Education and Propaganda

A number of years ago, I discovered the writings of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), a French philosopher who had started his adult life as a Marxist but became a devout Christian. He wrote more than 58 books, numerous papers and essays, many of which focused on one of the major themes of his life – the threat of technological society to human freedom and Christian faith. (In some ways, Ellul was like a French version of Wendell Berry, a generation younger than Ellul but who has developed many of the same themes.)

The book by Ellul that made the biggest impression on me was Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. It was published in 1962 in France and translated into English in 1965; I read the 1973 paperback version published by Vintage.

Elul said many important things in that book, but there was one that at first astounded me until I realized its simple truth. It was one of those Chestertonian “take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head” kind of statements. What he said what this: the people who are the most susceptible to propaganda are not the poor and uneducated. The people who are the most susceptible are the educated and intellectual classes, and the more educated you are, the more susceptible you become to propaganda.

And the reason is that more educated people read more, and they read so much that they cannot possibly verify everything they read. Therefore, one’s worldview becomes a critical filter – if something fits your worldview, you tend to believe it; if it doesn’t, you tend to reject it. People who are less educated tend to interpret news and issues with the filter of their everyday experiences and common sense (which might explain a lot about many of the members of our media elite).

That book by Ellul humbled me. It made me question more – question my own views and the things I immediately accepted as true. It also made me highly conscious of one of the ways to “resist enchantment” that Guy Kawasaki discusses in Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. Beware of salient points, data and the experts. None of them last forever. All of them can flawed, and seriously so.

And don’t fall for the “example of one,” he says, when one person articulates a point of view that gets lots of media attention, even if it flies in the face of reality. The example Kawasaki cites is actress jenny McCarthy, who has been an articulate spokesperson against vaccinations for measles, mumps and rubella because she believed it caused autism. A study in Britain in 1995 came to that conclusion. A few months ago, it was shown that the study was fraudulent. (I pointed that out in a book review of a Karen Kingsbury novel and got taken to the woodshed by a reader who said I should look at the writings and speeches of Jenny McCarthy and that the study was true even if it was fraudulent.) (I’m not making this up.)

Twitter and Facebook exacerbate this problem. If we trust the person who’s tweeting something, we will retweet it as true. We will not stop to question whether we should check the statement out. Serious damage can get done to people and organizations because we automatically accept something as true. It’s one reason why I generally avoid tweeting about politics, news and issues – I can’t verify whether the statements or true or not.

It’s not that education, and more education, is a bad thing. But it needs to be tempered by humility, and the more education we get, the more humility we need.


We’ve been discussing Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment over at The High Calling, led by Laura Boggess. We’re covering the last two chapters – “How to Enchant Your Boss” and “How to Resist Enchantment.” To see more posts, please visit The High Calling.

The Best Boss I've Ever Had

Actually, I’ve had two best bosses. Except one wasn’t a boss.

I had just graduated from college and joined the staff of the Beaumont, Texas, Enterprise as a copy editor. My “welcome to your new job” consisted of “here’s your chair and typewriter, and here are three pages for layout; don’t forget the headlines.” Today it would be called total immersion.

The staff seemed nice enough but was too busy to worry the new kid. When I had my pages done and headlines written, I rather tentatively asked where I should take them. “To the back shop,” was the reply. I did find the back shop, and then returned to my desk to find more pages waiting.

When it was dinnertime (which we called lunch, because our day began at 3 p.m. for the morning paper), one of the copy desk members – the guy designated as No. 2 – walked to where I was sitting and asked me to come to lunch with him.

His name was Richard, and he was about 12 years older than I was. He wasn’t my boss, but he did what a boss should – helped me learn the ropes. At dinner, and we had lots of dinners together, he told me about the paper, what to do and what to avoid, what reporters were totally reliable and what reporters weren’t, what to expect from my fellow copy desk editors, sources I could use to verify information.

I knew him for six weeks. One day he told me he was giving notice and going to one of the newspapers in Dallas. But the time he spent investing in me for those six weeks helped me – and the newspaper – enormously. Because six weeks after that, because of staff turnover, the new kid had become the new No. 2, and effectively No. 1 because No. 1 had a drinking problem.

Fast forward 10 years. I was working in St. Louis, and had just been promoted to a new position in a business division. My boss, a guy named Tom, was totally straightforward: “You should know what you’re doing. If you don’t, ask. If I’m not around, do what you think is best. If you make a mistake, I’ll tell them I authorized it.”

Then he threw me into the pool. And I figured out how to swim. He was always around with a life preserver if I needed it.

He was much like Richard at the Enterprise. Tom had been a reporter for years before becoming a PR guy, and he and Richard shared that no-nonsense, damn-the-torpedoes-full-steam-ahead attitude. I worked for Tom for a year until they transferred him into the corporate division.

Both Tom and Richard knew how to enchant employees. They certainly enchanted me, and made an enormous impact on my professional life.


Over at The High Calling, we’re reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. This week’s discussion is on “How to Use Pull Technology” and “How to Enchant Your Employees.” To see more posts on the book, please visit The High Calling.

The Authors Who Enchant Me

You’re in a bookstore, just browsing, and you spot a book by an author you know, an author you love. It’s a new book, just published, and you buy it without even reading the dust jacket, summary, back cover praises or anything else. The author’s name is sufficient.

There are a few authors I trust implicitly. They generally fall into the literary fiction and mystery/suspense categories. Some are Christians; some are not. All are good writers. Some are no longer living, but I will reread them. And I’ve never been disappointed.

Simply put, they’ve enchanted me to the point where I’ve internalized their writing.

Among the deceased writers are Flannery O’Connor, John Mortimer (Rumpole!), Dashiell Hammett and S.S. Van Dine (the Philo Vance mysteries of the 1920s and 1930s), Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams.

Among the living literary writers are Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Fred Chappell, Scott Cairns and Frederick Buechner.

Some of the mystery/suspense writers are Elizabeth George, Arturo Perez-Reverte Travis, Thrasher and Mike Dellosso. For many people, you can say the words “Stephen King” and watch them get a dreamy look in their eyes.

And Athol Dickson and Dale Cramer. Athol Dickson keeps writing extraordinary novel after extraordinary novel. Dale Cramer even persuaded me to read what I thought I would never read – an Amish romance.

I ask myself, what is it about these writers that so enchants me? Why will I not even think twice to buy a book by them I haven’t read, or immediately read an article they’ve written in a magazine or online journal?

It’s more than good writing. There’s lots of good writing out there, across all publishing genres and across the web, for that matter. It’s not just good writing. Good writing is a given.

Guy Kawasaki, in Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, unintentionally answers my question. He’s writing primarily about enchanting causes, products and ideas, but what he says applies to writers as well. It’s about trust, and what makes them trustworthy to read. To paraphrase and build upon what Kawasaki says, this is how I answer my question.

They write with joy. That doesn’t mean they write about joyful things. It means what it says – they all write with joy, the joy of writing.

They write unexpectedly. None of these writers is formulaic or predictable. In their stories, they keep pushing themselves and their readers.

They write with generosity. They’re conscious of their readers, and while their goal may not be necessarily to please their readers, they don’t hold anything of themelves, or their stories, back.

They write with transcendence. Their stories transcend the printed (or electronic) page, wrapping themselves around our hearts to the point where the reader becomes one with the story.

And that’s how they enchant me.


Over at The High Calling, we’ve been discussing Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment. This week’s discussion focuses on Chapter 7, “How to Make Enchantment Endure,” and chapter 8, “How to Use Push Technology.” To see more posts on the discussion, please visit The High Calling.

The Conference Unlike Any Other

In 1994, my boss assigned me the task of chairing the annual Public Affairs Conference for the company. This was a meeting that brought all of the PR, government affairs, industry trade relations and assorted other “affairs” people together to hear speeches, participate in workshops, schmooze and hear senior executives talk. Chairing the meeting was ostensibly a great honor; actually it was a royal pain that everyone tried to avoid. My boss had asked several others before he got to me.

We attended these meetings because we were required to attend them. It was three solid days of meetings, not to mention the travel time for people coming from all over the world. Attending was something you had to do but it had never been something that people looked forward to and enjoyed.

I thought I had an angle on how to change that. I decided that this meeting would be different – it would be designed for people to learn something, something that might actually benefit them in their jobs. It wasn’t going to be what it had always been – sitting for three days and listening to talk.

The previous year, we had launched the company’s first email newsletter, and had even run an experiment with an online magazine delivered to people’s email boxes. The electronic world was just getting beginning to come alive, and web sites were beginning to appear (although virtually none in the business world at that time).

I hired a technology firm to help (there were precious few of these back then, too; this one was the only one in St. Louis, and it hadn’t done what I was going to ask it to do for this meeting). We planned and plotted. I went our looking for speakers, and got two then-significant names by the sheer good fortune that both had had speaking cancellations elsewhere for the time I asked them to speak. We looked for who was doing cutting-edge electronic communications, and we asked them to come talk, present and interact with people. No one was asking for this back then, and they accepted to a person. We had not one turn-down.

The conference was held at a resort some 45 miles west of St. Louis. People would essentially be captive for three days, so I and my technology firm were determined to blow their socks off.

And we did.

Upon arrival, every participant was (1) videotaped doing a short interview by (2) the person who had arrived before them. You didn’t get your room key until you did the video, and people knew that the video would become part of a conference CD. Then people were assigned into teams, where they were given specific assignments for what would now be called “creating content” for the CD. In some cases, they had to talk with outside speakers, or be guinea pigs for what the outside speakers would be demonstrating. But every person and team had a substantive assignment.

So, for example, some people worked with the editor of Newsweek Interactive to demonstrate how the new CD magazine worked. Some got to show how people were beginning to use online research. Some introduced speakers. Some presented with the speakers. One speaker addressed how radio, television and now the internet were changing political campaigns (the government affairs people sat up and took notice). Another challenged the very notion of how we all did our traditional jobs – because that was beginning to change. We even were able to get hold of a copy of a just released movie that demonstrated incredible computer-generated special effects – the movie had just opened in U.S. theaters. It was called Jurassic Park.

Each night after dinner and usually some fun activity, I’d sit with the technology team, working into the small hours of the morning on editing, coding and assembling the CD. At the grand finale session, we showed the actual CD in progress – and the attendees did something unheard of for one of these conferences – they stood up and cheered.

This was 17 years before Guy Kawasaki published Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions, the book we’re currently discussing at The High Calling. But for that meeting, we did what he tells you to do to “tell a great story and immerse your audience.”

We involved everyone in the “story” of our meeting. We made it different from past conferences. We had people doing hands-on demos of everything we were talking about. We planted seeds of possibilities. We translated “electronic communications” into what was happening in people’s day-to-day jobs. We illustrated the key points. We showed people “the magic” and found a multitude of examples. We changed mind-sets and enchanted all the influencers.

And we also got to have our own private showing of Jurassic Park.


To see more posts on Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment, chapters 5 (“How to Launch”) and 6 (“How to Overcome Resistance”), please visit The High Calling.

Trust and Worldviews

Trust is one of those words one sees a lot these days. Whole books have been written about how to achieve it. The power of two social media networks – Twitter and Facebook – are supposedly built upon it. Corporate mission and values statements usually have one reference to it.

The demand for trust is high, possibly because the supply is so short. In today’s world, we don’t trust business, politicians, Wall Street, the news media, news pundits and commentators, elected officials, school boards, teachers, unions, organized religion, disorganized religion, universities, the health care industry, doctors, tort attorneys, movie stars and the President’s birth certificate, to mention only a few, unless they happen to agree with our own perspectives. It seems, however, we do trust a small circle of people in our networks of friends and colleagues, especially the ones whose opinions we share.

That’s the common denominator – we trust the people and institutions whose worldview we share. We don’t trust those with whom we disagree. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll find that the concerns we have about trusting others is actually a result of living in a me-centered world. And I’m as guilty of this as the next person.

I trust you if you agree with me. And I’ll believe just about anything you say if we share the same worldview.

I had an email exchange with a person who was tweeting on Twitter absolutely unbelievable things about the company I work for. After pointing out how what she was saying was wrong (and giving her references), I asked her where she got her information. A friend told her, she said, a friend she trusted. The fact that the woman who was tweeting this was a Christian, who actually had a full-time ministry for helping Christian women gain wisdom, somehow made this worse.

I have friend in Chicago named David whom I met years ago when he edited a newsletter. We’d talk on the phone, see each other at conferences, and exchange emails on a fairly regular basis. We now follow each other on Twitter and we have each other’s blog listed in our blogrolls. Politically and religiously, we are night and day. We are about as different as you could imagine – we could be the poster children for blue states and red states. We do not in any sense share the same worldview. And yet I have tremendous regard for his writing, his thinking, and his often brutal honesty. I love how much he adores his family (yes, even liberals love their children). He’s utterly fearless in expressing his opinions.

I inherently trust him. Why? For some the same reasons Guy Kawasaki talks about in Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. David trusts others. He’s a mensch – a real human being. He’s completely open about his own interests, beliefs and biases. He helps and encourages others (including me). He’s knowledgeable and competent.

And I’m blessed to count him as a friend.


Over at The High Calling, we’ve been reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment. This week’s discussion is on chapter 3 – “How to Achieve Trustworthiness” – and chapter 4 – “How to Prepare.” To see other posts based on this week’s readings, please visit the site.

Enchanted by a Speech

It was a little more than 20 years ago. I was attending a speechwriters’ conference in Chicago, and the keynote speaker was Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Few of us had heard of her, but she has just published a book entitled Eloquence in an Electronic Age, about how radio and television had reshaped and transformed political speechmaking, and not necessarily for the better.

This period – the early 1990s – was a critical time for corporate speechwriters. Reorganizations, restructurings and downsizings were taking their toll. A number of corporate executives were beginning to take their speeches cues from the political world and beginning to experiment with “key message points” from which they would speak extemporaneously. People were saying that speeches longer than 10 minutes were becoming extinct. Speechwriters were beginning to feel like dinosaurs after the meteorite hit.

Some 250 us were gathered in Chicago. Jamieson, who had been a speechwriter for a congressman for many years, had turned to the study of modern political rhetoric. And she understood how television and radio – with the emphasis on sound bites and “cool” speakers – were profoundly changing politics and elections. (If you’d like to know where today’s political incivility comes from, a lot of the seeds were sprouting in the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

Jamieson, in her keynote address, defied expectation and convention. She spoke for an hour without pause. And you know all that stuff about short attention spans? Right out the window. We were mesmerized by her speech. The entire group was silent, completely captivated.

Actually, I was enthralled. Completely.

She called for us to take back rhetoric. She told us how difficult it was going to be. She told us how we would be fighting a powerful current, and attitudes already becoming entrenched. She said we would have to defy the crowd. And we would have to do all of this without knowing whether we would be successful or not.

She spoke for that hour. When she finished, we were on our feet, cheering. She was asked the first question, and spoke for another 30 minutes. We were on our feet again, cheering again.

She changed my speechwriting life. I read everything she wrote. I changed how we did speeches at my company, and instead of falling victim to the electronic age we took full advantage of it. We produced scores of quality, award-winning speeches, the kind that got noticed and quoted and reprinted. We flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom.

Ultimately, we only delayed the inevitable. Eventually, executives retired and new ones appointed, and then came the message-point barbarians. But for six years it was incredible. And this was before the internet  had become ubiquitous.

What Jamieson did in that speech was precisely what Guy Kawasaki describes in Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. Over at The High Calling, we’ve started a new book discussion on Kawasaki’s book. Today’s discussion covers chapters 1 and 2: “Why Enchantment?” and “How to Achieve Likability.”

Kawasaki offers a number of definitions for enchantment, but the one I like best is a process by which situations and relationships are transformed (the book is about how that happens and what you can do to make it happen). He lists five situations when enchantment is necessary – aspiring to lofty, idealistic results; making difficult, infrequent decisions; overcoming entrenched habits; defying a crowd; proceeding despite delayed or nonexistent feedback.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson did exactly those things in her speech – 20 years before Kawasaki wrote his book.

And I was enchanted.


If you’d like to learn more about Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who’s authored or co-authored some 17 books since 1990, here are some resources:

Her faculty page at the University of Pennsylvania web site.

Her entry at Wikipedia.

Some of her books:

Eloquence in an Electronic Age

The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (contributing writer)

Electing the President 2008: The Insider’s View

Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (co-author)

Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising