Book Review: Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes

Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, expresses a dark vision of propaganda, democracy and human nature. Ellul was a professor of law and social history and he built a reputation on social and political philosophy. Propaganda is written from a sociological point of view and sees propaganda as a sociological phenomenon. Although technology and society have changed enormously since 1962, some of Ellul’s insights about propaganda and human nature are disquietingly close to what modern experience and science is revealing in real time.

Two caveats merit mention. First, some of the social norms that were in place have since fallen away. Norms that constrained propaganda and how propagandists used it in democracies have weakened or disappeared. In this sense, the situation we live in today is more perilous that what Ellul described in 1962. Second, some of his arguments run counter to current conventional wisdom. Changed technology and social circumstances have rendered some of Ellul’s assertions somewhat or mostly no longer true. Ellul seems to struggle with a period of flux where technology and social norms were rapidly changing, while the impacts of the recent Nazi and Stalinist past still echoed powerfully in his mind. Ellul fought the Nazis as a member of the French resistance.

Like others who study propaganda, Ellul sees propaganda as sometimes capable of obliterating truth and creating fake reality. He writes: “History shows that plain truth can be so thoroughly snuffed out that it disappears, and that in certain periods the lie is all powerful. . . . Propaganda, in fact, creates truth in the sense that it creates in men subject to propaganda all the signs of true believers. For modern man, propaganda is really creating truth.” That is conventional wisdom today.

He saw the US, Russia and China as the world’s main sources of propaganda, with other regions and nations being less influential globally. Ellul argues that propaganda in earlier times was often based mostly on blatant, outrageous lies, but the propaganda of his time was more sophisticated and based on more truthful content because the public was too educated. Thus truths, truths out of context, half-truths and mixed truth-lies was the dominant form of propaganda. However, even with propaganda that starts out as lies-based morphs into content that contains some truth because truth sometimes has power if it is positioned properly.

Ellul makes a disturbing assertion that for propaganda to be effective, the people it is used on must be educated. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear what he means by educated, but he seems to imply college graduates. That assertion appears to go against mainstream current belief that the more education a person has, the more resistant to propaganda they tend to be. Ellul argues that intellectuals are the most susceptible to propaganda in part because they falsely believe they cannot be deceived or used. There may some truth in that. Nonetheless, it isn’t clear that educated intellectuals, whatever that means, are more or less susceptible to propaganda than other groups.

Disappointingly, Ellul refuses to define propaganda. At various places he says what traits it has or does not have, but what it is remains a matter for personal interpretation of his heavy prose. That is unsatisfying. Another concern is that Ellul does not rely on empirical experiments or statistics to assess what propaganda does and doesn’t do. Instead, he relies on personal observation and logic. That is suspicious. Nonetheless, some of his observations intuitively ring true and/or have some empirical support in later research.

Ellul does assert some qualities of propaganda that modern research has supported as true. For example, he claims that propaganda can generate beliefs mainly through provoking emotional responses and not by facilitating reasoned thinking or logic. He also argues that as time passes and propaganda narratives are adopted and internalized, there is a tendency for affected minds to (1) harden and become resistant to inconvenient or contradictory facts, truth and logical reasoning, and (2) become unable to discern detail and nuance or their relevance. Loss of detail and nuance allows for simplification of issues and moral questions and that leads to greater persuasive power for more propaganda. Regarding the weakness of facts, Ellul comments that “even a proved fact can do nothing against crystallized opinion.” The same holds for sound reasoning. All of that is undoubtedly true. It accords with empirical findings from modern cognitive and social science research.

Ellul sees propaganda as the greatest danger to democracy and civil liberties. He argues that propaganda inherently and necessarily tends toward totalitarianism. Lies and deceit take away the ability of deceived people to consent or object to what they have been deceived about. That is authoritarian, not democratic. In this regard, he anticipates one of the key arguments that Sissela Bok asserts in her 1999 book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (my book review is here) is the reason that lying to the public is immoral. Ellul predicts that over time with the advance of mass communications, both authoritarian and democratic governments will increasingly resort to technological tyranny to infringe on and attack fact, truth, reason and civil liberties. He claims that nations that do not resort to propaganda will weaken. In democracies, this is necessary simply because the masses participate in governance and the government itself must have some way of communicating both facts and its preferred narratives.

Ellul predicts that because of the increasing cost of propaganda, political parties would be forced to turn to private sources of wealth. In turn, that will “indenture themselves to a financial oligarchy.” That prediction has turned out to be true. It also reflects a truth that, with few exceptions, money is power. Because propaganda is power and money can buy it, the logic seems solid and unassailable. In addition to money buying power in political parties, wealthy people and interests can cut out the economic waste of buying a middleman and go directly to government to buy favors, advantages and influence. That is something that is done in abundance these days.

What Ellul leaves is the critical unanswered question: Assuming it is possible to do so at all, how can propaganda be used in defense of democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, social civility, facts, truths and sound reasoning? The political playing field favors tyranny-oligarchy-kleptocracy. It is heavily stacked against democracy, the rule of law, etc. If Ellul is basically correct in his vision of the future, he projects a sobering, frightening vision. American democracy has not yet arrived at a satisfactory answer, or any answer at all.

Update on Disqus Technical Problem

As most of you know, Disqus notifications have stopped due to an unspecified technical problem. I asked about the status of the fix and got this reply:

Hey Germaine - status is still 'partial outage' and 'degraded performance.' Sorry.  

 https://status.disqus.com/ 

It is reasonable to think that notifications will be coming back in the next few days. Patience Grasshoppers.

Dark Free Speech and the Media’s Burden

NBC's Meet the Press broadcast a 13-minute segment yesterday about the burden on the professional media to try to call out the tidal wave of dark free speech in politics. The transcript of the broadcast is here.




A couple of key points are worth mentioning.

1. The rise of fact checkers in the professional media reflects the rise of extremely aggressive dark free speech tactics in politics. Often social media amplifies its power to deceive, distract and divide. In response, newsrooms are reorganized to do aggressive fact checking and to be more assertive about calling out lies and deceit in real time. The media knows it has lost much public trust, much of which is undeserved. Media distrust is significantly based on dark free speech intended to undermine facts and truths that for-profit propagandists, tyrant wannabes, ideologues and kleptocrats want to suppress. Intense fact checking is the media's attempt to regain some public trust and to try to show the public that finding and defending fact and truth is a critically important service to the public interest.

The point is this: US professional media has flaws and weaknesses, e.g., corporate ownership and a for-profit morality. Despite that, flawed media is better than either no media or propaganda sources like Breitbart, Fox News or the president himself.

2. The burden on the media is enormous. The public has lost, or never had, a good grasp of how to defend itself against the dark arts of sophisticated deceit, lies and unwarranted, intense emotional manipulation that divides, distracts and foments bigotry and distrust. All of those emotional responses play into the hands of liars, ideologues, authoritarians and kleptocrats. Dark free speech-driven benefits to them usually come at the expense of the public interest.

Martin Baron, executive editor at the Washington Post reflected on the burden and complexity of trying to defend a significantly defenseless society from relentless attacks:

“How do you address beliefs, when they're not rooted in reality? How do you tell someone, ‘I'm trying to treat your fears seriously. But your facts don't exist?’ How, as individuals, and how, as a country? Like, this is a challenge. Like, this reminded me of Sharia law, right? There would be all these, ‘Sharia law's coming.’ And you're like, ‘It's not.’ And you would try to reassure -- there's nothing like that. And yet, you're like, ‘There's no facts here to support it.’ .... We live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies. And that's made possible by the internet and social, social media. And people are drawn to sources of information, so-called information, that confirms their preexisting points of view. And you know, that's what's contributing to this environment that we have today. .... But we still have the responsibility for, for determining what's, what’s true and what's false and, in particular, holding our government officials accountable for what they say and telling people whether they're telling the truth, or they're not telling the truth. That's fundamental to the responsibilities that we have as a journalistic institution.”

3. Although the president has made over 15,000 false or misleading statements since coming to office, an astounding 91% of Trump supporters said he is the source they rely on for accurate information. Fact checks are irrelevant. This is what the president wants and reinforces it by calling the press the enemy of the people and urging the public to reject everything the press (and courts, historians and scientists) asserts as fact with the exception of facts that are favorable to the president and his agenda. In history, this is what it looks like when a tyrant-kleptocrat wannabe makes a run at power and attempts to destroy a democracy in the process. Our president is no different than past tyrant-kleptocrats making a run for power.

4. The press is waking up to the fact that it needs to be much more aggressive about defending truth and democratic institutions, which includes being more transparent and showing as much raw information as possible in an attempt to win some public trust in the face of the tyrant wannabe’s vicious attacks on the press, facts and the truth.


Thanks to Susan for bringing this to my attention. 😊

Pragmatic Rationalism: A Short, Simple Explanation

Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view. . . . We find here with significant uniformity what one psychologist has called ‘logic-proof compartments.’ The logic-proof compartment has always been with us. Master propagandist Edward Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923

We found ourselves at the end of chapter 3 with a dystopian assessment of democracy, an apparent ill-suited match between the mental apparatus of the public and the high-minded requirements of democracy: People should be well informed about politically important matters, but they are not. People should think rationally, but they most often do not. Political psychologist George Marcus, Political Psychology: Neuroscience, Genetics, and Politics, 2013


On various occasions, I've tried to explain that pragmatic rationalism operates as an anti-ideology ideology by focusing on four core moral values that are intended to help reduce partisan distortion, bias and irrationality in how people perceive facts and truths and how they think about what they think they see. It's not clear that prior explanations have been particularly successful. This is another try. Hope springs eternal.

Context

Pragmatic Rationalism[1] is an anti-bias political ideology based on four core moral values instead of core political, economic, philosophical or religious beliefs that characterize standard pro-bias ideologies, which can be overlapping to some variable extent, e.g., capitalism, socialism, fascism, nationalism, globalism or Christianity. Three of the four morals (1, 2 and 4 in the list below) are chosen because they are more objective than most concepts in politics.

Most concepts in politics are not universally definable and people bicker endlessly over what a concept means and how it applies to the real world. Undefinable concepts like that are called essentially contested concepts. They include fairness, the rule of law, sovereignty, privacy, constitutionality, etc. In modern American politics, endless disagreements over what is fair or unfair, or what is constitutional or unconstitutional are unresolvable except by compromise. Minds will not agree willingly.

Pragmatic Rationalism -- what it is 

Pragmatic rationalism is an ideology that holds that the four most important political moral values are: 

1. fidelity to trying to see facts and truths with less bias, especially inconvenient facts and truths that undermine or contradict personal beliefs;

2. fidelity to trying to apply unbiased or less biased conscious reasoning or logic to the facts and truths we think we see, especially inconvenient reasoning that undermines or contradicts personal beliefs;

3. applying 1 and 2 in service to the public interest[2]; and 

4. reasonable compromise.

That's the whole ideology.

Morals 1 and 2 are at the heart of the modern scientific mindset or ideology, but in pragmatic rationalism they are just applied to the definitely unscientific, messy endeavor called politics.

Very brief explanation

1. Each moral value serves as a bulwark against (1) authoritarianism, (2) kleptocracy, (3) dark free speech (lies, propaganda, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.), and (4) ideological partisan bias and politics based on false or unreasonably distorted facts, false or distorted truths and abuse of power by the majority or minority in democracy.

2. Regarding moral 4 or compromise, in authoritarian regimes the person or people in power don't have to compromise with anyone they have the power to ignore, or even abuse if they are so inclined. Compromise also fights against the kleptocracy that usually accompanies highly concentrated power.

3. Fidelity to less biased facts, truths and reason fights directly and powerfully against dark free speech or propaganda.

4. Most everyone doing politics firmly but falsely believes they do politics based on unbiased facts, truths and logic. Most also believe their beliefs best serve the public interest.

5.  If one tosses any of one of the four morals out, you have dictatorship or oligarchy, not democracy.


Footnotes:
1. Political ideology is hard or impossible to authoritatively define, just like most other politics-related concepts. I define pragmatic politics as a way of thinking within a framework of a cluster of concepts that are grounded in the real world. In essence, it is pragmatic politics, which is non-ideological. Pragmatic rationalism is anti-ideological because it is explicitly intended to try to keep perceptions of reality and reasoning strongly tethered to objective facts and truths and sound logic or reasoning. Pro-bias ideologies tend to lead to distortions of inconvenient fact and truth and flawed reasoning. The distortions and flaws include outright denying of objectively true facts and reasoning that is objectively flawed or incorrect.

2. Service to the public interest is an essentially contested concept and as I articulate it, it is larded full of additional essentially contested concepts. That is unavoidable because multiple concepts reveal the contours of politics in a democracy, but not the details. In essence service to the public interest outlines the contours of what is basically a food fight among competing interests over policy and everything else. But unlike most unresolvable partisan ideological disagreements, it is constrained by the other three core moral values, i.e., less biased facts, less biased reasoning and compromise.

For those interested, here's my current, but revisable, articulation of the food fight (service to the public interest):

The conduct of politics and governance based on identifying a rational, optimum balance between serving public, individual and commercial interests based on a transparent fact- and logic-based analysis of competing policy choices (evidence- and reason-based politics), while (1) being reasonably responsive to public opinion, (2) protecting and growing the American economy, (3) fostering individual economic and personal growth opportunity, (4) defending constitutional personal freedoms, (5) fostering improvement in the American standard of living, (6) protecting national security, (7) protecting the environment, (8) increasing transparency, competition and efficiency in government and commerce when possible, (9) fostering global peace, stability and prosperity whenever reasonably possible, including maintaining and growing alliances with non-authoritarian democratic nations, and (10) defending American liberal democracy and democratic norms, by replacing federal norms with laws, and (a) requiring states to maximize voter participation, making voting as easy as reasonably possible, (b) elevating opinions of ethics officials in the federal government to the status of laws or requirements that bind all members of all branches of the federal government, particularly including the President and all Executive Branch employees, (c) incentivizing voter participation by conferring a tax break on voters and a reasonable tax penalty on qualified citizens who do not vote, (d) prevent or limit corruption, unwarranted opacity, and anti-democratic actions such as gerrymandering voting districts to minimize competition or limiting voter participation, and (e) requiring allowing high level federal politicians and bureaucrats, federal judges and members of congress to show their tax returns for at least the six tax years before they take office or starting federal employment or service, all of which is constrained by (i) honest, reality-based fiscal sustainability that limits the scope and size of government and regulation to no more or no less than what is deemed needed and (ii) genuine respect for the U.S. constitution and the rule of law with a particular concern for limiting unwarranted legal complexity and ambiguity to limit opportunities to subvert the constitution and the law.

 

Hope springing eternal, again

HOW TO WIN AN ARGUMENT WITH YOUR LIBERAL RELATIVES

https://www.snowflakevictory.com/

Conservative Anti-Government Deregulation Marches On: Bird Deaths Increase

A sad story from the New York Times reports that a regulatory change, a “regulation reinterpretation”, guts reporting requirements and penalties for bird kills arising from various development and business activities. The new rule eliminate criminal penalties for “incidental” migratory bird deaths from normal business. Mandatory reporting of bird deaths is now “purely voluntary” and fines for bird kills are eliminated.

Under the Trump administration’s 2017 reinterpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, companies are not subject to prosecution or fines, even after a disaster like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 that killed or injured about one million birds. BP paid $100 million in fines for that avoidable but catastrophic company mistake. Similarly, the state of Virginia was going to build an artificial island for birds to nest on to compensate for loss of nesting habitat from a bridge and tunnel expansion in Chesapeake Bay tidewaters. After learning of the new interpretation of the law, Virginia abandoned the island and the habitat loss will not be compensated.

What an oil spill does to birds

The Virginia island story is just one of dozens of bird-preservation projects that are terminated after the 2017 policy change. In its standard public deceit mode, the Trump administration lied by called the change in the century-old law protecting migratory birds a technical clarification.

But, the situation is worse than even that. The NYT writes:

Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times. Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the documents show, it has discouraged local governments and businesses from taking precautionary measures to protect birds. In one instance, a Wyoming-based oil company wanted to clarify that it no longer had to report bird deaths to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “You are correct,” the agency replied. (emphasis added)

That is the face of deceitful conservative-populist anti-government, anti-environment ideology and rule. Trump ideology isn’t just neutral to the environment, it is actively hostile.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service claims that the Trump administration will “will continue to work cooperatively with our industry partners to minimize impacts on migratory birds.” Unfortunately, documents the NYT reviewed contradict that. A review of over 20 incidents found that short of literally going out to illegally shoot birds, activities where birds die merit no action. This is yet another of the endless Trump and his administration’s lies that they insult the American people with on a now daily basis.

For context, this summarizes the Trump administration’s work to deal with the environment as of June 2019.

The new interpretation is being challenged in court. If the case winds up before a Trump judge, it will probably be upheld. Otherwise, it is reasonable to think the new ‘interpretation’ will be overturned because it sounds more like the law is being illegally rewritten than merely reinterpreted. Time will tell how this plays out.

In the meantime, thousands or millions of birds will be mindlessly displaced or slaughtered in the name of Trump and his rigid ideological hate of environmental concerns. The companies and states that go along with this indefensible immorality reveal how their moral mindsets, or more accurately, lack thereof, work day-to-day.

If you like this, vote for Trump and republicans in 2020 or just stay home and don't vote at all. If you do not like this, vote for democrats in 2020. It’s your choice.