“The New Propaganda” – An Analysis of Chapter 2 of “Propaganda” by Edward L. Bernays
**If you are new to this series, make sure you start HERE**
The second chapter of Edward L. Bernays’ treatise Propaganda begins with a brief explanation of the democratic condition, and what about it necessitates his brand of propaganda. Power, he says, has “passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. … For the masses promised to be king.” [Bernays, 47] This is due to what he dubs the “trio of the industrial revolution”: “The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school.” [Bernays, 47] Particularly, it was the prospect of universal literacy that convinced some that, once the masses became well read, they would be imbued with “a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine.” [Bernays, 48]. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, and
instead of a mind, universal literacy has given [the average person] rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. [Bernays, 48; emphasis mine]
In essence, if people are reading all the same things, if they don’t question what they read, their literacy becomes an implement of their enslavement rather than the key to their freedom. However, Mr. Bernays doesn’t see this as a problem to be addressed, but as an opportunity to be seized. Because of mass-media and public school within the economic context of the industrial revolution, American society has come to be lost in a miasma of intellectual homogeneity. Based on this, democracy in Bernays’ view can be broken down as follows:
- Democracy means that “the people” are in charge; the majority rules.
- “The people” – i.e., the majority – can be swayed.
- Democracy means that those who can sway “the people” are in charge; those who influence the majority rule.
“The minority,” he explains,
has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. [Bernays, 48; emphasis mine]
Not only does he believe this is a necessary consequence of American society at the time of writing, but he boasts that all things of social import – “politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, [and] other fields” – are involved in this sort of mass-manipulation. This is a point that he will go on to repeat in a variety of forms throughout the rest of the book. The true rulers of democratic society are his shadowy leaders, and “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” [Bernays, 48]
Control of the “direction” of the public mind being key to the propagandist’s work, Bernays was a make-over man. He dealt in context. His craft was making the good appear bad, and the bad appear good. At least, it was making the favorable seem undesirable and the dubious seem palatable. In keeping with this role, Edward Bernays attempts in this chapter to resurrect the word – or really, the concept – of propaganda from its popular demise after the Great War. See, Americans became accustomed to associating the term with the German war effort; “propaganda” was a tactic of “the enemy.” It should be noted here that the main reason the average American would make that association was based on what they had been conditioned into believing by American propagandists. Apparently mention of this fact slipped Edward’s mind while he wrote this chapter, as did mention of his personal involvement in those propaganda efforts.
Whatever the reason behind the negative connotation, Bernays argues that, really, the word simply refers to the neutral practice of changing people’s minds and/or influencing their behavior. It shouldn’t be hard to guess his argument: Propaganda is just a tool and, being a tool, it is the user that makes it good or bad.
Propaganda becomes vicious and reprehensive only when its authors consciously and deliberately disseminate what they know to be lies, or when they aim at effects which they know to be prejudicial to the common good. [Bernays, 50]
Those who read my report on chapter 1, “Organizing Chaos,” are sure to recall what Bernays wrote about the relationship between propagandists and the public; specifically, that “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. … It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” [Bernays, 37-38] The reader might also remember that Mr. Bernays then went on to claim that the existence of this invisible government was voluntarily agreed upon by the public; that people who know nothing of this group’s existence or influence somehow consented to its activities.
In characterizing propaganda as merely a neutral tool, he neglects to address the fact that propaganda, by its nature, does not involve rational discourse. The propagandist doesn’t sway the masses by using honest, logical arguments or by opening himself up for legitimate debate. Instead, the propagandist must cater to people’s instincts. He must appeal to their emotions. In this sense, propaganda is inherently dishonest. Sure, we might strip the word down to its bare bones and say it means nothing more than “that which is propagated” – which seems to be what Bernays would like us to believe – but that doesn’t change the nature of the phenomenon the term is supposed to represent. Going off Bernays’ own words, propaganda exists to control the masses: To make the common person predictable and easy to manage. That implies quite a bit more than simply one person trying to convince another of something.
Despite its intrinsic secrecy, despite the fact that it depends on emotional manipulation which is often quite subtle, despite the propagandists creating context that places them above scrutiny and off the public radar, our author claims that propaganda is only bad when somebody lies outright, or threatens the “common good.” Writing decades later, author Jacques Ellul points out that some of the most successful propaganda isn’t necessarily a lie, so much as it is a careful, reserved telling of certain truths. [Ellul, 52-61] Sure, much of propaganda is outright lying – as I’ve said it is fundamentally dishonest – but its not always so straightforward, and I suggest that Bernays is over-simplifying the issue when he essentially claims that quiet, tactful mental manipulation is morally superior to obvious lies. And, of course, if public opinion is molded by the invisible government to the extent that Bernays asserts, the notion of “common good” goes out the window, as whatever constitutes the common good is determined and affected entirely by society’s rulers. Veiled by the cloak of democracy, actual common people’s best interests are cynically sold back to them, distorted and booby-trapped, by those who see themselves alone as capable of running society.
If you open two windows of your Internet browser and put them side-to-side, one showing a list of propaganda techniques and the other a list of informal logical fallacies (simple search engine queries will suffice), you will observe that there is an uncannily high degree of overlap. This is because propaganda is built on irrationality; rather, it is the process by which human irrationality is capitalized on. Bernays candidly presents an example of how a particular fallacy/propaganda technique might be used to take advantage of people’s illogical impulses: The appeal to authority. He cites some potentially controversial newspaper articles, one of which lists the State Department as its source; the second credits the Carnegie Foundation. Both of these institutions are generally trusted by Americans, thus listing them as sources naturally lends credibility to the stories. The two headlines are: “Twelve Nations Warn China Real Reform Must Come Before They Give Relief,” and “Pritchett Reports Zionism Will Fail.” These headlines, he says, “illustrate how conscious direction is given to events, and how the men behind these events influence public opinion.” [Bernays, 52] In other words, these stories are both presented with a particular slant, but the slant is made to seem like “fair and balanced” analysis by appealing to the authority of the sources.
At this point, Bernays stops to posit a real definition for “propaganda” at long last: “Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea, or group.” [Bernays, 52] He elaborates as follows:
This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no undertaking is now carried on without it, whether the enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president. Sometimes the effect on the public is created by a professional propagandist, sometimes by an amateur deputed for the job. The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. [Bernays, 52; emphasis mine]
There is much to say about “regimenting the public mind”; so much to say, in fact, that I’ll not delve deeply into it here. That notion has already been, and will certainly be again and again, looked at on this site. What needs to be understood here is that such regimentation necessitates psychological subservience to a centralized group of controllers; i.e., Bernays’ invisible government. Like generals have their physical armies, propagandists have mental armies; specifically, emotionally controlled, ideological armies. I will for now leave the reader with a sense of slight suspense and the link to my article “From New Deal to World Constitution” for some information in that vein.
This regimentation is only made necessary, he explains, by the existence of democracy, which is itself controlled by those who manufacture situations in order to utilize the predictable reactions. “Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted.” [Bernays, 54] Now, because democracy has made it so rulers must act at the behest of the masses, propaganda is required to gain necessary public approval. Bernaysian propaganda exists to control democracy and democratic thought; we might describe it as “the corrective mechanism of democracy.” But again, as such, it is intrinsically deceptive: Weaponized dishonesty. It only exists to dupe the masses; to sway people to accepting opinions and/or actions they would otherwise reject or not concern themselves with. All this so the ruling class can maintain and increase its monopoly on power, while the public remains under the impression that they are in charge. The rulers can still do as they please like in the old days of kings and emperors, the only difference being that now they must first have the people convinced that whatever they are doing is “moving us forward” or “for the greater good” or “the right thing to do.” Bernays, in a way, is a great democrat. As he explains over and over again throughout the book, “government by the people” makes his line of work absolutely necessary; he’s actually contributing to the democratic process, and, without democracy, he might be out of a job.
He next tells the story of how the invisible government came to realize that democracy and propaganda go hand-in-hand:
It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during [World War I] that opened up the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. [Bernays, 54; emphasis mine]
It’s rather odd, I think, that Bernays should call wartime propaganda successful, when all it really “succeeded in” was fomenting international hatred and ensuring the miserable mass-murders of some eighteen million people. Stranger still is that Bernays equates this with intelligence. Given the horrendous losses of the Great War, I don’t see how those who so staunchly supported it could be called successful or intelligent – unless they had ulterior motives. Who are these “intelligent few”? He doesn’t say. Why would they want to continue employing the technique that led to one of the worst periods in human history? Apparently, to further the regimentation of the public mind. There’s that phrase again, that phrase that was all too common in the era in which Bernays was writing. It was understood that militarizing the masses is essential if a totalitarian state is to be realized, and that psychological militarization is only achievable with propaganda. The concept implies unconditional obedience to authority, strong work and duty ethic, and intellectual homogeneity across the land. But again, this subject is too complex and important to be dealt with here as a tangent; it will require an article or articles of its own. In the meantime, I refer the reader to the page linked above.
The American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public acceptance, was new.” [Bernays, 54]
In a commendable fashion – certainly not “vicious and reprehensive” – Bernays’ counterparts deceptively sold World War I to the public, utilizing new manipulative psychological techniques the public was not aware of or ready to contend with. It’s great to see that good old American ingenuity at work, isn’t it? I also love that he refers to PR groups as “patriotic agencies.” There’s nothing more American than elitists sending the dregs off to die, after all.
They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach – visual, graphic, and auditory – to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group – persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. [Bernays, 54]
Essentially, influential people and their media were able to direct public opinion and thus public action, by employing the methods of propaganda. The vast majority of mass-communication media were blaring the trumpets of war; choice and deliberation were removed from the equation. It is important to note here that the propagandist doesn’t need to appeal to every single person, only to group leaders and others with social clout. They will do the rest. It’s as if the so-called invisible government “seeds” itself into various pockets of society. Those on the inside are planted carefully in areas where public thought can (or should, in their judgment) be molded, operating in the shadows, never suspected by their “official” subordinates. He continues:
They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy. [Bernays, 54]
By studying and employing psychology, propagandists were able to manipulate people’s trust, and then literally decide what they feared. Mass-media made it possible to spread that manufactured fear throughout the entire nation, a fear which was never based in fact. Bernays even admits here that the atrocities that built up to the war were merely “alleged.” When propagandized correctly, however, any allegation can be enough to go to war (think of just about any war, ever). Think about that for a second. If you need to lie to convince the general population (the people who will be doing the actual fighting) that a war is necessary, the war is not necessary. Unless you and your friends have ulterior motives you don’t dare reveal, that is. Or unless you just really think you know what’s best for everybody, and you can’t handle dissent.
This whole process is, to be sure, all dependent on the propagandists’ ability to break people’s will to think critically. People have to be put in intellectual pens before such profound duping can occur; the conniving techniques of manipulating emotions and taking advantage of group loyalties should be clear to anyone who is aware of their surroundings and practicing critical thought. But when most people are not taught to act and think this way – when they are conditioned from a very young age to act and think in the opposite way – can they really be blamed for winding up propagandized? Bernays says it here: People are accustomed to “read and believe.” The effectiveness of propaganda therefore rides on the back of an ignorant, docile, and uneducated public. This ignorance mixed with fear was then translated into patriotic fervor, and “honest, hard-working tax-paying citizens” rallied behind their flag to oppose the imminent threat of the barbarous enemy which, in America’s case, was literally and ocean and half a continent away. World War I revealed that the molders of the public mind could get away with just about anything. If they could convince people to support sending others to crouch in muddy ditches for months on end while airplanes shat fire down on them and strangers tried to shoot them and rats tried to eat them, what couldn’t they convince people of? After the war, the next step for the propagandists was obvious:
It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace. [Bernays, 54]
They just kept going.
Propaganda takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. [Bernays, 55]
Here’s another concept that deserves a great deal of discussion: Corporatism; that is,the idea that society is a body. We will see this notion in The Republic of Plato, as well as in the structure of Medieval society. For a paragraph or so on the subject, see “Totalitarianism: Six Key Concepts,” under “Body Politic/Corporatism.” We see here that the propagandist keeps this chain of thought alive, looking at society as a holistic system and approaching the control of it from that perspective. Regimentation (physical and mental) is part of corporatism, as all the constituent members of the social “body” must fulfill their role within it. I do wonder (because Bernays hasn’t addressed it) how these people – the propagandists; the invisible governors – are determined to be the ones best suited for the role of “brain” in the social body. Anyhow, Bernays frankly states why and how the propagandist utilizes the concept of the social organism:
Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism. [Bernays, 55]
Note the phrase “automatic response.” That is, stimulus-response. Imagine, human thought and activity – thousands of years of history and advancement – reduced to a simple process observed in starving, imprisoned rats. No critical thought on the part of the affected can take place between stimulus and response. People’s motivations, Bernays is saying, are turned off and on like a faucet. Even way back then, one might describe the whole thing as the mechanization of man.
Ending the chapter, Bernays claims that the masses are incapable of even considering new ideas without the careful guidance of “the intelligent few.” [Bernays, 57] The vast majority of people spend their lives in the shadows of these intelligent guardians, apparently. I suppose he’s right to a degree, though. After all, if it weren’t for propaganda, the average American would’ve never even thought of getting involved in World War I. Rounding it all out, he says:
Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. [Bernays, 57]
This sentence is a great example of how repetitive Bernays is; after reading what he’s already said, that is hardly worth writing. I only include it here to point out what might be a triviality. He says “us.” He puts himself in the camp of “the rest of us,” as if we are to forget or disregard his line of work. Perhaps he’s trying to downplay his role in the hidden establishment, or maybe he’s saying that even he, master of the craft that he is, is subject to the wiles and spells of still greater wizards. But alas, we cannot know, for the man died about a month after I was born.
Just by virtue of sheer content, this chapter is clearly very important within the book. We have established that mass-media and influential thought leaders are used as conduits within a social body to send directives from the “brain” to the rest of the body. We have learned that this process of two-step, stimulus-response control is called democracy, and that in a democracy, those who can influence the majority are in charge. We now know that the propagandist aims to maintain and increase the level of mental regimentation throughout society, rendering the population intellectually defenseless and predictable. Coming away from this chapter, I find myself even more wary of people in influential positions than I already had been; the necessity for critical thinking becoming ever clearer. I hope, though, that this information doesn’t breed paranoia or pessimism. I hope, instead, that learning about and talking about the techniques of the invisible governors helps us to shake the sleep from our eyes, so that we might oppose the propagandists. Not with some silly war against them, but by simply being better than them at controlling our lives.
