Psychological Effects of Propaganda
Abstract
In this article, we present a translation from French into Russian of one Chapter from Jacques Ellul’s work “Propaganda”, which was first published in 1962. “Communication. Media. Design” Journal's editorial decided to translate and publish the Chapter IV of this well known work named “Psychological effects of propaganda” (Effets psychologiques de la propagande). In this chapter, Ellul considers many effects of propaganda revealed by both the author and other researchers. Among them are psychological crystallization (when the latent, vague, and unclear tendencies of an individual under the influences of propaganda suddenly become powerful, direct, and precise) and alienation of individual through propaganda (when it makes him alien, that is, different, other than he was before, disorientates in social reality, forces him to live a fictional, foreign, artificial life, and the individual exposed to this propaganda becomes different and at the same time submits to alien impulses, submits to someone else). Ellul describes psychic dissociation effect when an individual opinion and the public opinion does not coincide, and then propaganda expands the gap between these two spheres deliberately. Besides, dissociation affects individuals in the way that he performs specific actions without a will, without reflection, without understanding why it is necessary to do this or that, what is the meaning, what is the purpose and what are the consequences of his actions. Finally, Ellul analyses mithridatization - when under the influence of propaganda a specific characteristic arises, a characteristic reminding the story of the Pontic king Mithridates, who was afraid of being poisoned and took small doses of various poisons from childhood, gradually becoming immune to them. So is an individual influenced by propaganda becomes immune to it over time. In the last chapter, Ellul examines the ambiguity of propaganda effects produced by propaganda.
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