I keep going back to Edward Bernays … the process I see around me now, with passage of the Senate health care bill, is much like soldiers inspecting bodies on the battlefield after the conflict and finishing off any that are still alive.
The victory achieved by AHIP and PhRMA is monumental, but won’t go down easy unless people are convinced that something good has happened. The usual suspects, the Democrats, are now starting to ridicule people who oppose the bill, which is pretty much in its final form now.
These passages are taken from Bernays’ writings in 1928. He is considered the father of modern public relations, and his early work was on the Committee on Public Information (The “Creel Committee”), that notorious group that led a reluctant American public into involvement in a war that was none of their concern. It was that group that first discovered the power of public relations -the ability of group leaders to shape and manage opinions.
Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. But there are usually proponents and opponents of every propaganda, both of whom are equally eager to convince the majority.
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?
This general principle that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons that men give for what they do.
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.
The name of the book, “Propaganda“, doesn’t set well anymore. It was written before World War II, when the word still had a certain functionality without negative connotations. But Bernays lays out the strategy for selling public policy in the same manner that toothpaste and fashions are marketed. People form opinions in a pyramid, each group looking to the group above to know what to think about the important issues of the day. The Democrats are now looking up to their party leaders, and forming opinions about the health care bill accordingly.
Piece of Mindful 
I can hardly believe the techniques of mass propaganda were discovered in 1928. I recall Moses dealing with these issues when leading his people to better health care back in the day.
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Humans have not changed, for sure. You make a good point. But “propaganda” in the modern sense is a product of mass media, which did not exist back then. The serious work on the subject was done around the turn of the 20th century. As we know it, modern propaganda was developed by Americans, further developed by the Nazis, and at this point in time is at a very refined stage. There’s hardly a whimper of protest here in the land of the free about anything – impossible to get a movement of any kind going. People are frozen in place.
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There’s a movement all right, heading toward the sports stadiums, or the malls. We’re frightfully busy doing not much of anything. It makes people happy, apparently. Nobody’s off to see the wizard anymore, nobody cares who the wizard is, and it’s too much bother trying to find out who’s pulling those strings. But to see the wizard, one must pass through the propagandist. Sleep, sleep, in that field of endless beauty and opium. If we follow the narrative, will taxing tanning salons arouse a sleeping giant – the tan vote? Happy New Year!
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Good post, Mark.
The masses are trained in school to avoid critical thinking, and more so, the tools of such thinking are steadily being degraded or removed.
Physical education is being promoted aggressively as a route of prosperity than science. One nearly has to see the outpouring of audience going to a high school football game vs. a high school science fair.
With massive mathematical illiteracy and massive scientific ignorance, the demand to obey ‘experts’ – “expertitis” as a call it – increases. The People have no tools to argue.
Then the people become easily manipulated – one merely needs to see the AGW myth and its extent throughout society, rewriting of science texts, etc. to the point that now a requirement of life on Earth has been declared a pollutant. And AGW is merely one example of this manipulation.
As long as those yellow school bus still run, the best that the rest of us can do is a rear-guard action. We are outgunned and in retreat as long as we send our children to be trained by those that work against us.
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