The Myth of Propaganda

Reflections on Jacques Ellul and René Girard

Oct 12, 2023

“Once you have entered the magic circle the sorcerer has drawn around himself, you are lost.”

—Eric Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery.”

We are drowning in propaganda. By whatever name we want to call it—public relations, advertising, branding, cable news, social media, psychological operations, etc.—as modern people, propaganda is our universal and unwanted companion. Yet despite this ubiquity, its operation has not yet been fully understood. In the following essay, I will deconstruct propaganda and emphasize the way in which it distorts our perception of time by making the merely possible seem inevitable. The image we have of propaganda as a powerful system of mental manipulation will be replaced with a new image, a circle which influences only those who do not know its secret.

Jacques Ellul’s landmark study of propaganda is remarkable not only for its exhaustive analysis of the phenomena but for overturning many of our common conceptions of how propaganda works. What is propaganda? Countering the notion that it is defined by lies and irrationality, Ellul insists that it has a “scientific character,” serving industrial, mass society as a rationalized, myth-making apparatus, in which psychology and sociology are weaponized by corporations or the government to unify and manage the population.1 On this point, he notes that propaganda around the world is based on different, though respectable and scientific, theories of mind and group behavior:

Stalinst propaganda was in great measure founded on Pavlolv’s theory of the conditioned reflex. Hitlerian propaganda was in great measure founded on Freud’s theory of repression and libido. American propaganda is founded in great measure on Dewey’s theory of teaching.2

Strangely, these distinct and conflicting methods of thought create works of propaganda which function very much like each other. Why is propaganda everywhere so similar if it is based on different, even competing, foundations? In no other scientific or technical field would this be the case. Ellul never answers this. In fact, he moves on, with some caveats, to analyze propaganda all over the world as being essentially similar in structure. What I will suggest is that Ellul does not answer this question, because the mechanics of propaganda have far less to do with psychology and sociology than normally assumed.

We tend to think of propaganda as persuading its audience, that it convinces us first, using symbols and psychological manipulation to touch the mind directly, and then we act on the conviction it has implanted. Ellul corrects this. The aim of propaganda, he tells us, is not to persuade, but to push the subject to action whether he believes the message or not. Then, once the subject has acted “in obedience to propaganda..he is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action.”3 This situation could be as mundane as regarding some product as good because we already purchased it, or as horrifying as retroactively justifying violence against the innocent. Either way, the end state of the process, the belief in the propaganda narrative, will appear to have occurred first, hiding the fact that any propaganda occurred at all. The subject is now convinced he always held the belief in question.

Ellul saw propaganda as having a myth-making function, and we find the same vicious circle we saw above, in the analysis of how action conditions belief, in René Girard’s anthropology of myth. Girard’s account is unique. He views each myth as a jumbled and misremembered record of actual events, a persecution story from the standpoint of the persecutors, who know not what they do. Girard explains:

"If you look at myth seriously, you will see stories about some kind of scoundrel who disrupts a community, who is punished by the entire community, and, after that, turns out to be a god. This is the misunderstanding…which creates the community”4

In myth creation three moments always occur in the following order—the crisis (1), the murder of the scapegoat (2), the reconciliation of the community and deification of the victim, i.e. myth (3). Yet if this process of myth creation is successful, the community will not remember it in the correct order. The divinity of the scapegoat is now believed to precede the crisis. Myth has become both the beginning and the end. In a commentary on Girard’s reading of myth, Jean-Pierre Dupuy furthers:

A mythic hero is expelled from a city, for example, for having destroyed the foundations of the political order. But the account of his expulsion transforms this event into the foundation of the very same political order. This paradoxical loop—how is it possible to have destroyed a social order one creates by being expelled from it?—is the very signature of myth.5

The mythic function of propaganda goes beyond what Ellul explained. In some ways, propaganda is myth, not only in the sense that it tells fantastical stories, or blames scapegoats, but that its essence is to distort our sense of time. In both Girard’s monomyth and Ellul’s discussion of how action conditions belief, the subject misremembers the sequence of events, moving the end stage of the process to the beginning to disguise his own role in what transpired.

Even when propaganda is pushing us to take action, we find yet another circular operation in which our sense of time is critical. Edward Bernays’s “Torches of Freedom” campaign, known today for its role in Adam Curtis’s documentary on propaganda and psychoanalysis, The Century of the Self, is a cornerstone of the conventional view of propaganda. Bernays is credited for convincing women to smoke, for reversing the taboo on women smoking in public, through weaponized psychoanalysis. But all Bernays did was show a group of attractive (but not too-attractive) women smoking openly in New York City’s Easter Day parade. I submit that what convinced women that smoking in public was now acceptable was not psycho-sexual symbolism, but that through his grand display and the associated media coverage, Bernay’s made it seem as though it was already acceptable for women to smoke.

More recently, during the so-called ‘pandemic,’ a common talking point in favor of the covid vaccines was that refusal was irrational, because everyone has already been vaccinated against other diseases numerous times. Parallel to this, it was made to appear that a “vaccine passport system” was already being implemented, which would forbid the unvaccinated from work or public life, making refusal impossible. Or consider the issue of immigration. Citizens of the United States are told that we must accept mass immigration from other countries, because we are already a nation of immigrants. On the topic of transgender medicine, we are told, not that we must provide “gender-affirming care” to support the newly emergent phenomena of trans-children, but that trans-children have always existed, and that we must act now to correct our previous denial.

Thus far we have explored propaganda as a series of circles. It creates belief by moving people to action, it drives action by convincing the subject he has acted already, or that his action is otherwise inevitable. When successful, these “paradoxical loops” vanish from the mind of the subject, who then has no recollection of what has occurred. But there is one final circle, and it is the most fundamental of them all.

Unsurprisingly, propaganda and its critique have grown together. However, as we have seen thus far, wherever myth is involved, causality never flows in the direction we think. The critiques do not follow in propaganda’s wake. They are its foundation. Propaganda’s real object is always itself, to convince us of its own power, that it is already in control, and there is no point in resisting.

Even with the best of intentions, critics of propaganda have furthered its control, presenting media and its manipulators as a powerful system of direct mind control. But these techniques do not reach our consciousness in the way we have been led to believe. How could they? Psychologists and sociologists cannot even agree on which theories are scientific. No, propaganda has one core mechanism, it moves the desired future state into the past, to trick people into making that desired state into reality in the present. And it works so well because it has applied that mechanism to itself. In other words, it succeeds because we are conditioned to believe that it already has. But once this operation is understood, the circle is broken. All we need to do is step outside.