An Essay on “Framing” and Fanaticism: Propaganda Strategies for Linguistic Manipulation

In his brilliant classic, Propaganda, French philosopher Jacques Ellul explains that the stereotype—a key tool of propagandists--“helps [humans] to avoid thinking, to take a personal position, to form [their] own opinion.” The problem for a political system is that stereotypes do not require thought. They are “acquired by belonging to a group, without any intellectual labor.” Deborah Tannen describes what has occurred as the “Argument Culture”. In the “argument culture” we are fanatics, unable and unwilling to engage in the kinds of fact-based reasoned discourse that we always were told was at the core of the democratic system. Tannen observed that: “when you’re having an argument with someone, your goal is not to listen and understand. Instead, you use every tactic you can think of—including distorting what your opponent just said—in order to win the argument.” Welcome to social and political “discourse” in America of the early 21st Century where as indicated by Gabriel Marcel, fanatics are never able to see themselves as fanatics.