Propaganda reduces both language and its audience to instrumental tools

Evidence

How absurd it is to try to change the world by propaganda. Propaganda makes language an instrument, a lever, a machine. It fixes the condition of men, as they have come to be in under social injustice, by setting them in motion. It counts on being able to count on them. Deep down all men know that through this tool they too will be reduced to a tool as in a factory. The anger they feel mounting inside them as they succumb to propaganda is the age-old resentment against the yoke, heightened by the suspicion that the remedy it prescribes is the wrong one. Propaganda manipulates people; when it cries freedom it contradicts itself. Deceit and propaganda are inseparable. A community in which the leader and his followers come to terms through propaganda—whatever the merits of its content—is a community of lies. Truth itself becomes merely a means of enlisting support and is falsified in the very utterance. This is why genuine resistance knows no propaganda. Propaganda is misanthropic. It assumes that to say that policy ought to spring from mutual understanding is not a basic principle but conveniently empty phraseology. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 261

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the culture-industry thesis from the earlier chapter: mechanical manipulation of language parallels mechanical manipulation of art and audience. — connects to: Language can distort as well as transmit human culture; Advertising doubles language into a mockery that linguistics cannot analyze — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 310; Language in the culture industry calculates and incites but no longer expresses. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 258 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Defines propaganda in critical-theory terms: an instrument that fixes human conditions rather than liberating them.

Broader Connections

• Language in the culture industry calculates and incites but no longer expresses. #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 258
• Advertising doubles language into a mockery that linguistics cannot analyze #expands (0.80) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 310
• Language can distort as well as transmit human culture #expands (0.78)