Inspect the Magic

Six devices that worked, and the machinery that made them work.

A course on the thought of Propaganda as Technique.

Course outline

1. The composite enemy — The first device is not hatred. It is arithmetic — the collapsing of many unrelated opponents into a single category, because attention that divides cannot be mobilised. Burke found the rule stated…
2. All proof is automatic — Once the enemy is defined as an essence rather than as people who do things, evidence stops being able to touch the claim. Burke watched this happen sentence by sentence, and named the moment it…
3. The contrary label — The most durable device in the set is the cheapest — conduct war in the name of peace, cruelty in the name of love, the irrational under the slogan of Reason. Burke's warning is that this is not…
4. Poison you drink unawares — Klemperer, a philologist forbidden to work, kept a diary of single words instead. His finding is the least intuitive in this course — the speeches were not the instrument. The vocabulary was.
5. Chanting is not singing — The sound layer, and the one device that operates below argument entirely. Klemperer, watching columns cross the bridge outside his window, works out why a chanted text does something a sung one does…
6. I believe in him — Where argument ends. Klemperer's evidence is a colleague he knew well — an educated, sensible woman with broad horizons — and Burke's is a trap that catches whoever names the division. The module…

Part of the Simposeum course library.