Jacques Ellul Quotes

The proletarian was alienated not only because he was the servant of the bourgeois but because he became a stranger to the human condition, a sort of automaton filled with economic machinery and worked by and economic switch.

Propaganda makes man serve.

Is obvious that propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man — the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim fo elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings the most widespread ideas the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end - Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

"Once again we are faced with a choice of "all or nothing." If we make use of technique, we must accept the specificity and autonomy of its ends, and the totality of its rules. Our own desires and aspirations can change nothing."

Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.

First our desire for money is never satisfied. Our pursuit of money is infinite. We can never say: this is enough.... There is never any limit, since in order to set a limit or a stopping point, one would need self-control and wisdom. And if one had these at the outset, he would not have had such a passion for money.

"Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material, it does not create it.

This material falls into four categories. First there are the psychological "mechanisms" that permit the propagandist to know more or less precisely that the individual will respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus - Here the psychologists are far from agreement; behaviorism, depth psychology, and the psychology of instincts postulate very different psychic mechanisms and see essentially different connections and motivations. Here the propagandist is at the mercy of these interpretations.

Second, opinions, conventional patterns and stereotypes exist concretely in a particular milieu or individual.

Third, ideologies exist which are more or less consciously shared, accepted, and disseminated, and which form the only intellectual, or rather para-intellectual, element that must be reckoned with in propaganda.

Fourth and finally, the propagandist must concern himself above all with the needs of those whom he wishes to reach. All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, peace, security, work) or a psychological need."

Enthusiasm and adventure

In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the in­dividual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself. On the other hand, such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discour­agement and despair. Therefore specialists in agitation propa­ganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one.

Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life's vexations.

La questione che vorrei abbozzare in questo libro è fra quelle che mi turbano più profondamente. Essa si contraddistingue per la sua drammatica e inconsueta rilevanza storica e perché, allo stato attuale delle mie conoscenze, mi sembra irrisolvibile. Nella maniera più semplice può essere così presentata: com’è possibile che lo sviluppo della società cristiana e della Chiesa abbia dato vita a una società, a una civiltà e a una cultura del tutto opposte a quanto si può leggere nella Bibbia

For when a man is faced with a curse he answers, 'I'll take care of my problems alone'. And he puts everything to work to become powerful, to keep the curse from having its effects. He creates the arts and the sciences, he raises an army, he constructs chariots, he builds cities. The spirit of might is a response to the divine curse, and one could almost say that such a spirit would never have existed if there had been no curse in the first place.

Propaganda is necessarily false, when it speaks of values, of truth, of good, of justice, of happiness-and when it interprets and colors facts and imputes meaning to them. It is true when it serves up the plain fact, but does so only for the sake of establishing a pretense and only as an example of the interpretation that it supports with that fact.

For propaganda to succeed, a society must first have two complementary qualities: It must be both an individualist and a mass society. These two qualities are often considered contradictory. It is believed that an individualist society, in which the individual is thought to have a higher value than the group tends to destroy groups that limit the individual's range of action, whereas a mass society negates the individual and reduces him to a cipher. But this contradiction is purely theoretical and an illusion. In actual fact, an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move toward liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process the individual frees himself completely from family, village, parish or brotherhood bonds - only to find himself directly vis-a-vis the entire society. When individuals are not held together by local structures, the only form in which they can live together is in an unstructured mass society, Similarly, a mass society can only be based on individuals — that is on men in their isolation, whose identities are determined by their relationships with one another. Precisely because the individual claims to be equal to all other individuals he becomes an abstraction and is in effect reduced to a cipher.

Primary education and suscepitibility to propganda

Actually, the most obvious result of primary education in the 19th and 20th centuries was to make the individual susceptible to super-propaganda. There is no chance of raising the intellectual level of Western populations sufficiently and rapidly enough to compensate for the progress of propaganda. Propaganda techniques have advanced so much faster than the reasoning capacity of the average man that to close this gap and shape this man intellectually outside the framework of propaganda is almost impossible. In fact what happens and what we see all around us is the claim that propaganda itself is our culture and what the masses ought to learn. Only in and through propaganda have the masses access to political economy, politics, art, or literature. Primary education makes it possible to enter the realm of propaganda, in which people then receive their intellectual and cultural environment.

Intellectuals and manufactured problems

The greater a persons knowledge of political and economic facts, the more sensitive and vulnerable is his judgment. Intellectuals are most easily reached by propaganda, particularly if it employs ambiguity. The reader of a number ol newspapers expressing diverse attitude — just because he is better informed - is more subjected than anyone else to a propaganda that he cannot perceive, even though he claims to retain free choice in the mastery of all this information. Actually, he is being conditioned to absorb all the propaganda that coordinates and explains the facts he believes himself to be mastering. Thus, information not only provides the basis for propaganda but gives propaganda the means to operate; for information actually generates the problems that propaganda exploits and for which it
pretends to offer solutions. In fact, no propaganda can work until the moment when a set of facts has become a problem in the eyes
of those who constitute public opinion. At the moment such problems begin to confront public opinion, propaganda on the part of a government, a party, or a man can begin to develop fully by magnifying that problem on the one hand and promising solutions for it on the other. But propaganda cannot easily create a political or economic problem out of nothing. There must be some reason in reality. The problem need not actually exist, but there must be a reason why it might exist.

Technical civilization has made the great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact.