Sociology

Pertaining to society; relating to men living in society. or to the public as an aggregate body; as social interests or concerns; social pleasures; social benefits; social happiness;
social duties. True self-love and social are the same.

E. Fromm, 'Escape from freedom', Holt Paperbacks: 1994.
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J. Ellul, 'Propaganda: The formation of Men's attitudes', Vintage: 1973.
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'In November 1957, a Bordeaux association organized a lecture on the atomic bomb by a well known specialist; the lecture would surely have been of great interest (and not for propaganda purposes). A wide distribution of leaflets had announced it to the student public, but not a single student came. Why? Because this happened at exactly the same time as Sputnik's success, and the public was concerned only with this single piece of news; its sole interest was in Sputnik, and the permanent problem was 'forgotten'.

'Actually, the public is prodigiously [very much] sensitive to current news. Its attention is focused immediately on any spectacular event that fits in with its myths.''A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect.''There is never any awareness - of himself, of his condition, of his society - for the man who lives by current events. Such a man never stops to investigate any one point, any more than he will tie together a series of news events. We already have mentioned man's inability to consider several facts or events simultaneously and to make a synthesis of them in order to face or to oppose them. One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones. Under these conditions there can be no thought.

And, in fact, modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them. He is even less capable of spotting any inconsistency between successive facts;man's capacity to forget is unlimited.'

'Moreover, there is a spontaneous defensive reaction in the individual against an excess of information and - to the extent that he clings (unconsciously) to the unity of his own person - against inconsistencies. The best defense here is to forget the preceding event.''In so doing, man denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today's events his life by obliterating yesterday's news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented. All this is also true of those who claim to be "informed" because they read some weekly periodical filled with political revelations.''This situation makes the "current-events man" a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents. He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event.

Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist. No confrontation ever occurs between the event and the truth; no relationship ever exists between the event and the person. Real information never concerns such a person.'

'The experience of contradiction is certainly one of the prevalent experiences in our society. But man cannot endure contradiction; anxiety results, and man struggles to resolve the contradiction in order to dissolve his anxiety.

Finally, as a result of all the threats and contradictions in contemporary society, man feels accused, guilty. He cannot feel that he is right and good as long as he is exposed to contradictions, which place him in conflict with one of his group's imperatives no matter which solution he adopts. But one of man's greatest inner needs is to feel that he is right. This need takes several forms. First, man needs to be right in his own eyes. He must be able to assert that he is right, that he does what he should, that he is worthy of his own respect. Then, man needs to be right in the eyes of those around him, his family, his milieu, his co-workers, his friends, his country. Finally, he feels the need to belong to a group, which he considers right and which he can proclaim as just, noble, and good. But that righteousness is not absolute righteousness, true and authentic justice.''What matters is not to be just, or to act just, or that the group to which one belongs is just - but to seem just, to find reasons for asserting that one is just, and to have these reasons shared by one's audience.This corresponds to man's refusal to see reality - his own reality first of all - as it is, for that would be intolerable; it also corresponds to his refusal to acknowledge that he may be wrong.

Before himself and others, man is constantly pleading his own case and working to find good reasons for what he does or has done. Of course, the whole process is unconscious. The individual reconstructs his past to demonstrate that his conduct was right. But this is justification rather than explanation of behavior. Man thus lives in seemingly reasonable fiction. Such justification corresponds at least partly to what American psychologists call rationalization, i.e., the search for good reasons. But rationalization covers less territory than justification. Rationalization occurs when the individual is prey to the difficulties of social life. The collision with various groups and other individuals provokes tension, conflicts, frustrations, failures, and anxieties for which man has a low tolerance. He tries to avoid all this, but cannot. He therefore gives himself excuses and good reasons for avoiding the disagreeable consequences of such conflicts, or fabricates a conclusion, which explains his failure and gives it the appearance of success ("sour grapes"); or he justifies everything by creating a scapegoat, or justifies his conduct by showing that the other party is to blame (racial prejudice), and so forth. Clearly, the individual believes the reasons he gives, all the more so as these reasons are "good" to the extent that they are shared by a large number of people, if not by everybody.

The individual who justifies himself is always scandalized [offended] if told that the reasons he gives for his conduct are false, that he has acted for other reasons, and that his explanations are only embroideries [fabrications] to make his conduct acceptable and to win praise for it.

This need seems abnormal. On the individual level, it is often considered pathological [sick], because it shows a dissociation from the self. But in reality this judgment was discarded because of its moral implications, the process involved being nothing other than hypocrisy. It was then concluded that there is nothing pathological in this need - for two reasons.

The first is the universality of the phenomenon. Practically everybody justifies himself all the time, to himself and to his group, and it is difficult to call a general attitude pathological.

The second is the usefulness of the process: it is generally accepted nowadays that in his psychic life man automatically finds what is useful for him and permits him to exercise "economies". Justification is undeniably useful.

Through justification man not only defends himself against tensions and anxieties, transforming failure into success, but also asserts his sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice. Often a man's true beliefs are revealed only through this channel (justification).''Such hypocrisy has another use: it permits man to cast off some of his inhibitions without having to assert anti-moral or anti-social convictions publicly. Whereas inhibited behavior is damaging to society, an overloud declaration of immoral or asocial convictions is damaging too. Here we encounter the old problem: Is it better to behave badly and hide it, as in 1900, or to behave badly and advertise it, as in 1960 (taking into account that the man of 1960 uses different justifications)? The process of justification is thus found everywhere because of its great utility.''On the collective level one can say that most ideologies and political or economic theories are justifications.'

C.J. Sommerville, 'How the news makes us dumb: the death of wisdom in an information society', IVP Books: 1999
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'The product of the news business is change, not wisdom. You need to go elsewhere for wisdom. Wisdom has to do with seeing things in their largest context, whereas news is structured in a way that destroys the larger context. You have to do certain things to information if you want to sell it on a daily basis. You have to make each day's report seem important. And you do that by reducing the importance of its context.

If readers were aware of the bigger story it would diminish today's contribution to that story. So news-industry profits absolutely depend on dumbing us down by deconstructing our world by dailiness. In reporting today's news they have to make us want to come back tomorrow for more news - more change. Tomorrow the implication will be that today's report can now be forgotten.

(...) intellectuals, of all people, seem the most addicted to news and the proudest of being "informed". (...) But we should be honest enough to admit that we do not even begin to be informed about "the world".

Let's say you are really serious about staying informed, so you take four important newspapers and spend hours every day getting through them all (...). Would that do it? The CIA comprises about twenty thousand people - the population of a whole town - who collectively try to keep up to date with 180-plus countries. They read all the important newspapers as well as all their other sources of information. Are they getting the job done?

Ironically, intellectuals are precisely the people who seem to have the least respect for the CIA and treat it as a joke. Where does that leave them, with their paltry four papers?

There is simply no way to be "informed" in the sense that we imagine. If you stopped reading the paper tomorrow, you would not suddenly become uninformed; you are already uninformed about anything as big as "the world." You learn this when you actually visit one of those 180-plus countries. Travel helps you realize that your previous notion of being informed was simply infantile. Stopping this pretense would mark a gain in realism.

It turns out that being informed really means knowing what the people around you are talking about. Our reality is the news, not the world.'

'When we don't visit our most basic beliefs, our thinking becomes shallow.''Nothing is more common nowadays than to have someone interrupt a serious discussion with the objection "Who's to say what the truth is anyway?" or "If that's your opinion, that's fine for you". Why do we say this? Nobody in their innermost heart believes that standards of truth are unreal. Academics, who often describe themselves as relativists, would lost their authoritative, elite position if relativism were taken seriously, and their students would have to grade themselves. But a flippant relativism has become a habit with us, a habit encouraged by the "evenhandedness" of the news.

If we say 'There is no absolute truth,' we expect others to accept this as a true statement - or else what good is it? So whereas a true relativism is self-canceling, the news version of relativism is very dogmatic. Skepticism is the creed of the news, if that is not a contradiction. One might think that the evenhandedness of news means a respect for everyone's opinion. Actually, it means undermining whatever is stated too emphatically by reporting that there are those who disagree. Maybe this is our idea of being modest or democratic.

We argue our great social issues badly because we hold the idea that all 'viewpoints' are somehow equal. The sketchiness of news coverage encourages this notion. We are so used to its juggling approach to ideas that we have lost the patience and the humility to submit our opinion to true argumentation.'

Sociology

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