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Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion
Randal Marlin's classic text on the history and ethics of propaganda is updated in this new edition.
392 pages, Paperback
First published September 30, 2013
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December 19, 2017
Here is is a comprehensive study of the history and techniques of ubiquitous art of propaganda. The author is a student of Jacques Ellul, the preeminent philosopher of propaganda in the twentieth century. As part of a university course for students, who are the next generation of information producers, there is a strong focus on ethics involved. The book presents the ideas of scholars from Aristotle to George Orwell, rather than simply the author’s opinions. Therefore multiple contradictory viewpoints are often given. I liked this approach because it encouraged me to think and reach my own conclusions. It comes at the cost of being a smooth and easy read.
The Definition is Important
Defining propaganda is more than an academic exercise, it gets to the heart of how we communicate with each other, and how we know what is true. The author defines it as “The organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment.” But this restrictive definition gets reclassified as “vertical” propaganda, while the many acts of persuasion that are not under such central control are called “horizontal” propaganda.
The Role of Intent
A fundamental question is the role of intent. There is no definitive answer given by the multiple viewpoints approach. With the focus on ethics, intent plays a major role in most of the examples in the book. I argue that including intent in a definition of propaganda means the abandonment of objectivity. It amounts to saying my side tells the truth; your side is propaganda. This kind of hegemonic definition is well described on page 6 as, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.”
Intent can actually be negative. The more deeply you believe something, the more likely you are to distort the truth to push your belief. If the message is wrong or manipulative, it remains so no matter how good the intentions behind it. Intent and ethics are important for the producers of information, the target audience for this book. On the other hand, we consumers of information/propaganda need to ignore supposed intent and look critically at everything.
Distinguishing Propaganda from Education
Jacques Ellul is paraphrased as saying that the decline of church, village and family influences that controlled our lives in the past has cut us off from our sense of identity. That is a nice romantic way of saying that in the good old days our beliefs were fed to us with no critical effort required on our part.
Education is the modern replacement for the source of our beliefs. Unfortunately it is mainly taught as revealed truth. On page 74 a brainwashing technique is described, including “confinement to the same position for long periods of time” and “prolonged concentration on the same subject.” Does this not describe the average classroom? It is this kind of education prepares the student for a lifetime of absorbing propaganda messages.
What exactly is the difference between propaganda and education? This is certainly an important question for educators such as Jacques Ellul and the author of this book. Several answers are proposed. The best is that education should “encourage critical enquiry and open minds to arguments for and against any particular conclusion, rather than close them to the possibility of any conclusion but one.” I would like to take this further. Propaganda (and most actual education) teaches and relies on faith, meaning uncritical acceptance of what is being taught. Challenging all faith-based thinking is the only antidote to propaganda.
Pre-propaganda and the Importance of Myth
Jacques Ellul introduced the concept of “pre-propaganda”, which prepares us to be receptive to the formal propaganda that is to come. This begins with uncritical education. But more interesting is the notion of “building up useful myths in the minds of a population.” A myth is an abstraction that takes on a life of its own, and becomes all encompassing in the mind of the believer.
An excellent example of the use of myth appears early in the book (out of place, in my opinion) under the name “persuasive definition”. This is defined as a word with high emotive content used to manipulate peoples attitudes. The example given is “Democracy”. We all love democracy. However, the socialist will redirect it to stress equality, while the capitalist will emphasize freedom from government control.
All myths work this way. Whether the myth is God and Country, Communism or Freedom, the “glittering generality” (another term used later in the book) is pasted over a specific meaning, and raised to the level of an absolute truth that cannot be questioned.
Although only about a page of the book is devoted to the concept, I think myth a crucial part of how propaganda works. The sequence is Mythologize, Polarize, and Tribalize. After the convenient myth is established, you then separate the believers from everyone else. The believers become a tribe, which demands absolute loyalty to the group and total opposition to every competing idea.
Can Propaganda be a Good Thing?
The book proposes some neutral and positive definitions of propaganda. I found two examples to be of interest.
The first example was in a courtroom, where the prosecution and defense both put the best possible spin on their respective cases. This is supposedly OK because we know the biases in advance, and are getting both sides. But the average of two lies does not always add up to the truth. I am thinking of the example of an innocent man who was convicted of raping the girl who lived next door because the police suppressed some of the evidence. The police are tired of guilty criminals going free because of clever defense lawyers, so they are forced to play the same game. In this case they “won”, and an innocent man lost years of his life. A better ethic of telling the truth on both sides would give a greater chance of the real truth being discovered.
The second example is that of John Grierson, the founder of Canada’s National Film Board. He claims that propaganda gives people the fourth “R” left out by education, “Rooted Belief”, which defines one’s place in the community. I translate this into creating a myth. But maybe he is right. There are plenty of propagandists out there who want to seduce us with false myths. Perhaps the only antidote is to get to people first with what we think are wholesome productive myths. This is discomforting for those of us attached to the myth of Reason.
The History of Propaganda
The book presents a comprehensive history of propaganda from the ancient Greeks to modern times. It seems that Aristotle figured out all the techniques of persuasion long ago. Most interesting is the well-documented account of how British propaganda in World War I manufactured a story about the Germans using human corpses as raw materials in a factory in Belgium. This supposed atrocity was meant to motivate British troops. Maybe it did, but the book points out that it also let to the unjust treaty ending the war that helped lead to the next war. And when Hitler was committing real atrocities, they were not believed because people had been lied to before.
Ethics and Freedom of Expression
Chapter four is essentially a compact course on ethics. I have encountered most of these ideas before, but I found having it all come at me at once a bit overwhelming. What is the effect on a student who has not thought much about this before? I suspect the unfortunate and unintended result may be an excessive moral relativism. But what is the author to do, not introduce ethics? This is yet another ethical question with no easy answer. The remainder of the book is essentially about the conflict between freedom of expression and placing controls on propaganda.
Conclusion
This book is an excellent resource for understanding the propaganda question. I think there is too much emphasis on traditional “vertical” propaganda, when most misinformation is now delivered horizontally, especially in this age of the Internet. The book needs to be approached with a critical mind. Don’t expect to be fed a bunch of easy answers. But, of course, that approach is the key to deconstructing propaganda.
The Definition is Important
Defining propaganda is more than an academic exercise, it gets to the heart of how we communicate with each other, and how we know what is true. The author defines it as “The organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment.” But this restrictive definition gets reclassified as “vertical” propaganda, while the many acts of persuasion that are not under such central control are called “horizontal” propaganda.
The Role of Intent
A fundamental question is the role of intent. There is no definitive answer given by the multiple viewpoints approach. With the focus on ethics, intent plays a major role in most of the examples in the book. I argue that including intent in a definition of propaganda means the abandonment of objectivity. It amounts to saying my side tells the truth; your side is propaganda. This kind of hegemonic definition is well described on page 6 as, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.”
Intent can actually be negative. The more deeply you believe something, the more likely you are to distort the truth to push your belief. If the message is wrong or manipulative, it remains so no matter how good the intentions behind it. Intent and ethics are important for the producers of information, the target audience for this book. On the other hand, we consumers of information/propaganda need to ignore supposed intent and look critically at everything.
Distinguishing Propaganda from Education
Jacques Ellul is paraphrased as saying that the decline of church, village and family influences that controlled our lives in the past has cut us off from our sense of identity. That is a nice romantic way of saying that in the good old days our beliefs were fed to us with no critical effort required on our part.
Education is the modern replacement for the source of our beliefs. Unfortunately it is mainly taught as revealed truth. On page 74 a brainwashing technique is described, including “confinement to the same position for long periods of time” and “prolonged concentration on the same subject.” Does this not describe the average classroom? It is this kind of education prepares the student for a lifetime of absorbing propaganda messages.
What exactly is the difference between propaganda and education? This is certainly an important question for educators such as Jacques Ellul and the author of this book. Several answers are proposed. The best is that education should “encourage critical enquiry and open minds to arguments for and against any particular conclusion, rather than close them to the possibility of any conclusion but one.” I would like to take this further. Propaganda (and most actual education) teaches and relies on faith, meaning uncritical acceptance of what is being taught. Challenging all faith-based thinking is the only antidote to propaganda.
Pre-propaganda and the Importance of Myth
Jacques Ellul introduced the concept of “pre-propaganda”, which prepares us to be receptive to the formal propaganda that is to come. This begins with uncritical education. But more interesting is the notion of “building up useful myths in the minds of a population.” A myth is an abstraction that takes on a life of its own, and becomes all encompassing in the mind of the believer.
An excellent example of the use of myth appears early in the book (out of place, in my opinion) under the name “persuasive definition”. This is defined as a word with high emotive content used to manipulate peoples attitudes. The example given is “Democracy”. We all love democracy. However, the socialist will redirect it to stress equality, while the capitalist will emphasize freedom from government control.
All myths work this way. Whether the myth is God and Country, Communism or Freedom, the “glittering generality” (another term used later in the book) is pasted over a specific meaning, and raised to the level of an absolute truth that cannot be questioned.
Although only about a page of the book is devoted to the concept, I think myth a crucial part of how propaganda works. The sequence is Mythologize, Polarize, and Tribalize. After the convenient myth is established, you then separate the believers from everyone else. The believers become a tribe, which demands absolute loyalty to the group and total opposition to every competing idea.
Can Propaganda be a Good Thing?
The book proposes some neutral and positive definitions of propaganda. I found two examples to be of interest.
The first example was in a courtroom, where the prosecution and defense both put the best possible spin on their respective cases. This is supposedly OK because we know the biases in advance, and are getting both sides. But the average of two lies does not always add up to the truth. I am thinking of the example of an innocent man who was convicted of raping the girl who lived next door because the police suppressed some of the evidence. The police are tired of guilty criminals going free because of clever defense lawyers, so they are forced to play the same game. In this case they “won”, and an innocent man lost years of his life. A better ethic of telling the truth on both sides would give a greater chance of the real truth being discovered.
The second example is that of John Grierson, the founder of Canada’s National Film Board. He claims that propaganda gives people the fourth “R” left out by education, “Rooted Belief”, which defines one’s place in the community. I translate this into creating a myth. But maybe he is right. There are plenty of propagandists out there who want to seduce us with false myths. Perhaps the only antidote is to get to people first with what we think are wholesome productive myths. This is discomforting for those of us attached to the myth of Reason.
The History of Propaganda
The book presents a comprehensive history of propaganda from the ancient Greeks to modern times. It seems that Aristotle figured out all the techniques of persuasion long ago. Most interesting is the well-documented account of how British propaganda in World War I manufactured a story about the Germans using human corpses as raw materials in a factory in Belgium. This supposed atrocity was meant to motivate British troops. Maybe it did, but the book points out that it also let to the unjust treaty ending the war that helped lead to the next war. And when Hitler was committing real atrocities, they were not believed because people had been lied to before.
Ethics and Freedom of Expression
Chapter four is essentially a compact course on ethics. I have encountered most of these ideas before, but I found having it all come at me at once a bit overwhelming. What is the effect on a student who has not thought much about this before? I suspect the unfortunate and unintended result may be an excessive moral relativism. But what is the author to do, not introduce ethics? This is yet another ethical question with no easy answer. The remainder of the book is essentially about the conflict between freedom of expression and placing controls on propaganda.
Conclusion
This book is an excellent resource for understanding the propaganda question. I think there is too much emphasis on traditional “vertical” propaganda, when most misinformation is now delivered horizontally, especially in this age of the Internet. The book needs to be approached with a critical mind. Don’t expect to be fed a bunch of easy answers. But, of course, that approach is the key to deconstructing propaganda.
November 26, 2025
Considering that Marlin is a university lecturer his book follows the course one would expect, which is an academic text designed for maybe first or second year students looking for a broad scope on topics like advertising, marketing, propaganda, and all the philosophical issues grounding them like those dealing with rhetoric, free speech and the value of democracy. The positive aspect of this format is that for a layperson it can give you a lay of the land of how thinking has evolved over time, with Marlin giving the highlights of Greek philosophy all the way to the enlightenment thinkers and how these streams of thought shape our ideas of rhetoric and truth today. However, the negative of this is that structurally you end up reading about one philosopher or great thinker for one page, then move on to the other the next, and maybe the third you get a discussion of how their thinking is similar or dissimilar, over and over again. Over time you just start glazing over who these people are, or as time moves on, who these commissions or governmental bodies are and what they have to say. It all starts blending together and worse becomes very boring. The last third of this book was a struggle to get through despite Marlin's attempts of invigorate the text with real world examples (one particular striking story being the use of atrocity stories in wartime propaganda both in ww1 and in our modern gulf wars). Marlin mentions in the introduction having constraints around space in the text but I wish he could have included more examples to liven up the narrative. Overall, I think if you're a layperson who is really interested in the study of public relations and the cloud of subjects around this topic than I think this work is worth leafing through. Less so for possible readers who aren't Canadian as Marlin was teaching at a Canadian university and therefore uses the Canadian political framework when discussing issues around things like government regulatory control over things like media and advertising. If someone like myself living in Canada found parts of this work boring, I'm sure other global readers would struggle greatly.
Some interesting passages from the work:
Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example. Of the three he places greatest stress on the ethos for persuading audiences and, at least regarding general audiences, he may be right. What ethos amounts to is credibility, something different from facility with words. It may be, Aristotle says, that people ought to pay more attention to argument than they do, but he is aware that we must treat audiences as we find them, and the fact is that how a person projects herself does make a difference to her credibility. To persuade an audience, you need a spokesperson whom people can trust, to whom they can relate. The Nazi propaganda machine made full use of this principle as we shall see. The Soviet Union made use of Vladimir Posner who, having grown up in New York, spoke English like an American. Ethos is also exploited in modern advertising, such as through the use of celebrity endorsements. (Pg. 40)
George Lakoff, a University of California linguist and cognitive scientist, has related the matter of framing to the way in which the brain is structured and how neural paths are tied together in ways that we are not conscious of. Metaphors resonate with other metaphors and can bring into play a whole moral universe. For example, the idea of the family is deeply embedded in our life experience, but how it affects our moral outlook will vary depending on the kind of experiences the family brings to mind. Metaphors of the father when applied to the state (the fatherland, founding fathers, etc.) tend to bring to mind ideas of authority, strict discipline, and punishment. Maternal metaphors, on the other hand, tend to make people think in terms of nurturing and co-operation. It can become of vital importance for progressives not to buy into those metaphors that favor neo-conservative values but to replace them with others that favor a more progressive politics. It is a key contention of Lakoff's that our culture has been over-concerned with rationality when so much of our behavior is affected by framing about which we have little consciousness. He thinks the neo-conservatives successfully manipulate public consciousness by playing into their own frameworks by using appropriate metaphors. Against this, the appeal to reasoned arguments is politically weak. (Pg. 98)
Personal note: This whole passage brings to mind debates I listened to around China's censorship of their own media. The pro-censorship take I heard repeatedly was something like "The government are like good parents who monitor what their kids do online", with the people participating in the debate ignoring the fact that they were all well into middle age and probably don't need to ask their parent's permission to check their e-mail. However, the framing device was a powerful way to gloss over any real political debate over what the proper constraints of communication should be, and Marlin goes intensively into how deeply the Canadian government questioned itself on how and when free speech should be restricted later in the text.
Name-calling in general is a powerful force for influencing opinion because names are easily remembered. Words such as "Uncle Tom," "demagogue," "racist," "sexist," "traitor," and the like carry powerful emotional overtones, but they also cause perceptions of the individual so named to be warped. It is sometimes said of such powerful terms that a person is "guilty if charged," such is the tendency of people to believe that there's "no smoke without fire" and that denials are only to be expected and not to be believed without further evidence. Names can have a powerful revealing effect, causing people to become aware of some truth. But, used in propaganda, names invite us to form our opinions without reviewing the evidence and, thus, to overlook those aspects of the truth the propagandist prefers to see concealed. In our own day, we find words like "Communist," "leftist," "liberal," "extreme rightest," "bigot," "neo-con," "terrorist," and so on used pejoratively, often without a clear idea as to the meaning of the term so applied. (Pg. 101)
Personal note: Reminds me of Trump's gift to come up with nicknames on the fly and how effective they were at damaging his opponents.
My suspicious nature has been spurred, perhaps unjustifiably, on more than one occasion by certain commercial labels involving "or" and "and/or" (the latter making clear that the disjunctions are inclusive, that is to say, "one or the other, or both," as distinct from "one, or the other, but not both"). A package says, "contains real cream and/or milk and/or skim milk powder." This statement is true if there is only skim milk powder in it. Is this a gimmick to make people think the contents grander than they in fact are? At least Canada's marketing lawmakers have issued regulations about the use of "and/or" in packaging. The statement "may contain sugar and/or dextrose" indicates that, when a sweetening agent is used as an ingredient, it may be sugar or dextrose or a mixture of each that is used, "{t}he probability being that more sugar than dextrose will be used during the twelve months" from the time the label is applied. Ingredients must, according to regulation, be listed "in descending order of the proportion in which they will be used." (Pg. 118)
Paulos mentions two related ideas. The first is the "halo effect," or the tendency to upgrade our evaluation of a person or group in all categories if we are particularly impressed by one category. The other is the notion of "anchoring effects." If people are asked to make an estimate when they have no real knowledge-say, about the population of Turkey-how they will answer depends on what number is first suggested to them. "Of those who were first presented with the figure of 5 million, the average estimate was 17 million; of those first presented with a figure of 65 million, the average estimate was 35 million."
A more difficult concept to understand is what Paulos calls "conditional probability," yet it is very important to do so if we are to have an adequate understanding of certain forms of risk. Risk can sometimes be exaggerated for propaganda purposes. As one saying has it, "funding follows fear." The saying is used to debunk activist groups but it is also true that sales of some services or products (e.g. pharmaceuticals) can also be increased by fear.
Suppose, Paulos continues, there is a test for a disease which is 99 per cent accurate; if you have the disease, the test will give a positive result 99 per cent of the time; if you don't have it, it will be negative 99 per cent of the time. Consider, then, a case where a disease has a general frequency of only 0.1 per cent, or one person in 1,000. What will happen if 100,000 people are given the test? Statistically, there should be 100 people who have the disease, but what will the test show?
Of the 100 people who have the disease, one will be shown not to have it, and the other 99 will be shown to have it. But of the other 99,900 people, 1 per cent, or 999, will be shown (falsely) to have the disease. The total number of people shown to have the disease will be 99+999 or 1,098. so, if you tested positive, there is still only a fairly small chance-99/1,098, or a bit over 9 per cent-that you have the disease, despite the fact that the positive test is 99 per cent accurate for those who have the disease. (Pg. 134)
John Locke (1632-1704) explicitly shares Milton's opinion that atheists and those who subject themselves to a religion tied to a foreign state, such that their civil allegiance to the Crown might conflict with their religious obligations, should not be tolerated by the civil magistrate. Nor, for Locke, should those be tolerated who profess to have special privilege or power derived from religion over the civil authority or who "will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matter of mere religion"-"mere" presumably referring to religions that are not tied to political power. Missing from Locke's account, as Fitzjames Stephen argues in a critique, is the principle that "free inquiry is the great, and indeed almost the only possible guarantee for the truth of any doctrines whatever. Persecution destroys this guarantee, and is therefore unfavorable to any intelligent and real belief in the truth of any creed whatever." (Pg. 221)
(Pg. 224) The tendency to conformity is strong, and people with original but challenging ideas are likely to be silenced if there is no recognition of the value of nonconformity, George Bernard Shaw was later to put this idea very succinctly when he said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Mill acknowledges that there is a need to protect a minority not only against tyranny by the state but also against the formidable social tyranny that is more difficult to escape, penetrating as it does "much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." From this comes Mill's call for resistance to this social tendency:
Quite apart from the possible truth of all or part of a heretical doctrine, Mill recognizes the great benefit provided by challenges to received opinion, namely, the stimulus to holding those views with vitality. Without any challenges, a view may become simply "dead dogma." The result of avoiding all critical reflection about a doctrine one subscribes to is that one becomes unable to defend the view against the most superficial objections. Apart from that, the holding even of true opinions through prejudice is unworthy of a rational being and does not constitute knowledge (JSM 43). We do not fully understand the justification for our believing in our own doctrines if we do not understand what arguments are brought against them. How can we say that some contrary view is wrong, when we don't even know what that view is? To experience a proper challenge to received opinion, it is not enough, Mill thinks, to get a secondhand statement of heretical opinions. It is important to hear from people who actually believe these statements and who can present their case in the strongest form. (Pg. 227)
(Pg. 290) If we hark back to the Glassco Report and look at government information in Canada in the decades since the 1960s, we can see no diminution of government advertising and we have reason to recall the admonition that sheer quantity can turn government information into propaganda. Bursts of advertisements accompany every new federal-provincial rivalry, and spending limits are sidestepped with subliminal messages paid for by the taxpayer. For instance, in the May 1980 referendum on Quebec independence the federal side was to vote "non" and the separate side "oui." One advertisement for not mixing drinking with driving, sponsored by a federal department, read "NON" in big letters; the overt intent was to indicate not drinking alcohol before driving, but the covert intent was which vote should be cast. The PQ government responded with an employment billboard with large letters featuring the acronym of the Office de la Securite d'Emploi-OSE. The word "ose" in French means "dare." In other words, the billboard suggested that people dare to vote for Quebec sovereignty. One argument in justification for the federal blitz was that, since the province had control over the teaching system and the CEGEPs (schools straddling high school and post-secondary education), the Quebec government had an unfair advantage. Certainly it made use of this advantage at the time of the introduction of the 1981 Constitutional Amendment (later to become the 1982 Amendment), when it circulated to history departments in all the schools and in public places such as liquor outlets an emotional 11-page booklet with the heading "Minute Ottawa!" The booklet contained a tendentious presentation and interpretation of the constitutional amendments.
With the referendum over, the advertising competition did not stop. The Quebec government, in anticipation of constitutional changes, placed a two-page advertisement in August 1980 in Le Devoir setting out its own position, the federal position, and the position of other provinces on a number of constitutional and policy issues. The federal government produced a large amount of advertising of its own, prompting an indignant column by W.A. Wilson in the Ottawa Journal, "Ads tread fearful line between information and propaganda." Wilson's comments are worth recording:
Some interesting passages from the work:
Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example. Of the three he places greatest stress on the ethos for persuading audiences and, at least regarding general audiences, he may be right. What ethos amounts to is credibility, something different from facility with words. It may be, Aristotle says, that people ought to pay more attention to argument than they do, but he is aware that we must treat audiences as we find them, and the fact is that how a person projects herself does make a difference to her credibility. To persuade an audience, you need a spokesperson whom people can trust, to whom they can relate. The Nazi propaganda machine made full use of this principle as we shall see. The Soviet Union made use of Vladimir Posner who, having grown up in New York, spoke English like an American. Ethos is also exploited in modern advertising, such as through the use of celebrity endorsements. (Pg. 40)
George Lakoff, a University of California linguist and cognitive scientist, has related the matter of framing to the way in which the brain is structured and how neural paths are tied together in ways that we are not conscious of. Metaphors resonate with other metaphors and can bring into play a whole moral universe. For example, the idea of the family is deeply embedded in our life experience, but how it affects our moral outlook will vary depending on the kind of experiences the family brings to mind. Metaphors of the father when applied to the state (the fatherland, founding fathers, etc.) tend to bring to mind ideas of authority, strict discipline, and punishment. Maternal metaphors, on the other hand, tend to make people think in terms of nurturing and co-operation. It can become of vital importance for progressives not to buy into those metaphors that favor neo-conservative values but to replace them with others that favor a more progressive politics. It is a key contention of Lakoff's that our culture has been over-concerned with rationality when so much of our behavior is affected by framing about which we have little consciousness. He thinks the neo-conservatives successfully manipulate public consciousness by playing into their own frameworks by using appropriate metaphors. Against this, the appeal to reasoned arguments is politically weak. (Pg. 98)
Personal note: This whole passage brings to mind debates I listened to around China's censorship of their own media. The pro-censorship take I heard repeatedly was something like "The government are like good parents who monitor what their kids do online", with the people participating in the debate ignoring the fact that they were all well into middle age and probably don't need to ask their parent's permission to check their e-mail. However, the framing device was a powerful way to gloss over any real political debate over what the proper constraints of communication should be, and Marlin goes intensively into how deeply the Canadian government questioned itself on how and when free speech should be restricted later in the text.
Name-calling in general is a powerful force for influencing opinion because names are easily remembered. Words such as "Uncle Tom," "demagogue," "racist," "sexist," "traitor," and the like carry powerful emotional overtones, but they also cause perceptions of the individual so named to be warped. It is sometimes said of such powerful terms that a person is "guilty if charged," such is the tendency of people to believe that there's "no smoke without fire" and that denials are only to be expected and not to be believed without further evidence. Names can have a powerful revealing effect, causing people to become aware of some truth. But, used in propaganda, names invite us to form our opinions without reviewing the evidence and, thus, to overlook those aspects of the truth the propagandist prefers to see concealed. In our own day, we find words like "Communist," "leftist," "liberal," "extreme rightest," "bigot," "neo-con," "terrorist," and so on used pejoratively, often without a clear idea as to the meaning of the term so applied. (Pg. 101)
Personal note: Reminds me of Trump's gift to come up with nicknames on the fly and how effective they were at damaging his opponents.
My suspicious nature has been spurred, perhaps unjustifiably, on more than one occasion by certain commercial labels involving "or" and "and/or" (the latter making clear that the disjunctions are inclusive, that is to say, "one or the other, or both," as distinct from "one, or the other, but not both"). A package says, "contains real cream and/or milk and/or skim milk powder." This statement is true if there is only skim milk powder in it. Is this a gimmick to make people think the contents grander than they in fact are? At least Canada's marketing lawmakers have issued regulations about the use of "and/or" in packaging. The statement "may contain sugar and/or dextrose" indicates that, when a sweetening agent is used as an ingredient, it may be sugar or dextrose or a mixture of each that is used, "{t}he probability being that more sugar than dextrose will be used during the twelve months" from the time the label is applied. Ingredients must, according to regulation, be listed "in descending order of the proportion in which they will be used." (Pg. 118)
Paulos mentions two related ideas. The first is the "halo effect," or the tendency to upgrade our evaluation of a person or group in all categories if we are particularly impressed by one category. The other is the notion of "anchoring effects." If people are asked to make an estimate when they have no real knowledge-say, about the population of Turkey-how they will answer depends on what number is first suggested to them. "Of those who were first presented with the figure of 5 million, the average estimate was 17 million; of those first presented with a figure of 65 million, the average estimate was 35 million."
A more difficult concept to understand is what Paulos calls "conditional probability," yet it is very important to do so if we are to have an adequate understanding of certain forms of risk. Risk can sometimes be exaggerated for propaganda purposes. As one saying has it, "funding follows fear." The saying is used to debunk activist groups but it is also true that sales of some services or products (e.g. pharmaceuticals) can also be increased by fear.
Suppose, Paulos continues, there is a test for a disease which is 99 per cent accurate; if you have the disease, the test will give a positive result 99 per cent of the time; if you don't have it, it will be negative 99 per cent of the time. Consider, then, a case where a disease has a general frequency of only 0.1 per cent, or one person in 1,000. What will happen if 100,000 people are given the test? Statistically, there should be 100 people who have the disease, but what will the test show?
Of the 100 people who have the disease, one will be shown not to have it, and the other 99 will be shown to have it. But of the other 99,900 people, 1 per cent, or 999, will be shown (falsely) to have the disease. The total number of people shown to have the disease will be 99+999 or 1,098. so, if you tested positive, there is still only a fairly small chance-99/1,098, or a bit over 9 per cent-that you have the disease, despite the fact that the positive test is 99 per cent accurate for those who have the disease. (Pg. 134)
John Locke (1632-1704) explicitly shares Milton's opinion that atheists and those who subject themselves to a religion tied to a foreign state, such that their civil allegiance to the Crown might conflict with their religious obligations, should not be tolerated by the civil magistrate. Nor, for Locke, should those be tolerated who profess to have special privilege or power derived from religion over the civil authority or who "will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matter of mere religion"-"mere" presumably referring to religions that are not tied to political power. Missing from Locke's account, as Fitzjames Stephen argues in a critique, is the principle that "free inquiry is the great, and indeed almost the only possible guarantee for the truth of any doctrines whatever. Persecution destroys this guarantee, and is therefore unfavorable to any intelligent and real belief in the truth of any creed whatever." (Pg. 221)
(Pg. 224) The tendency to conformity is strong, and people with original but challenging ideas are likely to be silenced if there is no recognition of the value of nonconformity, George Bernard Shaw was later to put this idea very succinctly when he said, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Mill acknowledges that there is a need to protect a minority not only against tyranny by the state but also against the formidable social tyranny that is more difficult to escape, penetrating as it does "much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." From this comes Mill's call for resistance to this social tendency:
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. (JSM 7)
Quite apart from the possible truth of all or part of a heretical doctrine, Mill recognizes the great benefit provided by challenges to received opinion, namely, the stimulus to holding those views with vitality. Without any challenges, a view may become simply "dead dogma." The result of avoiding all critical reflection about a doctrine one subscribes to is that one becomes unable to defend the view against the most superficial objections. Apart from that, the holding even of true opinions through prejudice is unworthy of a rational being and does not constitute knowledge (JSM 43). We do not fully understand the justification for our believing in our own doctrines if we do not understand what arguments are brought against them. How can we say that some contrary view is wrong, when we don't even know what that view is? To experience a proper challenge to received opinion, it is not enough, Mill thinks, to get a secondhand statement of heretical opinions. It is important to hear from people who actually believe these statements and who can present their case in the strongest form. (Pg. 227)
(Pg. 290) If we hark back to the Glassco Report and look at government information in Canada in the decades since the 1960s, we can see no diminution of government advertising and we have reason to recall the admonition that sheer quantity can turn government information into propaganda. Bursts of advertisements accompany every new federal-provincial rivalry, and spending limits are sidestepped with subliminal messages paid for by the taxpayer. For instance, in the May 1980 referendum on Quebec independence the federal side was to vote "non" and the separate side "oui." One advertisement for not mixing drinking with driving, sponsored by a federal department, read "NON" in big letters; the overt intent was to indicate not drinking alcohol before driving, but the covert intent was which vote should be cast. The PQ government responded with an employment billboard with large letters featuring the acronym of the Office de la Securite d'Emploi-OSE. The word "ose" in French means "dare." In other words, the billboard suggested that people dare to vote for Quebec sovereignty. One argument in justification for the federal blitz was that, since the province had control over the teaching system and the CEGEPs (schools straddling high school and post-secondary education), the Quebec government had an unfair advantage. Certainly it made use of this advantage at the time of the introduction of the 1981 Constitutional Amendment (later to become the 1982 Amendment), when it circulated to history departments in all the schools and in public places such as liquor outlets an emotional 11-page booklet with the heading "Minute Ottawa!" The booklet contained a tendentious presentation and interpretation of the constitutional amendments.
With the referendum over, the advertising competition did not stop. The Quebec government, in anticipation of constitutional changes, placed a two-page advertisement in August 1980 in Le Devoir setting out its own position, the federal position, and the position of other provinces on a number of constitutional and policy issues. The federal government produced a large amount of advertising of its own, prompting an indignant column by W.A. Wilson in the Ottawa Journal, "Ads tread fearful line between information and propaganda." Wilson's comments are worth recording:
The real problem with propaganda, as opposed to information, is that it is intended to condition the public mind by evading the questions and need for answers which are inherent in the information process. That is why media manipulation, a form of propaganda, is so popular during election campaigns-the purpose is not to spread information but to condition the popular mind....
April 8, 2019
The last chapter on the internet needs some updating as there are statements made about google's algorithms that are incorrect.
It would also seem that the author has some work to do regarding awareness of his own moral convictions and assumptions which come through in the chapters where he talks about sex in advertising (i'm glad he's against the objectification of women but he comes across as more than a bit prudish) and the recurring excuses for capitalism and marketing (apparently advertising is good for consumers since it's educational).
This book started strong but by the end felt less relevant and somewhat repetitive.
It would also seem that the author has some work to do regarding awareness of his own moral convictions and assumptions which come through in the chapters where he talks about sex in advertising (i'm glad he's against the objectification of women but he comes across as more than a bit prudish) and the recurring excuses for capitalism and marketing (apparently advertising is good for consumers since it's educational).
This book started strong but by the end felt less relevant and somewhat repetitive.
December 21, 2010
The argument suffered from a steadfast notion that propaganda is about the specific content rather than about the Weltanschauung the propagandist seeks to create. Thus, the book focused more on a dichotomy of truth v lies in the dissemination of propaganda. The argument didn't seem to take into account the Machiavelian, or value-neutral, aspect of propaganda. The brief history of propaganda provided in the book was pretty good for any beginner.
April 30, 2014
A good book overall!! Details the history & tactics used in all aspects of propaganda from media to retail statistics and wartime advertisements!! The moral compass or lack of in our capitalistic society!! The ethics of publicity & how to persuade people to see the concept your way! Remarkable really yet scary how media & propaganda influences society!! Glad I had this source for my essay--great insights!!
December 19, 2017
I started reading this book at the recommendation of multiple friends, and out of a feeling of being intrigued by what I perceived to be inexplicably abrupt (and very recklessly carried out) phenomena in the widely-circulated media of the past few years.
It would be wrong to say that the conclusions made available to be drawn by this book, in their entirety, have had a small impact on my world view.
It would be wrong to say that the conclusions made available to be drawn by this book, in their entirety, have had a small impact on my world view.
November 15, 2012
This text was assigned for a course in contemporary propaganda. The writing is very accessible and was really interfering at first; I just got bored with it. After the first few chapters Marlin's points became very predictable.
May 4, 2016
A very insightful book that tackles propaganda from every angle. I found the examples used very useful and I might not agree with the ethics of propaganda but morally they make sense.
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