Fantastic Planet turned me onto Christian anarchist sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who I’m reading up on. One of Ellul’s major works is called Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. I found some excerpts and information about the book online. I’ll probably post more, but here’s a little starter.

…[M]odern propaganda cannot work without “education”; he thus reversed the widespread notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda. On the contrary, he says, education or what usually goes by that word in the modern world, is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls “pre-propaganda”–the conditioniong of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposeds and posing as “facts” and as “education.” Ellul follows through by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons:

1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information;
2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinionon 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.” The literally need propaganda.

In fact, the need for propaganda on the part of the “propagandee” is one of the most powerful elements of Ellul’s thesis. Cast out of the disintegrating microgroups of the past, such as [extended] family, church, or village, the individual is plunged into mass society and thrown back upon his own inadequate resources, his isolation, his loneliness, his ineffectuality. Propaganda then hands him in veritable abundance what he needs: a raison d’etre, persornal involvement and participationin important events, an outlet and excuse for some of his more doubtful impulses, righteousness–all factitious, to be sure, all more or less spurious; but he drinks it all in and asks for more. Without this intense collaboration by the propagandee the propagandist would be helpless.

This also kind of relates to that thing from Vallee about how conspiracy theorists are so susceptible to manipulation.