In the past year I have written about the ways that the government manipulates the public through the intense use of symbolism that manipulates the emotions and values of the masses and through intellectual indoctrination within the public education system, which conditions us to be subservient to it and murder others for it in war. As Dr. Carl Jung noted, the ultimate purpose of this process is to produce what he called “mass-mindedness” – a kind of thinking where the individual is trained to go along with the will of the masses and to surrender his or her individuality, his or her individual rights, to the mass political system. More recently I have explored the ten basic characteristics of war propaganda and how this system of indoctrinated and manipulation is used by those in power to generate support for, or at least acquiescence to, the waging of wars by those in power.
Yet, all of this still left me lacking an explanation for how propaganda is used to manipulate the individual outside of war and how propaganda is used to manufacture the consent of the masses to taking part in a system that is built to profit the very few rich and powerful political and corporate leaders at the top at the cost of all the rest of us. I couldn’t understand why people have fetishized democracy as if merely having a system of elections would protect people from those in power while ignoring the ideals and values that make democracy anything other than the choosing of a new dictator every four to six years. I could not understand how something like the Deep State/Double Government could develop in the most fervently democratic age in human history. That changed once I was exposed to the book Propaganda by Edward Bernays.
Working for the U.S. Committee on Public Information during World War I, Bernays learned how information, statistics, and facts could be manipulated and propaganda could be used to transform society and to manufacture the consent of the public for whatever actions the government wanted to take. Further, he came to realize the absolute necessity of propaganda if governments were going to maintain control of the masses in times of peace as well as they did in times of war. After the war he began a private practice putting everything he had learned to use for both politicians and corporations, creating the field of “public relations” in the process. Bernays was often met with dismay and criticism by the intelligentsia, not because he was a liar or crass, but because he was all too honest about what he and the government did. Not only did he write and print a whole book on how propaganda is and should continue to be used in order to manipulate the masses and increase the power of the centralized state (the aforementioned Propaganda) but the man’s on oft repeated motto was, “Public relations is the engineering of consent.”
And so it is to Propaganda that we now turn so that we can take advantage of Bernays’s insights into how governments and corporations engineer the consent of the public through the very methods of democracy itself. What follows is a mere taste of the truths Bernays tells more honestly than any politician or powermonger today ever would.
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The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. 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.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.
Propaganda, pgs. 3-5
Notice that what Bernays is talking about here when he refers to the “invisible government” is not some conspiracy of secret rulers, but rather the true way that the government directs society. We like to imagine that what we have is a society where all the facts, truths, and morals are laid bare for the public which each individual then assesses and makes a rational choice for the leaders and programs which he or she best accords with the equal rights and best outcomes for all people. This idea is, in and of itself, pure propaganda. In reality most of us are spoon fed the ideas, morals, and facts which accord to what those in positions of influence want us to know so that we will then think and act in ways that will best secure the position and power of those elites. They provide the framework in which we act and therefore ensure that whatever happens will work out to the benefit of their groups if not for them individually. The only way to ensure that they do not profit in power and wealth at our expense is by discarding the framework which ensures it – the State itself.
As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.
With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously over the whole of America.
H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in the New York Times: “Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.”
What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. The groupings and affiliations of society to-day are no longer subject to “local and sectional” limitations. When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But to-day, because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.
Propaganda, pgs. 12-13
Doesn’t that whole last passage sound really familiar? From the propaganda that the U.S. Constitution is incapable of functioning in modern society to the propaganda that modern society demands centralized control from an ever growing government those sentiments sound like something you would read today – which is a magnificent example of just how pervasive this propaganda has become. As Bernays (and H.G. Wells) point out, the mass media has made it ever easier to manipulate the public into feeling, acting, and thinking in specific ways. Just watch the news and it’ll tell you what you should know, what you should think about it, and how to feel about it all in one segment using propaganda orchestrated at the highest of levels. Just look at the way Twitter explodes every time someone makes a faux pas or the way that Cancel Culture weaponizes social media to try and destroy the lives of those deemed heretical, whether they actually are or are not what they’re accused of being. The mass media is increasingly being used to engineer a specific framework of how society should act and think and then enforce that framework on the public until they either repent in the modern equivalent of the auto-de-fe or suffer destruction. Here Bernays calls this mass manipulation what it truly is – propaganda being dispersed through mass media to manipulate the public into compliance with the political framework that will ensure the election of politicians (in the social media example Leftists) into political power.
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. In the present structure of society, this practice is inevitable. Whatever of social importance is done to-day, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him 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. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine.
Propaganda, pgs. 19-20
No cause in modern politics is ever undertaken without first launching a propaganda effort to manipulate the masses. Indeed, we must understand that laws are not first passed and then sold to the masses, but that the passing of laws is the climactic outcome of a well executed mass propaganda campaign to sell that law to the public. In doing so it takes advantage of what Bernays called “rubber stamps” and which I called “propaganda triggers.” These are the ideas, beliefs, and values which have been implanted in the minds of men through mass social indoctrination which, once activated will secure the compliance and acquiescence of the public to some action by the State. Though the channels by which this manipulation and indoctrination takes place are varied, the central means by which these are accomplished is through literacy and the media. People are educated, in schools and in society, to hold specific beliefs and to think in specific ways, with the result being that they will hopefully only take specific actions. They may challenge specific laws but they won’t challenge the system itself. Bernays goes on to assert that while your results may vary on the individual basis on the general basis, this program is not only necessary for the functioning of the state but that it works excellently.
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.
…Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our mental pictures of the world. Even if this be unduly pessimistic—and that remains to be proved—the opinion reflects a tendency that is undoubtedly real. In fact, its use is growing as its efficiency in gaining public support is recognized.
This then, evidently indicates the fact that any one with sufficient influence can lead sections of the public at least for a time and for a given purpose. Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid out the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted. And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. Therefore, propaganda is here to stay.
Propaganda, pgs. 25, 26-27
The regimentation of the human mind. What a terrifying thought, that our minds are conditioned for control and obedience in the same manner that any soldier in the military is conditioned to obey orders. Most of us would be aghast at this possibility, yet we are surrounded by it and the way we think of the world. But the truth is that most of us think that we are exposing deeply held beliefs about gender, sex, politics, religion, science, war, peace, etc. based upon rationally accessed objective facts when what we are really doing is parroting back the propaganda we have been raised to believe all our lives and which is endlessly fed to us through the popular media, online and offline.
[During World War I] 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. 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.
…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 the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
Fortunately, the sincere and gifted politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.
Propaganda, pgs. 28 and 85
Those in power realize this and orchestrate it as much as they can in order to use it for their political advantage, as a means of rallying support and gaining power. Through democracy the masses, far from exercising some form of superior wisdom, just replicate their prejudices and errors on a massive scale, all of which can be directed and used for profit by those who know how. Bernays had first hand experience with this working as he did in the American propaganda ministry during World War I as mentioned before. He knew personally how the government manipulated the “mental clichés and emotional habits” of the public in order to obtain their obedience and compliance in achieving the goals of the State during war time. I have already discussed this above so I won’t go on more about it here except to point out that he noted that these same techniques were to be used in times of peace as well as war in order to allow the government to manipulate and control the people, something made even easier by a public education which indoctrinates the people into the ideas, values, and morals that those in power will then later manipulate. It is a very efficient system.
Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better informed about the processes of its own life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.
…Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.
Propaganda, pgs. 158-159
Here Bernays reminds me a great deal of George Orwell’s comments on the proles – that is the common worker – in Chapter 7 of his book 1984. In that chapter, Orwell repeatedly talks about how 85% of the population of Airstrip One, a dystopian near future United Kingdom, is made up of the proles who have the power at any moment to rise up against their political masters and shake off the Socialist dictatorship which dominates their lives as easily as a horse shakes off flies. Yet, they don’t. They aren’t even major targets for the intense spying and active oppression of the ruling political party. And why? Well, Orwell gives us a hint as the main character Winston copies down in his journal a text common to the “history books” of his age that present the world before the ruling party instituted their dictatorship as a time when everything was in ruins, everyone was poor, everyone was oppressed, and the rich, capitalist elite dominated the lives of everyone else and that today all people are wealthier, happier, and freer thanks to the leadership of those in power.
In other words, the ruling party has effectively used propaganda to permanently mold the opinions and habits of the masses. And what is more, people know this is happening and still allow it anyway because they can’t tell the difference between reality and the propaganda, something we learn from Winston’s interview with a man old enough to remember the pre-revolutionary years. Why? Because they don’t want to know, they’ve been conditioned to not want to know. As Bernays notes, people “need food, crave amusement, long for beauty” and as long as they get those things they will look the other way.
In 1984 those foods, amusements, and beauties take the form of porn, beer, and mass entertainments. In real life it is hardly different. People will obsess endlessly over their video games, sports, movies, and TV shows. They smoke and drink and party as much as they can for as often as they can. But for the things that matter – religion, philosophy, and politics – they have neither time nor the desire to make time. Indeed these things are often treated as boring at best and offensive at worst, things to be avoided unless being called upon outside of mindless collective action. Just like the proles of 1984, the people have all the power with which they can throw off the parasites that rule over them and like the proles of 1984 they have none of the will to do so. Because of this they open the way to be used and to be ruled and to be controlled, but they don’t mind as long as they have their food and amusements, the things which they have been told constitute the “good life,” to numb any desire they have to pay attention to what is really happening in the world. And as long as this is true there will always be a place for propaganda to be used to continue to manipulate them, indoctrinate them, lull them into complacency, and to engineer their consent and subservience to those in power.
What Can We Do?
So, if all this is the case, if the propaganda is inescapable, what can we do? For that I turn to a different source of wisdom, the greatest author of the 20th century – J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote in 1969:
What a dreadful, fear-darkened, sorrow laden world we live in – especially for those who have also the burden of age, whose friends and all they especially care for are afflicted in the same way. Chesterton once said that it is our duty to keep the Flag of This World flying: but it takes now a sturdier and more sublime patriotism than it did then. Gandalf added that it is not for us to choose the times into which we are born, but to do what we could to repair them; but the spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads.
THE LETTERS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN, Letter 312, pg. 434 of the PDF
For those of the faith no greater resistance to the teachings of the world can be found than in teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Refuse and counter the propaganda, the manipulations, the morals, and the lies of those in power and with not only the teachings of Jesus Christ but a life dedicated to and lived solely upon its precepts. As Dr. Carl Jung explained, religion, by giving a man an anchor to a form of morality outside of the State itself, can give the truly religious the power to break much of the conditioning the State has subjected him to in its efforts to indoctrinate and propagandize him. But this is often too much even for the deeply devout, for those whose entire sense of truth and morality has been orchestrated by the State itself wearing the sheep’s clothing of science and rationality it is usually impossible. So what then can be done?
In both of these cases the answer lays in recognizing the truth in Tolkien’s words. We must refuse to worship the hydra and reveal its propaganda for the manipulative half-truths and lies it is and reject the hydra’s call to follow along with its monstrous doctrines. We must realize that Germany, the United States, Russia, China, etc. are all merely different heads of the same hydra. We must realize that mass popularity contests are no better of a way to choose our leaders than the divine right of kings or choosing names out of a hat. We must realize that democracy is not sacred and that voting is irrelevant, ineffective, and, in a statist (“state-ist”) society, completely unethical. We must realize that politicians do not represent us, the state employed police are not our friends, and that little of what happens in public schools is education while a great deal of it is indoctrination. We must realize that patriotism is just nationalism whoring around in a better looking dress and that our cultures are being twisted by those in power to serve their own ends. We must rip away the multitudes of lies fed into us from our youth and throw all that propaganda away. We must refuse to believe it and we must refuse to comply with it even if that is all that we can achieve.
In doing so we may not be striking some great blow for revolution or become the Hero of the Rebellion. But we need not be. On some level the very image of the Hero that triumphs over incredible odds through a combination of luck, skill, and power is a lie meant to dissuade us as much as inspire us. The thinking goes, “We aren’t Luke Skywalker, so why even try?” Because it wasn’t Luke Skywalker that overthrew the Empire. Yeah, he blew up a really big base. But do you think that an Empire that spanned the galaxy was seriously diminished in means, material, resources, or wealth by the loss of the Death Star? Not one bit. What overthrew the Empire was that the people within it recognized it for the monster it was and refused to obey it. They no longer feared the hydra and therefore denied it they empowering worship of their subservience. And thereby alone was it overthrown.
Each of us can do the same, whether we are part of some great mass rebellion or not. The more we refuse to obey the hydra, the more we reject the worship of the Modern Moloch, simply by refusing to comply with its edicts and the more we refuse to listen to its half-truths and lies on an individual level the more we will help to spontaneously create the movement which will bring about its downfall. Don’t trust the politicians. Refuse to take part in their systems as much as possible. Investigate alternatives ways to achieve what you want or need and build better parallel institutions which make the government’s claims to necessity obsolete. Work to build up the world around you, lift where you are, instead of trying to force your version of the perfect world on others through the violence of law. Render the government, its methods, its causes, and its propaganda meaningless. In short, refuse to believe its lies, question everything it has taught you, and live your life fully. In doing so you may not become the next Achilles or Brutus, but you will strike three crippling blows to the structure of the State and encourage others to do the same by your word and deed until the whole antiquated and rotten superstructure collapses under the weight of its sins.