Success Quote by Jacques Ellul

Ellul’s line lands like a diagnostic: propaganda isn’t trying to win an argument; it’s trying to install a story that people will live inside. “Transform opinion” suggests the old liberal fantasy that citizens weigh evidence, shift positions, and call it progress. Ellul’s pivot to “arouse” is clinical and a little ominous. Propaganda, in his view, works less like persuasion and more like stimulation - it lights up identity, fear, pride, grievance. The target isn’t what you think; it’s what you’re willing to do.

The phrase “active and mythical belief” is the tell. Myth here doesn’t mean “false” so much as total: a narrative that explains everything, flattens complexity, and turns private emotion into public purpose. Myth doesn’t ask to be debated; it asks to be performed. That “active” matters because it names propaganda’s real product: mobilization, not consent. When belief becomes mythical, contradiction stops being a problem and becomes proof of persecution. Facts don’t refute the story; they get absorbed as plot twists.

Ellul wrote in the shadow of mass society: total war, the rise of advertising and public relations, radio and television’s intimacy, bureaucratic states needing compliance at scale. His warning reads even sharper now, in an attention economy where the most successful messages aren’t the most accurate but the most shareable, memetic, and identity-confirming. Propaganda’s modern genius, Ellul implies, is that it doesn’t merely occupy the mind. It recruits the self.