.
11. Lonely, depressed people are the easiest victims of propaganda. Jacques Ellul: "An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda."
12. The conditions of modernity are actually the conditions of unprecedented propaganda: "The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference — all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be conditioned at will. The individual left to himself is defenseless..."
Some food for thought for those who still chew and think rather than just swallow.
Bfl
On the flip side ... once you see it .. it can't be unseen.
Try watching a few old tv shows or hollywood movies ...
things you think may be “pre propaganda” .. it's an eye opener. The seeds where sown long ago .. a little at a time.
It reminds me of the Roddy Piper movie .. They live
A great delusion.
BTTT
So does that mean that someone is not my enemy just because the mass media tells me they are my enemy?
;-)
bfl
Excellent post, thank you.
That the culmination of doctrine(s) lead to the 1960s madness which became the building blocks to today’s national insanity, and has taken on a global posture.
An overview of the just the last century takes me to many scriptures on morality, behaviour, and the insidious attacks that are cast by the evildoers upon the global populations. The root of truth is that there really is nothing new under the sun.
Identifying the wrongheaded is easily begun by reading one chapter of proverbs per day thereby cycling through the book of proverbs every month. Basic training for free thinkers, brought to my attention over 50 years ago by an old ranch hand turned preacher.
Very good advice.
imho nazism lives …. nazism infested everything little by little over time till today and nazism is showing itself to be alive again in countless ways using an overwhelming variety of methods to do the will of evil. evil is nearly all powerful, on this earth, but praise be GOD is more powerful.
Ellul: “An individual can be influenced by forces such as propaganda only when he is cut off from membership in local groups because such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual and emotional life; they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.”
I don’t know if this holds today. The group that isn’t woke is rare now.
In all of these quotes of this guy he’s taking for granted or implying a constant implacable force engaged in deception. Hmmmm…
An interesting angle to all this is that everyone now has a point of view--a bias, so to speak. And, as Eric Weinstein, physicist, recently pointed out, a strong preconceived bias, whether just a POV or an ideology, makes science impossible. The scientific method requires objectivity and the bombardment of the scientific community and our entire society with ideologies and politics has killed objectivity.
As an aside, even people who say "I can be objective when I choose" are wrong because subconsciously we are powerfully influenced by "confirmation bias." No matter how objective we might want to be, our unconscious minds are going to filter all information we encounter--discarding anything that disagrees with our convictions and biases and keeping only that information that confirms them (our convictions and biases).
And it isn't just science that's dead.
Critical thinking, like science and the scientific method, requires objectivity. Without objectivity, every piece of information we receive either directly supports our biases or is twisted in a way so that it artificially confirms our beliefs.
Unfortunately, all the above creates fertile ground for ideologies like Marxism, which requires a populace incapable of critical thinking.
Yes I agree,there is no border crisis,the rockets and bombs are your imagination,Trump being sued is your imagination,Joe Biden is not a Traitor
Yep - many, even here, have been assimilated without even realizing it ....
Yep
Food for thought for those who still have brains - Orwell and Rand weren’t the only prescient ones
A good book — read it back in the day.
Much of his work and writing is as a Christian anarchist.
I may not agree with him on specific issues, but his general observations appear to have merit.
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