An excerpt from Jacques Ellul’s book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes:
“To begin with, what is it that propaganda makes disappear? Everything to the nature of critical and personal judgment. Obviously, propaganda limits the application of thought. It limits the propagandee’s field of thought to the extent that it provides him with ready-made (and, moreover, unreal) thoughts and stereotypes, it orients him toward very limited ends and prevents him from using his mind or experimenting on his own. It determines the core from which all his thoughts must derive and draws from the beginning a sort of guideline that penults neither criticism nor imagination. More precisely, his imagination will lead only to small digressions from the fixed line and to only slightly deviant, preliminary responses within the framework. In this fashion we see the progressives make some ‘variations’ around the basic propaganda tenets of the Communist party. But the field of such variations is strictly limited.
The acceptance of this line, of such ends and limitations, pre-supposes the suppression of all critical judgment, which in turn is a result of the crystalization of thoughts and attitudes and the creation of taboos. As Jules Monnerot has accurately said: ‘All Individual passion leads to the suppression of all critical judgment with regard to the object of that passion.’ Beyond that, in the collective passion created by propaganda, critical judgment disappears altogether, for in no way can there ever be collective critical judgment. Man becomes incapable of ‘separation,’ of discernment (the word critical is derived from the Greek krino separate). The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda.
With regard to political situations, he is given ready-made value judgments invested with the power of truth by the number of supporters and the word of experts. The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a facility not comfortably exercised under any conditions.
What the individual loses is never easy to revive. Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have been atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda has been suppressed. In fact, we are dealing here with one of propaganda’s most durable effects: years of Intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another; this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-à-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself. At the same time, propaganda presents facts, judgments, and values in such confusion and with so many methods that it is literally impossible for the average man to proceed with discernment. He has neither the intellectual capacity nor the sources of information. He is therefore forced either to accept, or reject, everything in toto.
https://tygpress.com/post/115549178-59- ... e-NPC-Meme
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