Dissecting The New Age: Alienation through Propaganda, page 1

Dissecting The New Age: Alienation through Propaganda

To be alienated means to be someone other (alienus) than oneself; it also can mean to belong to someone else, it means to be deprived of one's self, to be subjected to, or even identified with, someone else. That is definitely the effect of propaganda. Propaganda strips the individual, robs him of himself, and makes him live an alien and artificial life, to such an extent that he becomes another person and obeys impulses foreign to him. He obeys someone else.

Once again, to produce this effect, propaganda restricts itself to utilizing, increasing, and reinforcing the individual's inclination to lose himself in something bigger than he is, to dissipate his individuality, to free his ego of all doubt, conflict, and suffering - through fusion with others; to devote himself to a great leader and a great cause...

To begin with, what is it that propaganda makes disappear? Everything in 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 towards 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 permits neither criticism nor imagination. More precisely, his imagination will lead only to a small digressions from the fixed line and to only slightly deviant, preliminary responses within the framework...

The acceptance of this line, of such ends and limitations, presupposes the suppression of all critical judgment, which in turn is a result of the crystallization of thoughts and attitudes and the creations of taboos. As Jules Monnerot ha 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 critical collective judgment. Man becomes incapable of "separation," of discernment. 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 judgements 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...

... All this obviously leads to the elimination of personal judgment, which takes place as soon as the individual accepts public opinion as his own. When he expresses public opinion in his words and gestures, he no longer expresses himself, but his society, his group. To be sure, the individual always will express the group, more or less. But in this case he will express it totally and in response to a systematic operation.

Moreover, this impersonal public opinion, when produced by propaganda, is artificial. It corresponds to nothing authentic; yet is precisely this artificial opinion that the individual absorbs. He is filled with it; he no longer expresses his ideas, but those of his group, and with great fervor at that - it is a propaganda prerequisite that he should assert them with firmness and conviction. He absorbs the collective judgments, the creatures of propaganda; he absorbs them like the nourishment which they have, in fact become. he expounds them as his own. He takes a vigorous stand, begins to oppose others. He asserts himself at the very moment that he denies his own self without realizing it. When he recites his propaganda lesson and says that he is thinking for himself, when his eyes see nothing and his mouth only produces sounds previously stenciled into his brain, when he says that he is indeed expressing his own judgement - then he really demonstrates that he no longer thinks at all, ever, and that he does not exist as a person...

Everywhere we find men who pronounce as highly personal truths what they have read in the papers only an hour before, and whose beliefs are merely the result of a powerful propaganda. Everywhere we find people who have blind confidence in a political party, a general, a movie star, a country, or a cause, and who will not tolerate the slightest challenge to that god. Everywhere we meet people who, because they are filled with the consciousness of Higher Interests they must serve unto death, are no longer capable of making the simplest moral or intellectual distinctions or of engaging in the most elementary reasoning. yet all this acquired without effort, experience, reflection, or criticism - by the destructive effect of well made propaganda. We meet this alienated man at every turn, and are possibly already one ourselves.

... It satisfies man, but with false and illusory satisfaction. It gives him explanations of the World in which he lives, but explanations that are mendacious and irrational. It reassures him or excites him, but always at the wrong moment. It makes him tremble with fear of some biological warfare that never did exist, and makes him believe in the peaceful intentions of countries that have no desire for peace. It gives him reasons for the sacrifices demanded of him, but not the real reasons. Thus, in 1914, it called on him to lay down his life for his country, but remained silent on the war's economic causes, for which he certainly would not have fought.

... All this is also at work when propaganda liberates our deepest impulses and tendencies, such as our erotic drives, guilt feelings, and desire for power. But such liberation does not provide true and genuine satisfactions for such drives, any more than it justifies our demands and aggressions by permitting us to feel righteous in spite of them... The satisfactions and liberations offered by propaganda are ersatz. Their aim is to provide a certain decompression or to use the shock effect of these tremendous forces somewhere else, to use them in support of actions that would otherwise lack impetus. This shows how the propaganda deprives the individual of his true personality.

Modern man deeply craves friendship, confidence, close personal relationships. But he is plunged into a world of competition, hostility, and anonymity, he needs to meet someone whom he can trust completely, for whom he can feel pure friendship, and to whom he can mean something in return. That is hard to find in his daily life, but apparently confidence in a leader, a hero, a movie star, or a TV personality is much more satisfying. TV, for example, creates feelings of friendship, a new intimacy, and thus fully satisfies those needs. But such satisfactions are purely illusory and fallacious because there is no true friendship of any kind between the TV personality and the viewer who feels that personality to be his friend. Here is a typical mendacious satisfaction of a genuine need...

... The propagandee does not exert much energy to make his decision, for that decisions corresponds with his group, with suggestion, and with the sociological forces. Under the influence of propaganda he always takes the easy, the path of least resistance, even if it cost him his life. But even while coasting downhill, he claims he is climbing uphill and performing a personal, heroic act. For propaganda has aroused his energy, personality, an sense of responsibility - or rather their verbal images, because the forces themselves were long ago destroyed by propaganda. This duplicity is propaganda's most destructive act. And ot leads us to consider next propaganda's effect of psychic dissociation.

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[edit on 27-2-2010 by Wisen Heimer]