Jacques Ellul

The most uncomfortable book in this project, because its subject is you.

Propaganda works best on the educated. They consume the most information, they need a coherent opinion on everything, and they are certain they cannot be reached.

The argument

Ellul's first move is to detach propaganda from lying. Most effective propaganda is factually accurate. It works by selection, saturation and repetition, by supplying a frame in which true facts arrange themselves into a conclusion.

His second move is the one that stings. The educated are the most exposed, not the least. They read the most, so there is more material to work with. They believe having many facts protects them. And they feel obliged to hold a position on wars, economies and technologies they have no direct access to, which means they need someone to supply it.

Agitation and integration

He separates agitation propaganda, which stirs people up for a campaign and is what everyone pictures, from integration propaganda, the slow kind that produces conformity to an existing order and asks nothing dramatic of anyone.

Integration propaganda is the important one, and it is nearly invisible because it does not feel like a message. It feels like the ambient sense of what a normal, informed person thinks, which is Gramsci's common sense arriving by a different route.

Serious objections

• The theory is close to unfalsifiable. If disagreeing shows you are propagandized and agreeing shows the same, no observation counts against it.
• Ellul offers almost no way out, and a diagnosis with no remedy tends toward the quietism this project flags elsewhere.
• The empirical base is thin. It is a work of sociological argument, not of measurement, and later media-effects research complicates several of its claims.