You Need Propaganda

We tend to think of propaganda as something done to us. But given the effects of the technological society, we have come to need propaganda to keep ourselves and society functioning.

90. You Need Propaganda

The common way that propaganda is thought about by many is that the propagandist is an evil manipulator and we are his passive, innocent victims. People have similar views of advertising — which is a form of propaganda — that it is something inflicted upon us by people trying to manipulate us into buying their products or services. This view is wrong.

“The individual must participate in all this from the bottom of his heart, with pleasure and deep satisfaction.”

This can be startling if you are hearing it for the first time. Even if you have been following this series on Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda, your natural inclination is to pull back from a statement like this. But, if we remember that propaganda is a necessary component of modern life because of the alienation and nihilism that modernity brings, it is easier to understand how we might come to want it, to welcome it, to allow it to fill the void and give life meaning.

“It is necessary to obtain the worker’s allegiance to the cau…