« MYTH: "Crazy like a Fox" | Sacred Cow Dung Home | MYTH: NDAs are a Good Idea »
June 04, 2005
What is "Mythocracy"?
What is this term “Mythocracy” I use so prominently in the subtitle of this blog? Actually, “Mythocracy” is a term I coined for myself in the early 1970s to describe the role of Propaganda in Technology-Driven Democratic Societies.
In college, I had been a huge fan of the brilliant works of the French Catholic Intellectual, Jacques Ellul, and in particular his seminal works “The Technological Society” and later “Propaganda”. These works helped shape much of my early thinking regarding society, political economy, and the advance of science & technology in the world. Essentially, these books are really Part I and Part II of the same body of thought.
Briefly (and hardly doing justice to his work), technology is not about machines at all but rather about rationalized processes in social organizations. In other words, not only is engineering about technology but so is psychology, economics, law, business, education, etc. Technology is THE methodology we bring to all successful human endeavors to build productive social organizations. The end of the “cold War” meant the triumph, not of capitalism or democracy, but of technology. Propaganda is the cornerstone of a Technological Society. Propaganda is the necessary adjunct to the successfully maintainence and advance of technology. Basically technology and propaganda are conjointed siamese twins from birth and would die instantly if separated.
The problem I had was not with the ideas (which were presciently developed in the 1950s) but with the images they conjured up in most people. The word “Technology” conjured up images of machines rather than methods social organization. The word “Propaganda” conjured up images of evil dictators running printing presses of lies rather than the universal and spontaneous desire to understand ones world using simplifying explanatory principles.
The idea that propaganda could actually be “true” was just a foreign (read: french) concept to most people back then (and still is today). And even more outragious was the implication that intellectuals share a grand delusion (and still do) that they are somehow resistant to propaganda when, in fact, it is often intellectuals themselves who are the most “propagandized.” Not to mention the role of a “free press” in all of this.
To some degree, the challenge Jacque created for himself was to redefine these images by sharing his body of thought to the intellectual community. Although, Jacques did a brilliant job of dispelling these images with a much more refined and sophisticated elaboration of their true meanings, here we are 50 years later and we still have the same misleading images of what these word mean. And brilliant right wing Republicans practitioners, like Karl Rove, skillfully administer these basic principles to convert the “State of the Art” to the “Art of the State” — with very few understanding how they are “getting away with it” in an austensibly democratic society. In other words, my hero, Jacques Ellul, failed to drive the discourse beyond the mundane.
One of my dreams was to write the sequel to these two great books and call it “Mythocracy.” My goal would be to update his thinking — but not by trying to get people to “unlearn” and then “relearn” the words “technology” and “propaganda” but rather to imbue a de novo term with their actual fused dual meanings — hence the term “Mythocracy.”
I’ve actually written quite a bit on Mythocracy over the years and perhaps, one day, will actually “finish the book” — but, for now, this is all I’ll say and leave it to your imagination what the term “Mythocracy” means — you’ll probably come pretty close to what I mean by the term. Yes, we are talking about “subverting a dominant paradigm.” But this paradigm is definitely a non-partisan, non-sectarian, and non-ideological paradigm.
No successful social organization or human endeavor can exist without the life blood of “Mythocracy” coursing through its veins.
Posted by cmayaud at 01:15 PM | Permalink| Comments (4)
Del.icio.us Tagging |
Digg This
| Posted to Business Strategy | Entrepreneurship | MYTH of the Week | Open Source | Political Economy | SOFTWARE IT | Venture Capital Process | z NOTES to Myself
Comments
Damn....excuse the profanity, but Hemingway, who was notorious for telling it like it is with great clarity- and I am an expert on Hemingway-would have been proud.
I don't kiss A_ _ but on this one and the last I must add you certainly tell it like it is and the way it really is.
Posted by: Michael Pokocky at June 6, 2005 04:11 AM
a comment I recieved today for anonymous posting:
BTW on Mythocracy: I believe that George Lakoff is attempting to understand "propaganda" in a modern way. But it is also quite sad but amusing that the very unanalyzed class basis of the left in Europe and the US has made it dismissive of the marketing methods needed to communicate with the public at large.
Posted by: Christian Mayaud at July 5, 2005 11:49 AM
you did not coin the term "mythocracy." the term was used (and probably invented) by the jazz musician Sun Ra well before the early 70s.
Posted by: Daniel Moore at December 11, 2005 04:20 PM
actually I did coin the term "mythocracy" in the early 1970's ... but, as you rightly point out, I too doubt I was "the first" to coin the term.
We didn't have Google back then and I couldn't find any other reference to the term at the time in our college library. I was using the term in a college paper and wanted to make sure I found relevant references to the term. I was surprised not to find other references to such an obvious term with such a straightforward meaning.
We see others "re-coin" it from time to time these days -- under similar circumstances where you need a word with that meaning and it just pops into your head pretty easily in the normal course of writing.
I doubt anyone needs to be exposed to it to re-coin it
Posted by: Christian Mayaud at December 11, 2005 07:39 PM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)
