If ever I come across an old National Geographic, I am most interested not in the stories, but rather the advertisements. They give me insight into what people were seeing and thinking more than any writing. In my wildest dreams, I have descended back in time, back into 1968 or 1960, and tasted the hamburgers and listened to the sights and sounds. Just as everything around us now is brand new and modern, so was it then. Progress is nothing but an illusion. (Carole at Missouaplois showed a YouTube of a film taken from inside a car driving around Missoula in 1968 – fascinating – the other cars, the signs and businesses. I think I saw my girlfriend’s VW bug.)
So I am reading now, for the third time, a book from 1965 called “Propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes”, by Jacques Ellul. It is a gold mine, and every trip down the shaft brings up new nuggets. Ellul was himself detached from propaganda, and so was able to give a dispassionate description of the art/science from its early formal incarnation during the time of Napoleon to the highly sophisticated versions he saw around at that time – Chinese, American, French, Soviet. These were the countries that were actively engaged in deliberate propaganda at that time.
Since that time, it has only gotten worse.
In Ellul’s time, the most sophisticated propaganda was Soviet, as seen by the attempts by them and the Americans to bring Vietnam into their respective systems. So successful were the Communists that even South Vietnam, supposedly the American puddle and subject to American propaganda, wanted Ho Chi Minh as its leader. In the end, the Americans had no choice but to attack the country, kill those infected the the disease, and leave it wasted as an example to the rest of the world of what happens to those who go their own way. Where propaganda fails, brute force must take its place.
Others have written about various specific propaganda campaigns, like those that led the American public in to the great wars of the 20th century, or more recently our Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. Ellul takes it much deeper, talking about the destruction of the individual and the intellect, the need that people feel for propaganda, how it fills their voids, provides meaning, about how without it they are lost.
As I look at our two-party structure, the Tea Party movement, the submissive media, our very baseline notions that private property and capitalism are natural systems, that absurd notion that advertising is a neutral force that merely dispenses information … I realize that we are so deep in it, so deeply indoctrinated, that our daily lives have lost most meaning. We work and we shop. We are political eunuchs incapable of changing either our leadership, way of life, or our form of government. We are as regimented and enslaved as any population in modern history, more so than the Soviets who, one might notice, actually broke their chains. (Soviet propaganda lost its allure as people living in those countries realized that they were materially disadvantaged compared to their western counterparts. This was simply a product of natural subterfuge brought about by improvements in electronic communication. The U.S. never intended, never wanted the Soviet Union to fail. Isn’t it amazing that once they awoke, their horrible and oppressive communist governments simply dissolved? It seems impossible that such a thing could happen under our bubble.)
Here is today’s nugget, one that I overlooked in my first two passes through this book, as the two-party system was not much on my mind than in past readings.
A party or a bloc of parties almost as powerful as the would-be runaway party starts big propaganda before it is pushed to the wall. This is the case in the United States, and might be in France if the regrouping of the Right should become stabilized. In that situation one would necessarily have, for financial reasons, a democracy reduced to two parties, it being inconceivable that a larger number of parties would have sufficient means to make such propaganda. This would lead to a bipartite structure, not for reasons of doctrine or tradition, but for technical propaganda reasons. This implies the exclusion of new parties in the future. Not only are second parties progressively eliminated, but it becomes impossible to organize new political groups with any chance at all of making them heard; in the midst of the concerted power of the forces at work, it becomes increasingly difficult to establish a new program. On the other hand, such a group would need, from the beginning, a great deal of money, many members, and great power. Under such conditions, a new party could only be born as Athena emerging fully grown from Zeus’ forehead. A political organism would have to collect money for a long time in advance, to have bought propaganda instruments, and untied its members before it made its appearance as a party capable of resisting the pressures of those who possess the “media.”*
Not just the mere organization of a new party is becoming increasingly difficult – so is expression of a new political idea or doctrine. Ideas no longer exist except through the media of information. When the latter are in the hands of the existing parties, no truly revolutionary or new doctrine has any chance of expressing itself, i.e, of existing. Yet innovation was one of the principle characteristics of democracy. Now, because nobody wants it any longer, it tends to disappear.
One can say that propaganda almost inevitably leads to a two-party system. Not only would it be very difficult for several parties to be rich enough to support such expensive campaigns of propaganda, but also propaganda tends to schematize public opinion. Where there is propaganda, we find fewer and fewer nuances and refinements of detail or doctrine. Rather, opinions are more incisive; there is only black and white, yes and no. Such a state of public opinion leads directly to a two-party systems and disappearance of a multi-party system.
The effects of propaganda can also be clearly seen in view of what Duvenger calls the party with the majority mandate and the party without that mandate, which originally should command an absolute majority in parliament, is normally the one that has been created by propaganda. Propaganda’s principal trumps then slip out of the hands of the other parties. All the latter can do then is make demagogic propaganda, i.e., a false propaganda that is purely artificial, considering what we have said about the relationship between propaganda and reality. (In other words, the party out of power must pick an artificial issue.)
In that case, we find ourselves faced with two completely contradictory propagandas. On one side is a propaganda powerful in media and techniques, but limited in its ends and modes of expression, a propaganda strictly integrated into a given social group, conformist and statist. On the other is a propaganda weak in regard to media and techniques, but excessive in its ends and expressions, a propaganda aimed against the existing order, against the State, against prevailing group standards. (Emphasis added)
In other words, the Republicans, out of power, tend to go extreme on us as a means of regaining power, while the Democrats, out of power, appeal to more progressive roots, also perceived as extreme by the other side. Neither has any implications regarding how each parties governs once in power.
We cannot avoid propaganda, we are all subject to it. To the degree we think ourselves immune, we are its slaves. To be aware of it is to be free of it to some degree. And, of course, just like a teen horror movie, in backing away from it, we fail to notice that it is lurking behind us too.
But most important is this: propaganda, while seemingly tied to various ideologies, is apolitical. It is solely structured to control the behaviors of men and women in large societies. In our case, neither our Democrats or Republicans represent an ideology of any coherence, but rather only seek to organize voting blocs based on various sales pitches aimed at various interest groups. Once elected, each party governs in the same manner, following the dictates of the powerful forces of finance and industry.
Most interesting to me is this: “Propaganda,” per se, is not taught in our universities, and yet skilled practitioners emerge as if deeply trained in the art. It appears to be a protégé system. Goebbels did not study it, nor did Bernays or Rove, yet each was/is highly skilled. Go figure.
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*This is perhaps why Nader’s most recent book it titled “Only the Super-rich Can Save Us,” why only extremely rich men like H. Ross Perot or Michael Bloomberg can ignore the two-party structure.
Piece of Mindful 