#jaquesellul — Public Fediverse posts

As a teacher of budding scientific and technical professionals, I’m again and again struck by how little sense of personal autonomy is part of today’s education, our modern ›Paideia.‹ Students hope to master the fundamentals of, say, one of the branches of engineering, get a ›good job,‹ come up with some lucrative ›innovation‹ and live happily ever after. Very often they simply lack any sense that they might reflect upon, talk about, and seek to realize an independent, personal understanding of life’s possibilities. Thus, the autonomy of technology often comes to the fore when ascertaining people’s sense of basic priorities. But the intellectual and moral autonomy of today’s students, employees and citizens? Not so much.

... surprises and troubles attributed to technologies that seem to have become ›autonomous‹ can often be traced back to the persons and groups that are ›in charge.‹ Marx describes the kinds of mechanical apparatus that fully claimed the bodies and minds of factory workers in his day. As he explains such calamities in his h#TheoryOfCapital, it’s clear that the owners of the #MeansOfProduction bear full responsibility for what happens.

... education is largely identical with what Ellul calls “pre-propaganda”—the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes 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 opinion on 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.” They 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.

Assuming an attitude in the reader is a good way of putting it there.