Thread by @ConceptualJames

Jacques Ellul wrote one of the most important and clarifying books ever written on propaganda. In it, he insists a certain kind of person is the most susceptible to propaganda, giving three traits beyond his own ridiculous belief that he's immune to it. Let's take a look. 🧵

Ellul gives three traits that make someone not just susceptible to propaganda but also dependent on it (!). For us, they will be very unsettling. Before talking about those, though, he also explains that we generally misunderstand propaganda as being like tall tales and lies.

Not only are we susceptible to propaganda, then, we don't even have the ability to identify it. Sure, it's misleading, but it's more often misleading with truths than with outright lies. That's a first mistake most of us make in trying to recognize propaganda.

Second, and more importantly, we tend not to realize that propaganda is usually employed not exactly to mislead but to amplify and inflame existing trends, or, in reverse, to dampen them. That is, if typically seeks to produce overreaction or underreaction.

Ellul then gives three specific characteristics of people who are most susceptible to propaganda, in addition to the fact of being educated. Yes, being educated, he insists, increases our vulnerability to propaganda. Let's look at these three traits, then.

The people who are most susceptible to propaganda, says Ellul, are
1) interactive with the largest volumes of information,
2) feel a need to give their opinions (takes) on virtually every topic, and
3) deem themselves competent to judge the quality of information for themselves.

Here's how these categories are summarized in the introduction to his book, which are more specific than how I summarized them within the character limit.

"(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.”"

This list should make most of you on here very uncomfortable because it's us, especially "influencers" and pundits. Very Smart People and Very Political People are particularly indicted here. This is how we interact on social media, especially with "big" accounts.

Not only should reading it raise a mirror in front of us and make us feel uncomfortable, it should also make us nervous about the ways we are ourselves conduits for propaganda, relays in the vast communication webs we embed ourselves in, in this information economy.

It should also make us wary of influencers in a way we tend not to be. Their vulnerability to propaganda, even without being paid to participate, is effectively maximized by the incentives and pressures they're under. They're propaganda amplifiers and transmitters.

Ellul isn't particularly positive or negative about this state of affairs, but it seems important to recognize it for what it is. It's a lot to think about, that's for certain.