What Propaganda Does to You
We all know that propaganda affects us. But how?
Does a fish know that it is wet? If everything is propaganda, is nothing propaganda? Right? Is it possible for propaganda to be such an all encompassing experience that is nearly impossible for any of us who live in the modern west to distinguish our own thoughts from that which is produced by propaganda? What if you don’t have any thoughts of your own? Is the Matrix real, and are you living within it? Can you even be unplugged? What would happen to you if this were to come about?
For most of us, we only notice the most obvious forms of propaganda these days. In many ways, the propaganda that most stands out is bad propaganda. News where the biases are so obvious that you can’t not notice that someone is attempting to manipulate your opinions and actions. During the Covid lockdowns people began paying a lot more attention to the ways in which the narratives were being employed to shape their behaviours. But what about the myriad of ways, even now, that you are being pushed, nudged, shaped and modified of which you are unaware? How much propaganda do you not notice? So much of it is geared to simply maintaining the way things are, that we don’t see ourselves as manipulated.
Remember, the technological society breaks down grounded, organic community, normal human relationships and a living culture with its history, stories, belief system, and morals, taking all of this and either undermining it, re-writing, abstracting it or simply using is as the subject matter for entertainment. Culture itself stops being an organic product of a real people and becomes part of the propaganda system. The whole society is made to participate, even the churches, such that your ability to distinguish between what is real culture and what is propaganda diminishes. In the modern technological society, propaganda is your culture.
Everything participates in supporting and maintaining the myths, stories, images, narratives upon which the whole of your thoughts are formed. Your entire psyche has, pretty much since birth, has been subjected to no-stop propaganda. Whether it is mass-media entertainment — movies, television, radio, sports, the arts — the education system, or things like literature, and especially advertisements, all shape for you what your life should be, the beliefs you should have, the things towards which you aspire. The home in the “Home Alone” movie is presented as completely normal.
As is the one in “Ferris Bueller's Day Off.”
But both of these are the homes of people with significant means. They are hardly “average.” You simply absorb this as the “normal” home or a normal family. The narrative never stops to ask whether or not you should aspire to own and live in a home like this as a “normal” person who is a “normal” representative of mass society. Why would a home that requires you to be in the top 5% of income earners be presented as “normal?” Is everyone supposed to aspire to own and live in this home? What effect will this have on society when 95% of the population can’t achieve this, but are expected to be dutifully aspiring to own this home? And, the underlying egalitarianism of our society is reinforced with the idea that everyone “normal” can obtain a home like this if they dutifully participate in the system the way they are told.
What would happen to society if people stopped aspiring to own this home and pursued aspirations that were more spiritually satisfying? That you do want it, or there is a part of you that says you should want it, that believes that you can have it if you do all the right things, has been produced within you by this kind of ubiquitous propaganda. These images then tell you what kinds of career you should pursue, the education you will need to get into that profession, the hours you will have to work, the lifestyle you will then have to live. All provided for you by a series of images presented to you over and over and over again. You have been propagandized.
Everyone on television is beautiful. There is a certain unreality to the stories on television. Everything works out in 30 minutes or an hour. From the story lines on TV, to the scripts of movies, to the lyrics in songs, to following the lives of entertainment personalities, all of it has been shaping you. Advertisements project, offer and promise a certain outcome for your life if you buy their product or service. Additionally, they were shaping you into the kind of person who finds their life satisfaction by doing the things necessary in your life to achieve the kind of life presented to you on the television and in the advertisements.
Its more than that, everything from the the political solutions to problems, to the laws that are put in place, to what you expect from religion, from the training you get in school and university, all of it is geared towards the realization of a certain way of life. Why do we debate the goodness of “the meritocracy” or “diversity, equity and inclusion?” Well, we have been taught that there is a certain way of life towards which we should aspire and we are discussing how best to realize this societal vision, never stopping once to question the underlying vision over which we are having the, “How best to achieve it?” debate.
Do we ever stop to ask where these ideas come from? How would you know whether the are arising spontaneously or are the product of a consistent propaganda effort? Selling products in a mass market, requires that you create a people who are a mass people. A mass people is no longer an organic society. A mass society must be held together by propaganda because in order to create it, you must destroy the organic communities which ordinarily form a people and make them resistant to being part of a mass. Everything in this mass society from its history, to its art, to its religion, to its entertainments must be geared towards making this society a functioning reality. If it continues long enough, propaganda eventually becomes your culture. Potentially all of your thoughts, everything that makes you who you are, has been shaped by propaganda. There are small islands of resistance: insular, tight knit communities, like a church, which still generate organic cultural elements can act like a buffer, but they cannot protect you entirely.
So, how does this affect you?
We need to begin by noting that you cannot separate the content of propaganda from the media used to convey the propaganda. The medium itself will have its own effects on you. You become a listener of the radio. You become a newspaper reader. You become a television watcher. You become a smartphone user. You become a Twitter or TikTok user. Even your automobile has a message. The administrative state has a message that is conveyed by its very existence. This is the meaning of the “the medium is the message.” All of these carry messages. To use a recent example, Donald Trump, on the first day of his second presidency, signed a flurry of executive orders. When we try to understand the meaning of what is happening, we have to look at not just the content of the orders, but we need to understand the medium of the order itself and the propaganda message that the executive order as a medium and method of governance sends irrespective of the content of any one particular order so as to fully understand what is happening.
Psychological Crystallization
Propaganda, as a necessary function of the technological society, organizes, shapes, optimizes and makes your thoughts more efficient. Not just your thoughts, but your whole personality is subjected to technological realities, shaping them into a system that can be abstracted, categorized, rationalized and crystalized. Who you are is made to fit a type or a system. Your personality is given a label to make you easier to understand. You are frozen into a mold. As someone integrated into the machine world and machine thinking, your thoughts and opinions become hardened. Propaganda removes all of the reasons you should reconsider or change your opinions. There is no mystery to the world. Your thoughts, the whole of your enculturation mirrors that of a rationalized machine.
“Propaganda standardizes current ideas, hardening prevailing stereotypes, and furnishes thought patterns in all areas. Thus it codifies social, political and moral standards.”
Your thinking is made more efficient. Every thought you could have, every opinion you could hold, is given the kind of label that you might use in a drop down menu on your computer. Your thinking must be classified and labeled and placed into one of the three options in the drop down menu. The less nuance the better. Even spiritual realities are squeezed into a menu tree. Propaganda gives these options a force and an efficiency that they do not have when formed organically. All of your thoughts are squeezed into rigid classification systems which are predetermined for you. They give you the appearance of thinking for yourself, but not the reality. You have not had to think through anything on your own. You just select your opinions from the pre-determined options and move on with your life. Quick, easy, efficient and user friendly.
When you encounter an idea or thinker for the first time, you will feel that urge to want to give them a label, put them into a certain camp, make sure you have them classified. Once they have been properly sorted this makes fitting them into your current thought schema simple, easy and efficient, reducing the psychic anxiety which might arise from confronting ideas that are outside the patterns which have been optimized for you through long term exposure to propaganda. Feeling this need within you to engage in these classification behaviours is a sign to you that your thought patterns have been conditioned by propaganda. Because of this, private thoughts are eliminated. All thoughts are public opinions, shared by the mass.
“Propaganda builds monolithic individuals. It eliminates inner conflicts, tensions, criticism, self-doubt. And in this fashion it also builds one-dimensional beings without depth or range of possibilities.”
In this crystallization process you come to identify yourself with the propaganda. Any challenge brought against the messaging will make the propagandized feel personally attacked. You develop a religious like passion for the narratives being shaped for you by the propagandists. The cost to you is that this tends to make you, the propagandized person, neurotic. The mass society — mass democracy, mass markets, mass media — as it is built by means of breaking down natural, human, organic beliefs, social relations and societal structures in order to build up society at scale is that it induces an overall state of mental illness in society that is felt and expressed to a greater or lesser degree across the whole of the mass of people.
Part of the role of propaganda is to control and channel the effects of its own ubiquitous implementation across the totality of society, further exacerbating the effects. As the last vestiges of organic community began to dissolve in the 1960’s — as observed so well in Alan Ehrenhalt’s The Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues Of Community In America — this is also the time we begin to see the growing effects of social dissolution begin to ramp up in society.
Alienation through Propaganda
One of the most notable effects of propaganda is captured by the term “alienation.”
“To be alienated means to be someone other (alienus) than oneself; it can also 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.”
Alienation is the state of being cut off from one’s self, to lose yourself. It involves being severed from organic relationships. Propaganda always spurs you to lose yourself in something else. It severs you from yourself and the local environment which ordinarily would define your life, pushing you into the mass until you are lost to the mass. Once immersed in the life and world of the mass your own critical judgement disappears. You can no longer disassociate yourself or separate yourself from mass politics, mass culture, the mass market. Your identity is now merely a collection of mass opinions, mass news, mass entertainments, mass ideas, mass market brands. You are merely the collection of mass items chosen for you and presented to you in the crystalized drop down menus of mass society. Your identity comes ready made for you with pre-selected user friendly options. You no longer exercise personal judgement, nor do you form your own thoughts.
“What the individual loses is never easy to retrieve. Once personal judgement is gone and critical faculties have disappeared or have been atrophied they will simply not reappear when propaganda has been suppressed.”
Propaganda eliminates the capacity to judge ideas for yourself. For all intents and purposes, the person ceases to exist as a person. You are reduced to an infantile state. When the dominant form of propaganda is shut off, you do not start thinking for yourself. You will immediately attach yourself to the insurgent counter-propaganda. Once you live fully immersed in a propagandizing mass society, you need propaganda in order to have thoughts. For the most part, even when the message crafters change, the nature of propaganda remains fundamentally the same and its purposes remain the same. Propaganda adjusts us to our situation, generally without ever fundamentally changing it. Its goal is to ease the pressures of modern life, preventing us from breaking down or spazzing out.
“Modern man deeply craves friendship, confidence, close personal relationships. But he is plunged into a world of competition, hostility and anonymity.”
Lost, isolated, alienated in mass society, he attaches himself to the TV personality, the actor, the musician, the athlete or to the leader in the realm of the political. He immerses himself in mass media formats such as social media and his devotion to its personalities, to “the party,” “the movement,” and to the leader becomes near absolute. The connection he believes he has seems to fill the loss he feels, but he cannot necessarily identify what it is he no longer has.
In many ways, propaganda works like product advertising — which is, of course, itself part of the system of propaganda — creating a need for a product that you didn’t know you needed, but now must be filled by the leader through state power and control. Often these goals are abstractions like “success,” or “equality,” or “equity.” You can be made to feel a need for them, which now justifies the exercise of power in the name of instantiating these abstractions. These artificial needs, created within us by propaganda, replace those normal needs we have as human beings. In fact we can no longer even identify what a real need is.
“As a result of propaganda, these superficial tendencies end up becoming identified with our deepest needs and become confused with what is most personal and profound within us.”
Even things that we now take for granted, abstractions like “class,” have become so crystalized in our consciousness that, for example, we now have a deep need for “equality.” These needs become more important than our private needs. We deliver ourselves, then, over to the abstract technical mechanisms of the technological mass society. The individual subjected to propaganda believes that he has come to this awareness on his own and that his responses to events depend on his own decisions. But under the influence of propaganda he will always choose the easiest path, the one that creates the smallest amount of anxiety, the one in line with the propaganda under whose spell he has fallen.
The Psychic Disassociation Effect of Propaganda
Because thought is internal, in the world of propaganda, actual thought is no longer necessary. Thought and reflection have been rendered pointless and unnecessary. You do not need to think in order to act. Action is determined by the broader social situation created by technique. No one really has the time or space to think about what they are doing. Man in the technological society is kept perpetually in motion. Man is expected to work with maximum efficiency, machine like, always productive. But without thought there can be not attachment to one’s work, one’s life. You are are alienated from it all, floating along in a perpetual state of movement and production. Because your mind is never allowed to rest and process, you now release the tensions building up within you through further action.
Competing propagandas, the propaganda of “the regime” and the propaganda of the “the dissident right” do not cancel each other out. It is not as if dissident propaganda actually frees you from regime propaganda. Instead, it deepens the effects of propaganda. It is like being in a boxing match where you are getting hit with a left and a right hook repeatedly. Jab. Jab. Jab. With every punch you become groggier. Eventually, you become so groggy that you can no longer act. You become passive. You surrender. When you do act, it is because you have been agitated by the propaganda to act in the way dictated to you. Or, you go the other direction. You become so overinvolved that you lose yourself in political involvement. You pick a side and make that the whole of yourself and thus all the contradictions and uncertainties in your life now fall away.
The Need for Propaganda
Once you have become fully subjected to propaganda, you cannot live without it. Your psyche becomes addicted to it. It creates a need for it that only propaganda can fulfill. Ellul uses the fancy term here, “mithrandization,” the process whereby you build up immunity to a poison by ingesting small amounts of it. The more that you are immersed in propaganda, the more tolerance you build up to it. You would think that this would be a good thing, but it is not. Perpetual exposure to propaganda does not actually free you from its effects. You need the effect of propaganda to function properly. You need it to be better. More controlling. More sophisticated. To go deeper into your psyche. You become addicted to “the news” in the way an addict is addicted to drugs. You must plug yourself into the 24 hour news cycle while tweeting about it. You completely give yourself over to it and it now defines your identity. The propaganda eventually breaks you and you give yourself over to it. Once broken, the person does not need the constant onslaught. He just needs periodic boosters. He is at once numb to it, but now acts according to its smallest stimuli.
But now broken, the person needs propaganda. He cannot bear to have it stop. He cannot actually live without it because propaganda relieves his anxieties and internal contradictions caused by living within the modern mass technological society. If he is entirely removed from propaganda, all of these anxieties come back with ever more force. Because propaganda removes the sense of powerlessness, he will find himself now feeling more powerless than ever. It gives your life justification. Without it, you begin to lose confidence in yourself and your actions. And this is not just political propaganda, it is the all encompassing totality of messaging.
And should you find yourself cut off from messaging for a period, this does not thereby free your mind for a period. Not at all. You engage in pre-programmed actions, dictated to you by the propaganda, the things you have been conditioned to do when cut off from it for a period of time. This, of course, maintains the sense of cognitive alignment, that you are doing the things you are supposed to do. To be truly cut off entirely from propaganda, there would be both social and individual dissolution. It would likely induce mental illness in many. As a society we are now caught. We have built this edifice that we now know as the technological society with all of its supporting mechanisms, like propaganda. We are addicted to its effects. We are in a position that we if are to survive within the system as is, we can no longer do without it. Everything real would have to be built up again over generations from the ground up. We have power and money, but it has cost us our lives.
Next up: the final piece in this series, dealing with the social and political effects of propaganda, including the impact it has on the Christian faith.
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Great piece as usual. There is currently a euphoric addiction to "conservative" news. I shudder to think there is a non 0 % of Christians who have missed church due to some form of news cycle addiction. Maybe Christian Ghetto can do a "confessions of Twitter addicts" episode? (CJs attendance is required)
KP,
I would of given you 50 bucks just for this post but I figgered I might as well get a sub.
This post on Propaganda is the most concise few paragraphs I have read on the subject, and I am a very well read man. I lived in a backroom of a bookstore for 5 years.
You Sir, are a Wordsmith of the highest order I salute you, PB