FROM Konrad Kellen’s introduction to the 1973 English translation of Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes by French writer Jacques Ellul:

A related point, central in Ellul’s thesis, is that modem propaganda cannot work without “education”; he thus reverses the widespread notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda. On the contrary, he says, education, or what usually goes by that word in the modem world, is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda.

In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls “pre-propaganda”—the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as “facts” and as “education.” Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modem propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of “judging for themselves.” They literally need propaganda.

In fact, the need for propaganda on the part of the “propagandee” is one of the most powerful elements of Elluls thesis. Cast out of the disintegrating microgroups of the past, such as family, church, or village, the individual is plunged into mass society and thrown back upon his own inadequate resources, his isolation, his loneliness, his ineffectuality. Propaganda then hands him in veritable abundance what he needs: a raison d’être, personal involvement and participation in important events, an outlet Introduction (vii and excuse for some of his more doubtful impulses, righteousness —all factitious, to be sure, all more or less spurious; but he drinks it all in and asks for more. Without this intense collaboration by the propagandee the propagandist would be helpless.

Thus propaganda, by first creating pseudo-needs through “pre-propaganda” and then providing pseudo-satisfactions for them, is pernicious. [bold added]

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