Propaganda: Its Types and Classifications
What are the different types of and kinds of propaganda and how do we identify them and how do the various types work on us in their own way?
After introducing propaganda to us, Ellul spends the rest of the opening section walking us through a series of paired, and, in some ways, contrasting forms of propaganda.
Political Propaganda and Sociological Propaganda
Ellul does not spend a great amount of time talking about political propaganda at this point as it can be broken down into several paired binaries that he will go through in more detail later. Political propaganda is made up of the forms used by the political parties, the government and increasingly these days, the so-called “news” media. It is strategic or tactical meant to activate people in line with actions deemed necessary by the government or to rally the party faithful. Again we will talk more about the different ways that the government and party do this shortly. For now, though, Ellul wants us to think about sociological propaganda.
The sociological form of propaganda is primarily concerned with social integration and is far more prevalent than specifically political propaganda. It can be used politically, but more often that not, it creates the context wherein political propaganda can easily activate people. It is lifestyle propaganda. It is not meant to direct you to a specific political action like voting, or protesting, or volunteering to fight in wars, but rather in a suite of behaviours that integrate you into the kind of society where political propaganda can be easily and powerfully effective. It can include everything from public relations to product advertising to the shows you watch on television. It is much more difficult for people to see and grasp how it working.
“It is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context.”
It is propaganda that works from the bottom up, through the stuff of daily living. The goal is to make you participate in the broader social context of society. You are trained by the mass messaging to be a good citizen, a well adjusted member of society. You return your shopping cart and know that you are doing your duty to keep society a well functioning machine. Sociological propaganda is about the climate within which we live, the atmosphere of society. It is about feelings. It attacks you through your unconscious habits. Because it works slowly and subtly, you think that you came to all these habits of mind and action on your own, but you have been conformed to the manufactured collective. The function of a real, organic community, broken down by mass society, is replaced with propaganda. You are socialized into the mass by means of constant propaganda. After enough exposure you will yourself reinforce the propaganda as your own, like you came to these beliefs on your own. For example, films that show the American way of life as being a certain way become for you what America is and what it means and what it should be.
Because of the omnipresent nature of product advertising, television, films and movies and now social media, without ever realizing it, Americans subjected themselves to a totalizing and totalitarian integration of the person into the mass collective, leading the society to a suite of what ends up becoming involuntary behaviours. Again, it is the combined effect of product advertising, movies, television, music, social media, technology itself creating its own necessity, education, books, and even the government’s public service advertisements all together create a context which allows the social and the political to act together. This produces a general conception of a way of life that you then adopt as completely normal. It is just the way things are. But this is completely fabricated, a reality into which you have been integrated. What you think of as the “American Way of Life” is largely the creation of propaganda. When an American thinks of himself and his way of life, it is not necessary for him to actually be living an objectively better life than in some other place. It is merely necessary for him to believe that it is better and it becomes fact for him. Everything that reinforces this perception is then selected, elevated and fixated upon and framed as “good.” Everything which challenges this perception is memory holed or framed in a way that makes it suspect or “bad.”
Sociological propaganda is slower because it aims at long term penetration and slow, progressive adaptation. One grows up receiving through an variety of outlets the content of what it means to be an American — what Carl Schmitt would call the “educational dictatorship.” Once one has interiorized this content and a person-in-crowd, the mass-man believes that something is “pro-American” and thus “good,” or “un-American” and thus “evil,” he can now use this for political purposes.
Ellul argues that the extent to which propaganda is used to shape the overall consciousness of the people is a characteristic of America in part because of the weakness of any natural, organic American identity, especially as a result of the first great wave of immigration.
“Sociological propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life. In the beginning, the United States had to unify a disparate population that came from all the countries of Europe and had diverse traditions and tendencies. A way of rapid assimilation had to be found; that was the great political problem of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. The solution was psychological standardization — that is, simply to a way of life as the basis of unification and as an instrument of propaganda.”
What Ellul is arguing is that “America is an idea” is a response to the great wave of immigration and settlement that occurred just as the technological society was gaining real momentum. Because of the lack of a mature, distinctive, singular American ethnicity, combined with the demands of an industrial society and the problem of integrating new immigrants into American society, the shift to “America is an idea” was a necessity. Commerce, industry and technology worked as an acid to undermine what organic community did exist, substituting propaganda centred the emerging industrial society and its demands.
“Mass production requires mass consumption. But there cannot be mass consumption without widespread identical views as to what the necessities of life are.”
Wide spread views that are unified across a large mass of people are created by means of propaganda.
“One therefore needs fundamental psychological unity on which advertising can play with certainty when manipulating public opinion. In order for public opinion to respond, it must be convinced of the excellence of all things “American.” Thus conformity of life and of thought are indissolubly linked.”
This propaganda, argues Ellul, built around America as an idea and America as an industrial nation of consumers was made easy in part because of the weakness of the American social fabric. The industrial society did not have to push against or undermine a thousand plus years of culture. The difficulty in answering the question, “What is an American?” made Americans uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of propaganda necessary to both integrate millions of immigrants and produce the technological society, making America a commercial and technological powerhouse. One of the trade offs for this is that the American people grow up in a near totalizing environment of integration propaganda. This reality makes Americans particularly vulnerable as a society to propaganda that touches the subject of American identity. Ellul was saying this, not in 2024, but in the 1960’s.
Much of the apparatus and architecture of political lobbying and political action groups serves a two-fold function. One is to influence the government and its policies. But perhaps more important function of the parties, political action groups and lobbying groups, is to integrate the population into the political life of the nation. They thus mediate regime propaganda and messaging to the general population, keeping them in line and integrated into the state. This is a hard thing for many to grasp, but much of what happens politically in modern democratic societies is not about changing and shaping the government; but rather, their purpose is to control you and to keep you focused on the government, the state, as the source of solutions for all your problems. Democracy is a form of social control. By participating in the political life of the nation, you are not participating in activities which undermine the power and control that the state has over your life.
Again, the point of sociological propaganda is not so much to induce you to political action, but to integrate you into society in a way that operates beneath the surface of your awareness. The goal is to make you an American, an American who lives a certain way and expects a certain way of life.
“All forms of sociological propaganda are obviously very diffuse, and aimed much more at the promulgation of ideas and prejudices, of a style of life, than of a doctrine, or at inciting action or calling for formal adherence.”
Propaganda of Agitation and Propaganda of Integration
Propaganda of agitation is always directed at action, specifically that of rebellion or war. It is concerned with attacking and defeating enemies. Most of the propaganda used during Nazi Germany was propaganda of agitation, or agitprop. China’s “Great Leap Forward” was also a propaganda of agitation. Agitprop looks to excite and to agitate the person to act, hence the name. Because of this bias to action, it is often revolutionary in nature. It demands that the current order be brought down. It identifies the enemy and excites the person-in-crowd to attack and destroy the enemy.
“Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Seeking the Hidden Thing to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.