The Forgotten Prophet of Propaganda

Anti-memetic thinker Jacques Ellul on the modern disease of technological efficiency and conformity

This is essay #1 in my series about propaganda.

It can be read without part 0 / the introduction to the essay series.

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Hero worship isn’t in my wiring. But reading and learning about the polymathic French philosopher, sociologist, Nazi Resistance fighter, and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul comes pretty close. I finally understood the banality of evil¹ upon hearing Ellul recall the Nuremberg trials. The head of camp Bergen-Belsen was asked if it was horrible, overseeing so many corpses. He had replied: “What could I do? The capacity of the ovens was too small…I had no time to think about those people. I was too busy with that technical problem of my ovens.”² Violence was a technical malfunction, atrocity a throughput issue. Ellul saw the hidden disease in that response: where efficiency lives, responsibility dies.

In two of his most famous yet underrated works, The Technological Society (1954), which I’ve just started reading, and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962), which I read two months ago, Ellul conducts a cold autopsy of modernity. With surgical precision, he clarified the confusions I've carried for years, from when I both spread and suffered from propaganda. Ellul gave me the words I lacked. His prescient insight: propaganda is a powerful form of technology, what he called technique—the logic of efficiency. Propaganda is the technique of conformity: it integrates us into technological society at the low, low cost of our agency. If violence is a mere byproduct of a technical system we conform to, then no one is responsible, since no one makes choices. And if no one makes choices, then no one is free. Through efficiency and conformity, we’re made to feel free. But in reality, modernity has robbed us of freedom with no force at all.

Technique: The Infection called Efficiency

A spectre haunts modernity. Many have spoken of it: Vervaeke’s meaning crisis, Foucault and Orwell’s biopolitical surveillance, Weber’s disenchanted world, Marx’s alienation by capitalism,³ Nietzsche’s mournful cry “God is dead.” But you don’t need to be a great thinker to feel sick. You might intuit that technology has something to do with the brainrot, the loneliness, the tribalism. Yet we’re still mired in a tired debate about technology: it is either good or bad or—if you fancy nuance—neutral (“it depends on who owns it”). Optimists see technology as the inevitable march towards progress, while doomers see it as a harbinger of dystopia. The nuanced could love autonomous driving but hate Elon Musk, so Waymo it is. And since Zuckerberg is an alien wearing a human suit,⁴ maybe we shouldn’t let him “move fast and break things.” In the end, we wring our hands and say, technology has granted us so much, but there’s some bad excess. It lurks in the allure of the algorithm, so let’s try to tame the beast. All we have to do is delete TikTok. All we have to do is write without AI. All we have to do is keep a watchful eye on the devil, and all will be cured.

“Think globally, act locally.” - Jacques Ellul’s most famous phrase. Photo from Papadakis.

Whether technology is savior or villain or neither misses the scope of Ellul’s much larger, darker diagnosis: we have been infected with the machine logic of efficiency applied everywhere to everything.⁵ We suffer from Technology with a capital T, or the poorly translated concept of technique, the broader driving force behind technology (etymologically, technology means “the study of technique”). Skeptics say, we have always used techniques to transform the world. Which is true. However, in pre-modern times, techniques served human ends, such as ritual and worship of God and nature.⁶ But modernity, which has profaned and desacralized the natural world and God, has elevated technique to the sacred instead. Deprived of our fundamental needs for connection with nature, one another, and the sacred, we turn to even more techniques as substitutes. Even if we set aside the gadgets and gears, less visible forms of technique thrive: doctors prescribe pills to return people to productivity, McKinsey consultants distill decisions to KPI dashboards, marketers create copy for clicks and conversions, educators teach to the test. Every field, institution, community, and relationship across the globe is invaded by technique, even our most intimate selves. How many of us dress up our dating profiles? Polish our LinkedIn pages? Leverage “life hacks” in our lives? Search, scour, scramble for the “one best way”⁷ to be?

Technique hijacked us, a mechanical parasite with a life of its own,⁸ engineering us to its own ends. We do what It needs; we dot our pale blue dot with datacenters for AI; we contort our cities for cars; we break our backs for the clock. Technique thinks in binaries; 0s and 1s; it either works or it doesn’t. It is ambivalent⁹ to wisdom, beauty, justice—silly human values and goals. Whether technique is good or evil is irrelevant; technique does not dream of morals. It does not ask why it should be done, only that it must be done. Technique fragments life into tasks that must be done, each one rational, efficient, utilitarian. Everyone responds to their task, and no one is responsible for the whole. Each of us can chant I had to: the engineer only designed the ovens, the conductor only directed the trains, the bureaucrat only signed the orders. Yet these meek protests reveal the paradox. If something is necessary, can we choose it? If we cannot choose, can we be responsible? Ellul’s sobering story of Bergen-Belsen makes his point clear. The officer with his feeble bleating “What could I do?” tried to deny his responsibility, but his very denial affirmed it. The technician did the task he needed to do, and he thought necessity would absolve him. Make no mistake: we always have a choice. We choose to evade choice. We choose to worship technique. We choose to efficiently eliminate our humanity. Like the officer, we’ve become too busy with the technical problem of our ovens to stop the sickening stench, to protest the “transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp.”¹⁰ When Ellul cuts open modernity, he sees almost no blood. There’s hardly anything human anymore among all the wires.

Propaganda: The Mutation called Conformity

The most sinister, secretive, and paradoxical of all techniques is propaganda. Unlike technology, whose virtues and vices are endlessly debated, propaganda is rarely thought of as a technique at all. We see it as a necessary tool when wielded by democracies, pure evil when perfected by the Nazis.¹¹ Even Ellul nearly fell prey to its monstrous, most obvious form. Once, out of morbid curiosity, Ellul attended a Nazi rally. Despite his convictions, the feverish crowd nearly seduced him. His arm almost rose in salute.¹² Almost. That near-betrayal of his beliefs shatters the popular perception of propaganda. It is not persuasive brainwashing, but something far more insidious, possessive, bone-deep. Other academic theories only gesture at its nature. Walter Lippman, father of journalism, bowed to necessity: propaganda is a neutral, practical way to manufacture consent in a complex society.¹³ Noam Chomsky,¹⁴ father of linguistics, flipped the script on Lippman: propaganda may be necessary, but never neutral when it destroys dissent as the instrument of powerful institutions. Edward Bernays,¹⁵ father of public relations, waxed rather naive poetic: propaganda is not only necessary, but good when it serves the truth. Only Ellul dissected propaganda to reveal its true face: the technique of conformity. If technique is an infection that erases responsibility, propaganda is its most advanced mutation: it erases agency, leaving us incapable of choosing responsibility.

Propaganda has found the “one best way” to make us conform to a technological society.¹⁶ Daily we wade through the flood of headlines, the 24/7 hum of Slacks and sermons, the gossip from our neighbors, the texts from our friends, the pings from our bosses, the cries of our children, the loss of our lovers. Time, space, and energy evaporate; we have nothing left for reflection. Enter propaganda to replace reflection with reflex, letting us adapt neatly into our lives with pre-fabricated parroting. Propaganda has one chief desire: to make people act in a pre-ordained accordance.¹⁷ It will search for the most efficient idea, slogan, myth to make us act out of reflex, exploiting lies, half-truths, and most often the full truth.¹⁸ It need not persuade, though it can. We act, then find reasons to excuse the act.¹⁹ Belief follows action, and with it, we complete the cycle at last, smiling as we join the technological society. Propaganda then, is not only a technique because it joins the techniques of mass media and behavioral science in unholy matrimony. It is a technique because it efficiently exploits our need to manage modernity in all its overwhelm. And it is the most dangerous technique of all; most of them still leave some blood in us, but propaganda drains the rest. It takes away agency, the possibility of choice, of taking responsibility, and refines it into crude oil. Propaganda “solves the problem of man,”²⁰ completing our transformation into automatons, unblinking, unthinking, unseeing. In turning man into machine, propaganda reveals its totalitarian essence. We are trapped in a paradox: we need propaganda to survive, but we cannot live with propaganda.

Propaganda has also found the “one best way” to hide itself, rerouting what remains of our immune response towards scapegoats instead of the infection. During COVID-19, I opted out of the vaccine. I had calculated my own risk-benefit ratio, given a pre-existing autoimmune condition, and decided to chance the disease instead of the vaccine. But propaganda cannot tolerate individual judgment; opting out is an illusion. Decades-long friends flaunted their vaccine passports, approving my segregation from polite society. My fellow Bernie Sanders-supporting, Medicare-for-All friends told me to just fucking die alone already; hospitals aren’t for “Republican conspiracy theorists” like me. I no longer saw myself reflected in their black eyes; I was nobody, nothing, a nefarious thing, the nemesis of all that was good and pure. I turned to leftist thinkers for mercy, and found no one aside from Agamben. Even the great critic of propaganda and anarchist Chomsky, who I owed my belief that all news is propaganda, supported keeping filth like me from grocery stores.²¹ For the first time, I keenly felt the ways in which so-called “democratic propaganda,” made in service of the truth and public health, destroyed the values of democracy. I finally understood how propaganda could redirect resentment towards ready-made enemies: Jews, the bourgeoisie, MAGA deplorables, homosexuals, the globalists, the unvaccinated. Against any Other, propaganda can make cruelty a moral right, violence a virtue. And yet, as long as even one drop of blood remains, there is still a chance to exercise agency. There is still a chance to resist propaganda.

Forgotten Prophecies: Anti-Memes Resist Spread

I accidentally struck a gold vein when I found Ellul’s ideas, but it’s strange that I had never heard of him before. Four years I spent as a policy debater mining obscure philosophy, yet I never surfaced him. Other thinkers far eclipsed him in fame for similar criticisms of technology and violence. For instance, I cited Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology²² in debates, a critique published the same year as Ellul’s The Technological Society. While Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation did little to slow his fame, Ellul has eluded me until now; quite a mystery. Why did other peoples’ ideas spread, but not Ellul’s? To answer the question, I borrow from René Girard, a scholar famous for his theory of mimetics. According to Girard, we don’t just want things—we want what others want. Desire itself is contagious. Rivalry over scarce objects of desire escalates into conflict, spreading violence like a plague that can only be contained through sacrificing scapegoats. Memes²³ may work the same way. When we share a viral meme, the idea is less important than the belonging it signals. Ideas spread because they mark us as part of the right tribe, the cool kids club. Almost anything can become a meme—even death itself, as in the documented phenomenon of suicide clusters.

In a classic consultant two-by-two matrix, Nadia Asparouhova categorizes ideas by impact and transmissibility

But there is a type of idea that cannot easily spread. Anti-memes²⁴ are consequential truths that resist replication because they are too uncomfortable to circulate. Ellul’s ideas belong here. He cut modernity to the bone, but his critiques ask for too much. They ask readers to face their own complicity. They ask readers to wrestle with contradictions and paradoxes: technology is empowering and enslaving; propaganda is necessary and destructive; violence is natural and unacceptable. Contradiction creates no enemies to fight, no slogans to chant. This is nearly impossible to tribalize, let alone monetize. By contrast, Girard’s mimetic theory traveled far because it was memetic in itself.²⁵ Girard’s protege Peter Thiel invested in Facebook because he foresaw how the platform would amplify mimetic rivalry.²⁶ Ellul’s work offers no such great investment strategy. And the great irony? Ellul and Girard admired each other.²⁷ Both defied the fashions of the French intelligentsia. Both diagnosed problems of violence. Both found no answers to violence against human dignity in the material world, only the spiritual.²⁸ But Girard’s ideas spread because they explained violence cleanly, while Ellul’s ideas saw a different fate. Perhaps Ellul is forever doomed to echo Kierkegaard, one of his greatest influences. Kierkegaard was “another voice raised in prophetic warning against [technique], but his warnings…were not heeded. They were too close to the truth.”²⁹

The Forgotten Prophet: A World without an Exit?

If Ellul’s prognosis—that entire nations are now concentration camps—strikes you as grim hyperbole, relax. He says that the truth is bleaker yet:

“It will not be a universal concentration camp, because it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not be insane, because everything will be ordered…We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win…We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.”³⁰

If this description rings a bell, you may be recalling Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). His dystopia was not terror, but anesthetized pleasure—a hazy, docile world of people sated by soma, sex, and distraction.³¹ It’s no wonder, then, that Huxley championed Ellul for English publication, saying that Ellul “made the case” that he had sketched out in fiction.³² Thanks to Huxley’s intervention, Ellul avoided total obscurity. Once translated into English, Ellul’s influence began to seep out in shadowy, indirect ways. He surfaced in entire fields, such as communication theory through celebrated names such as Neil Postman³³ of Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Marshall McLuhan,³⁴ the father of media studies. Ellul’s strangest and most infamous claim to fame came through the notorious Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who grotesquely misread Ellul’s work, twisting his writings of nonviolence³⁵ to justify violence.

I’m only missing Brave New World

While it’s tempting to label Ellul a fatal pessimist, he wasn’t one at all. He believed this was a “world without an exit,”³⁶ yes, but he also believed in the Kingdom of God. Ellul’s pessimism lived in his sociology and philosophy, and his optimism in his theology.³⁷ I certainly appreciated his jolly optimism in his interviews, where he spoke of his love of poetry and music, all while rummaging through towers of books and papers only rivaled by his towering intellect.³⁸ But what about hope for nonbelievers? For them, Ellul offered modest means of resistance: cultivate awareness, reclaim responsibility, slow down so that wisdom can reassert itself over reflex, and refuse the false substitutes of technique. We can act opposite of that camp guard, making time to think about people as people, not inputs for machines. It’s not easy; even Ellul, who resisted propaganda, couldn’t resist technique. He was no Luddite, and he lived like a machine himself, grinding through ten-hour workdays.³⁹ So let’s be clear: these are not cures. They are therapies for a sickness that may never leave us.

I can’t pretend I’m not infected. Technique has hijacked me as well. For instance, I use AI every day, even to write this very essay. Perhaps I shouldn’t, in honor of Ellul. Maybe you’ll accept my meager consolation: I take AI as a bitter medicine, not as an efficiency pill—I use AI to write much, much slower. It becomes a dialogue partner, not a shortcut. It helps me think through structures, layers, paradoxes, contradictions. It helps me reflect on the fidelity of each phrase I put to paper. But even if my writing process is inefficient, I often wonder if the end result embodies the ultimate form of technique. I worry that I am spreading propaganda, as I did in the past. Is every Note and every essay just another easy, digestible package delivered to your feed, telling you what to do? My answer, I think, is no. Propaganda thrives on reflex; paradox resists it. Wrestling with hard ideas is my inoculation, my refusal to find the “one best way,” my small rebellion against technique. And my invitation to you, the reader, is reason, argument, dialogue, debate—but also to feeling, laughter and grief and sweetness, all the sugary, spicy warts that make us human. If we share just one drop of blood, we return to being more than just machines. Maybe I’d be less of one now, if I had found Ellul sooner. But perhaps I only received his diagnosis once I was ready to see the wires.

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Thanks for the feedback: Jeff Giesea, CansaFis Foote, Ved Shankar (and for the book rec), Emily Brooke Felt, Malarkodi, Promise Tewogbola, Dolores Lucero, Michael Dean (both for many discussions and Essay Architecture)

And thank you for coworking with me :) Will Mannon, Adam C. Siegel, Davide Bruzzone, Jack Purdy

1. Hannah Arendt’s famous paradox from Eichmann in Jerusalem

2. Full transcription of the story (9 minute mark) from The Betrayal of Technology

It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The person in change of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was asked, during the…Nuremberg trials:

“But didn't you find it horrible? All those corpses?”

He replied: “What could I do? The capacity of the ovens was too small. I couldn’t process all those corpses. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about those people. I was too busy with that technical problem of my ovens.”

That was the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and he’s not interested in anything else.

3. While Ellul believed Marx diagnosed the 19th century correctly, Ellul thought capital-induced labor alienation an inadequate explanation for the 20th century, since he saw the same disease afflict socialist nations. Ellul read Marx in full and considered him one of his greatest influences, but rejected the French intellectual tradition of Marxism as dogma.

4. You thought this was a real citation? Haha!

5. In Ellul’s words in Notes to the Reader: “The totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity”—ironically, feeding the definition to readers is a form of efficiency…but I think a footnote makes it a little bit inefficient :)

6. Ellul spends several sections describing this history of transformation in The Technological Society

7. Shortcut of explaining technique that Ellul repeats throughout The Technological Society

8. A force Ellul described as self-augmenting and autonomous. Specifically, automatic (automatism), ever expanding (totalization), interconnected/inseparable (monism), and standardized (universalism)

9. κρῠπτός / Kruptos speaking about Ellul’s definition of ambivalence in a podcast episode Chronicles Magazine

10. The Technological Society, pg 100. Ellul was specifically speaking of police state and surveillance techniques, but stay with me on this somewhat out-of-context sentiment to the end of the essay

11. Renee Hobbs in Propaganda Education for a Digital Age: “Where is propaganda taught in American public schools? What I learned is that it's only taught in history class and it's only taught in the context of Nazi Germany. Sometimes, if you go to a very good school, you'll get a study of propaganda in the context of learning about World War II, but that's it. It's only studied as a historical topic.”

12. Ellul scholar Jake Rollison explains in the Hermitix podcast

13. Robin McKenna compares various propaganda theorists in his great Substack essay called Two Ways of Thinking About Propaganda

14. Also co-author Edward Herman, but he doesn’t have a nice “Father of” title so I cut him out :( Sorry sir. This summary is from what I can remember of reading Manufacturing Consent (1988) in my college days

15. The nephew of Sigmund Freud—Bernays’ mother was Freud’s sister, and his father was Freud’s wife’s brother. This psychoanalytic lineage informed his belief that the masses were irrational and could be directed through unconscious desires rather than reason. Bernays pioneered modern public relations: celebrity endorsements, staged events, “third-party authorities” etc. His client were the U.S. government, the infamous United Fruit Company, and other elite families. Scarily enough, his descendants remain active in strategic communications today

16. When I skipped around and read the section on propaganda in The Technological Society, I realized why Ellul had to expand it into the book Propaganda. I wish I had read that book first, before Propaganda. It would have made things a lot clearer to me from the get go

17. In Ellul’s words: “A set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulation and incorporated in an organization” (Propaganda, pg 87). I am resisting the efficient use of definitions once again here. :) For me, the most important part of Ellul’s definition is his concept “mass of individuals”, which I’ll talk about in a later essay.

18. Even infamous Nazi propagandist Goebbels said that the truth ought be used, as noted in the preface to Propaganda

19. A psychological process we now know as post-hoc rationalization

20. Ellul in preface to Propaganda

21. By the time I heard what Chomsky had to say about people like me, I was already too numb to feel disappointed

22. Ellul was aware of Heidegger according to Jacob Rollison, as they were contemporaries. Ellul probably read his works. But Ellul never spoke of Heidegger due to his Nazism. I aspire to that level of righteous pettiness

23. Biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” aka the smallest unit of information. He believed the framework of biological evolution could also apply to cultural evolution. Memes behave like genes, replicating and mutating through networks

24. Nadia Asparouhova makes the case for anti-memes in her book Antimemetics. She cites Girard, but argues that memetic transmissibility isn’t necessarily driven by Girardian mimetic desire–sometimes we just share memes because they’re funny. I completely disagree; humor too is mimetic. We laugh because others laugh, or because we want to belong to the same tribe that “gets it.” Humor itself is social, contagious, bound up in mimetic rivalry. As an aside, unfortunately I found this book disappointing.

25. While Girard explains why we imitate desires, I think Ellul shows why certain desires spread farther than others—they are optimized for spread. For instance, a meme condenses a funny idea into the “one best way” to circulate it, the “one best way” to get attention. Memes are the most efficient carriers of mimetic desire - technique applied at the level of humor. As long as humor can be streamlined for speed, it will face the selection pressure of technique

26. Peter Thiel’s investment case for Facebook

27. Girard on Ellul, from an interview with David Gill: “I find in Ellul many ideas that I share with him completely. In some ways I am trying to do something similar (in the ancient context) to what he has done (in the modern context).”

28. Girard wrote “The Kingdom of God is not of this world” and per Jake Rollison in the Hermitix podcast, Ellul said that this is “a world without an exit.”

29. The Technological Society, pg 55

30. The Technological Society, pg 427

31. I had always preferred Huxley’s pleasuremaxxed world versus Orwell’s domineering surveillance, believing it a better depiction of dystopia. And now I have the theory to back it up with Ellul. But I digress!

32. See David Gill article.

33. Cultural and media critic and his relationship to Ellul

34. Andrew McLuhan, the grandson of Marshall McLuhan, wrote about this connection on his Substack

35. Actually nonpower—having the ability (power) to do something, and choosing not to do it. For Ellul, Christ is the exemplar and originator of nonpower

36. Ellul scholar Jake Rollison in the Hermitix podcast

37. This idea is echoed across several scholars, from David Gill in The Charge podcast to Jake Rollison in the Hermitix podcast to Barb Howe. I believe Ellul grappled with two opposing life experiences the most: God and Nazism. At 17, he had a profound and unsettling encounter with God (maybe in a similar fashion to me), beginning his conversion to Protestantism. Two decades later, he refused to obey the Nazi-aligned Vichy government, forcing him to leave academia and take up potato farming. I smiled when I read that he took as much pride in agriculture as he did teaching. Ellul later joined the Resistance and smuggled Jewish people out of France, for which he was posthumously honored by Israel. To me, his life reads like the popular understanding of Hegelian dialects, where the sublime thesis in God and the grotesque antithesis in Nazism produced a balanced synthesis across his lifelong work

38. Ellul biography and The Betrayal of Technology. This dialectical optimism partially explains my Ellul enthusiasm; I’ve labeled myself an optimist in online bios for years not because I am one, but because I think I need to challenge my naturally pessimistic personality

39. In The Betrayal of Technology, Ellul shows the technology he used to help him write books e.g. tape recorder, musical records. Jake Rollison also explains in the Hermitix podcast that Ellul was a workaholic.