Adventures in Marketing

Part of the beauty of American citizenship is that we sustain ourselves by selling to each other an endless array of useless products. We have long since fulfilled all of our needs, and are deep into wants. In the advertising business, they have to constantly create new wants; to create demand for new products. We naturally resist ads, as they are intrusive. So the ads, to be effective, have to subvert those defenses.

It should come as no surprise that the people who first used mass media to undermine our resistance to war also invented modern advertising. Edward Bernays was a member of the Creel Commission, aka the Committee on Public Information. The Creel people, including the Secretaries of State, War (since changed to “Defense”), and the Navy, along with journalist Walter Lippmann and others, were given the task of convincing a pacifist American public in 1917 that Germans threatened our existence, and that we needed to go to war with them.

It was all experimental at the time – Creel infected the public consciousness with feigned atrocities and used demonic archetypes, all to stoke a mob mentality. We take it all for granted now, but in 1917, it was a new science. It was terribly effective. Later the Germans, under Goebbels and Hitler, would advance American propaganda techniques even further.

It was Bernays who realized that the same methods that undermined our natural resistance to war could also induce us to buy products. He wrote the book “Propaganda“, then an innocuous term, recently re-released with an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller. He is also famous for an advertising campaign in the 1920’s that convinced many women to smoke cigarettes.

Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a brilliant man. I watch now as the American public is led from one conflict to another, as our leaders and media stoke our hatred and titillate us with fantastical evil demons. These creatures are invented in board rooms and sold to us like soap. Just in my short life we have had Muammar Qaddafi’, Yassir Arafat, Manuel Noriega, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser (“Hitler on the Nile”), Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Slobodan Milosevic, and most recently, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kim Jong-il and Hugo Chavez.

These are all real people, but they also serve as objects of hatred, a way of focusing public attention on a certain activity our leaders want to undertake, usually involving an attack on another country. The real reason for the attacks – theft of resources, imperialist ambitions, punishment of non-aligned bad-actors, installation of puppet governments, and economic penetration by American business interests, are never disclosed. They keep it simple. We good, they evil. We attack.

The Creel Commission was phenomenally successful, turning ordinary working/farming Americans into blathering hateful idiots. These are just a few of the incidents involving Montana pulled from a Chronology of Events in the Western United States during World War I:

November 9, 1917 – Billings, Montana – A round-up of alleged pro-Germans and non-purchasers of Liberty Bonds. 650 citizens force Curtis C. Oehme, an architect, to resign from the state board of architects, Herman Schwanz is forced to give up his seat as city councilman. Edward Kortzborn is forced to kiss the flag and declare allegiance to the United States.

March 23, 1918 – Bozeman, Montana – Julius Heuer escapes lynching when he his rescued by the sheriff and taken to the county jail. He allegedly made pro-German statements.

March 23, 1918 – Butte, Montana – The Swiss Club, Muellers Saloon and the 101 Saloon were raided by federal and local officials. 25 men were arrested and released after a patriotic talk. Rumors of pro-German celebrations led to the raids.

April 21, 1918 – Helena, Montana – Rheinold Kleinschmidt’s home was beset by a mob who painted on his house in white “Slacker” and other phrases. It was advertised by the county Liberty Bond committee that he was a “financial slacker.” He purchased $500 worth of bonds before the incident. The mob, armed with ropes and clubs, demanded entrance. He explained that he had purchased bonds the same morning. Kleinschmidt is 70 years old.

April 30, 1918 – Lewistown, Montana – Armed citizens patrol the streets after the school is burned. Weeks before the German texts were taken from the school by a mob and burned.

I doubt that government itself realized the power of propaganda before that time. In those days, pre World War II, they were quite open about it, even thuggish. There was no subtlety. These days things are a little more subdued. We are quietly inundated with Americanism throughout our lives, especially in school. American schooling is really a selection process where compliant individuals are praised and put into positions of leadership, given good grades and scholarships for higher learning, while noncompliant kids who lean towards independent thought are dealt out of the game. Many, usually boys, are even drugged to enforce compliant behavior.

So we live in a society now where leadership positions are naturally held by those people most deeply indoctrinated. Those who step out of line are quickly exorcised – in fact, rarely come to positions of influence at all. Newspaper editors, university presidents, mayors and governors and congresspeople and presidents are all people who colored inside the lines during their schooling. They are rewarded for compliance.

I’ll never forget going to one of my rowdy kid’s graduation ceremony (she received no awards, I’m proud to say). I listened to the speech given by the class “valedictorian”. The poor girl regurgitated every sad song ever sung to her in her twelve years of education. She uttered nary one original thought. She was well on her way to a position of leadership.

But there is life outside the lines. It is an excellent and fun and deeply rewarding life. I was boxed in for my first 36 years, and by means of circumstances involving my own rowdy personality, was told to make it on my own. I became self-employed. Fortunately, as a CPA, I had clients, but more importantly, I had time on my hands. It didn’t take long – two and one-half years to be precise – to leave the sphere of the compliant patriots, to feel freedom of thought and later, freedom of expression. I probably went a bit overboard. Freedom does that to a person.

April 15th is upon us – for me, a guy who does taxes, it’s freedom day. We are off the Zion and the Grand Canyon. We have something few appreciate in the wage-slave world – we own more than two weeks of our own time. We can go where we please, do as we please. But isn’t it interesting that with free time also came free thought?

Anyway, back to Bernays. Without a war to sell, he turned his mind to marketing. The book “Propaganda” is about the science of advertising. He understood then, as few do now, that the marketing of products and politicians were one and the same. A couple of excerpts:

The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible manipulation of motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, and others who continued with searching study of the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understood the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

… No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by group leaders in who it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.

… Political campaigns today are all side shows, all honors, all bombast, glitter and speeches. These are for the most part unrelated to the main business of studying the public scientifically, or supplying the public with party, candidate, platform and performance, and selling the public these ideas and practices.

… The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but how to sway the public. In theory, this education might be done by means of learned pamphlets explaining the intricacies of public question. In actual fact, it can be done only by meeting the conditions of the public mind, by creating circumstances which set up trains of thought, by dramatizing personalities, by establishing contact with the group leaders who control the opinions of their public.

How little things change. We suffer from the “myth of progress”, as Jacques Ellul called it. How beautiful to live outside this system, as much as humanly possible. True freedom is impossible, but even small doses of it elevate the mind, engage the senses, and give a feeling of warmth and excitement that is offered by little else in life.

I’m up early today, my tax work is mostly done. Spring is upon us, baseball in full swing, and we’re about to take off on another adventure. I wish everyone could have what we have. While a CPA can make a little more money than other professions, it’s more than just that. Come over to where I am. Join me. Experience freedom. Leave the right wing, leave the left wing, leave the realm of compliance and submissiveness, join the ranks of free thinkers.

Be warned, you may stop blindly “loving” your country in the process. It’s all part of growing up.