Propaganda and social control
Parsons’s quotes:
Propaganda is one kind of attempt to influence attitudes, and hence directly or indirectly the actions of people, by linguistic stimuli, by the written or spoken word. It is specifically contrasted with rational “enlightenment”, with the imparting of information from which a person is left to “draw his own conclusions,”and is thus a mode of influence mainly through “non-rational” mechanisms of behavior. Hence the apparent justification of treating it as a psychological problem, since psychology is the science of the mechanisms of behavior. But the same mechanisms operate in very different situations, cultures and social structures and in people with very different character or personality structures. While most psychologists would readily admit the existence of such variations they would tend to treat them as matters of common sense. To the sociologist, however, explicit analysis of these states of the social system provides precisely the problems he is interested in investigating. Why, for instance, have Germany and Japan become militantly aggressive powers while the United States has not? This is surely not in any ordinary sense of a problem of psychology.
Even in a single person the “social” component of his situation and personality cannot be ignored, although for some purposes it need not be treated as a set of variables. But most propganda is oriented to the influencing of not of single persons, but of large numbers in such a way that its effectiveness will lead to an appreciable alteration.
