Propaganda.

The French Calvinist sociologist who refused both sides

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) lived in Bordeaux, taught law and sociology, was active in the French Resistance, and wrote over fifty books spanning theology, technology, propaganda, and political philosophy. He occupied an uncomfortable position in the postwar intellectual landscape — too theological for the secular left, too anti-capitalist for the Christian right, too pessimistic about technology for the liberal mainstream, too literate in technology to be dismissed as a romantic. The discomfort was load-bearing.

His foundational work, La Technique (1954, English as The Technological Society, 1964), named the central object: la technique, the self-augmenting, self-justifying system of efficient means that increasingly governs every domain of modern life. The system is bigger than any single technology, larger than any institution that operates it, deeper than any politics that attempts to direct it. Once a culture organises itself around the systematic optimisation of means, technique becomes the substrate inside which everything else operates.

Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962, English 1965) is the specific sociological application of the broader frame. If technique is the substrate, propaganda is the substrate's mechanism for producing the population that the substrate requires. The book is one of the most rigorous extant analyses of the sociology of mass manipulation, and the contemporary information environment has only made it more relevant.

The first reframing — propaganda as sociological necessity

The book's central provocation is the claim that propaganda in modern technological societies is not an aberration that occasionally afflicts political life. It is a structural necessity that the technological substrate produces. The argument has several stages.

First, mass technological societies require coordinated mass behaviour at scales no traditional cultural mechanism (custom, religion, community, kinship) is calibrated for. The traditional mechanisms operated at village scale, in dense local relations, with face-to-face accountability and shared narrative substrate. The mass society — millions of strangers coordinating across continental polities — cannot run on those mechanisms. Some substitute is structurally required.

Second, the technological substrate itself generates conditions — anomie, information overload, the dissolution of stable community frames, the abstraction of work from context, the displacement of meaning from place — that leave the individual without the resources to evaluate large-scale political-economic developments on their own terms. The citizen is asked to hold informed positions on subjects (foreign policy, economic regulation, public-health response, technological governance) whose substantive content they cannot have first-hand contact with. They depend on mediated representations.

Third, the mediated representations available to them are produced by institutional actors (states, parties, corporations, movements) whose interests are not aligned with neutral truthful representation but with the production of population behaviour those actors require. Each actor produces the representation their institutional interest demands. The aggregate of those representations is the information environment the citizen inhabits — and the environment is propaganda not by accident but by structural necessity.

The mass technological society
requires the propaganda it pretends to deplore.

The second reframing — pre-propaganda as the actual substrate

Ellul's most analytically valuable move is the distinction between pre-propaganda and active propaganda. The distinction reorganises where attention should be paid.

Active propaganda is what the term typically names — the campaign poster, the political broadcast, the editorialised newspaper, the partisan television segment, the wartime mobilisation message. It is recognisable as propaganda because it has explicit persuasive intent attached to identifiable political content.

Pre-propaganda is the slow, ambient, ostensibly non-political conditioning of attitudes, vocabularies, emotional reflexes, and frame assumptions through ordinary mass media, advertising, entertainment, education, and the texture of daily technological life. Pre-propaganda has no specific political target. It is the installation of the substrate inside which specific political messages will later become operable.

Ellul's empirical claim is that pre-propaganda is most of the propagandistic effect; active propaganda is the trigger. The advertising-and-entertainment substrate conditions the population's relation to authority, time, attention, novelty, group membership, emotional arousal, and plausibility. When the specific political message arrives, it activates patterns that the pre-propaganda has already installed. Without the substrate, the message fails. With the substrate, the message is barely required — the population already half-believes the conclusion the message would have argued.

The contemporary information environment — algorithmic feeds, attention-optimised content, behaviourally-targeted advertising, infinite-scroll architectures, recommendation engines — is Ellul's pre-propaganda at an order of magnitude beyond what he could observe in 1962. The structure he named has scaled; the recognition has not.

The third reframing — why the educated are the principal target

One of the most uncomfortable contributions of the book is the inversion of the common-sense assumption that education protects against propaganda. Ellul argues, with sustained evidence, that the educated are systematically more susceptible, not less.

• Volume of consumption. The educated consume more information than the uneducated and have more confidence in their ability to evaluate it. The consumption surface is the propagandistic surface. Greater consumption equals greater exposure to the substrate.
• Obligation to have opinions. The educated feel morally and professionally obliged to hold views on subjects (foreign policy, climate, geopolitics, economics) they cannot have first-hand knowledge of. The obligation to opine, combined with the absence of direct evidence, forces dependence on mediated representations. The uneducated person who shrugs and says "I don't know" is structurally less reachable.
• Institutional fluency. The educated operate in institutional contexts (academia, professions, media, NGOs, finance) whose authority depends on having calibrated views. Calibrated views, inside the substrate, are propaganda-shaped views — the views the substrate installs as the recognisable signs of competence.
• Vocabulary fluency. The educated have absorbed enough vocabulary to perform agreement and disagreement fluently inside the frames propaganda installs. Sophisticated disagreement, in a propaganda- saturated environment, is still motion inside the frame the propaganda has set. The radical disagreement that would constitute genuine independence often requires a substrate the educated do not have — silence, slowness, local rootedness, traditional knowledge, contemplative discipline — that the educational system actively discounted on the way to its certification.
• Need to feel right. Educated identity is often built around the experience of being right about complex matters. Propaganda offers a steady supply of opportunities to feel right by aligning with whichever sophisticated position one's institutional cohort is occupying this cycle. The reward loop is reliable; the substrate is propagandistic.

The argument is not anti-educational. Ellul's point is that formal education in mass technological societies is not by itself a cognitive substrate; it is largely a credentialing process inside the substrate that propaganda also operates on. Genuine cognitive substrate has to be cultivated by different and more demanding means.

The fourth reframing — the propagandee as participant

The most ethically uncomfortable claim in the book is that modern propaganda requires the active participation of the propagandee. Propaganda does not happen to a population; it happens through a population that is, on some level, asking for it.

Ellul's evidence is sociological. The individual in mass technological society lives with a structural surplus of anxiety (the conditions are too complex, too fast, too impersonal to navigate without orientation), a structural deficit of meaning (the traditional frames that supplied it have been hollowed out), and a structural obligation to participate (citizen, consumer, employee, opinion-holder). Propaganda offers a low-cost answer to all three at once. It supplies orientation through a simplified worldview, meaning through participation in a movement larger than oneself, and the satisfaction of having performed the role of informed citizen.

The result is that the propagandised person is not the passive victim the term traditionally implies. They are an active producer of demand for the substance. They want the orientation; they want the meaning; they want the membership; they want the satisfaction of correctness. Propaganda producers and consumers are in a co-productive relation that the recipient is rarely positioned to recognise.

The neighbours — and where the diagnosis thickens

• Neil Postman, Technopoly: the cultural surface on which Ellul's structural diagnosis becomes visible. The technopoly is the cultural condition; the propaganda saturation is one of its principal mechanisms.
• Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928): the prior canonical text. Bernays — Freud's nephew and the inventor of public relations — wrote with cheerful enthusiasm about what Ellul writes with structural alarm. The two books together are the substrate.
• Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922): the elder ancestor. Lippmann's "manufacture of consent" idea named the operational programme that Bernays would systematise and Ellul would diagnose.
• Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent (1988): the contemporary extension that combines Lippmann's phrase, Bernays's programme, and a sustained analysis of the structural constraints on twentieth-century US news media. Less philosophical than Ellul, more empirically detailed.
• Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism: the contemporary apex of Ellul's pre-propaganda diagnosis. Behavioural-surplus extraction funds the engineering of the substrate at scale; the recommendation system is pre-propaganda made algorithmic.
• Daniel Schmachtenberger,: captured sense-making as one of the four generators of the metacrisis. Ellul's analysis is the foundational sociological ancestor of Schmachtenberger's contemporary framing.
• Byung-Chul Han, Burnout Society / Psychopolitics: the phenomenological deepening. What it is like to live inside the substrate Ellul names. The achievement-subject self-propagandises in service of metrics they have been pre-conditioned to want.

The Indic counter-frame — viveka, vairāgya, pramāṇa

The Codex reads the propaganda condition as a Ṛṣi-Ṛṇa problem — a debt to the knowledge commons systematically defaulted on by institutions whose operations require the substrate to be degraded. The counter-substrate is not "more critical thinking" inside the existing frame; it is the recovery of three Indic cognitive disciplines as substrate-level practices:

• Viveka — discrimination, the cultivated capacity to distinguish the real from the apparent, the substrate-level from the surface-level, the durable from the momentary. Viveka is not a one-time judgement; it is a cultivated disposition that has to be practised. In a propaganda-saturated environment, viveka is the principal cognitive instrument.
• Vairāgya — cultivated dispassion, the structural detachment from the reward loops that make propaganda effective. The achievement-subject in Han's sense, the educated-opinion-holder in Ellul's, the engagement-metric-served citizen in Zuboff's — these are all positions held in place by the absence of vairāgya. The vairāgya-disciplined operator inside the substrate is structurally less reachable by it.
• Pramāṇa — the structured science of valid knowledge sources from the Indic logical-epistemological tradition (Nyāya school). The standard pramāṇas — pratyakṣa (direct perception), anumāna (inference), upamāna (analogical reasoning), śabda (reliable testimony) — name and constrain the legitimate sources of knowledge claims. Modern information environments structurally overweight śabda (testimony, what someone said) and systematically underweight pratyakṣa (direct perception) and anumāna (rigorous inference). The discipline rebalances the substrate.

These are not abstract resources. They are operational disciplines with two-and-a-half millennia of refined pedagogy behind them. Sāmatvārtha's deeper claim is that civilisational substrates carry these disciplines as standing capital, and that the Indian civilisational stack — though under sustained pressure — has not completely lost them.

The structural counter-move — Ṛṣi Ṛṇa and the commons

The cognitive cultivation is necessary but not sufficient. The information substrate has to be redesigned at the level of the economic engine driving its propagandistic optimisation. The Techno-Memetic Commons licence is the operational instrument: information substrates built under it cannot be enclosed by surveillance-capitalist business models in the same way, which removes one of the principal economic engines driving pre-propaganda. The federated-unicorn architecture distributes ownership of the information substrate across many proprietors rather than concentrating it in a small number of platforms, which removes the aggregation that propaganda at planetary scale depends on.

The combined effect is to make the propaganda condition structurally more expensive for the institutions that depend on it and structurally less corrosive for the individuals operating against it. The Codex view is that both layers are required: the personal cultivation of viveka, vairāgya, pramāṇa and the architectural redesign of the information commons. Neither alone suffices; together they are the substrate-level response Ellul's diagnosis demands.

What to do with this

1. Audit your information substrate, not your information. The substrate (what you consume, how, when, why, what gets rewarded by the consumption, what gets foreclosed) is upstream of the information. Substrate redesign has larger effects than content curation.
2. Cultivate the disciplines. Viveka, vairāgya, pramāṇa are practices with empirical pedagogy, not abstract aspirations. They require regular cultivation under instruction. The Indic spine carries operational knowledge of how this is done.
3. Build information commons that resist the propaganda engine. Open-protocol substrates, commons-licensed content, federated information stores, structurally transparent recommendation systems — these are not merely virtuous design choices. They are anti- propaganda infrastructure. See TMC for the licence-engineering form.