There’s no easy way to talk about who Edward Bernays is, much less to learn about him for the first time. He’s the kind of insufferable cunt we can normally only dream of. None of us really have a problem with accusing rich people of snobbery, or suggesting that they’ve hijacked politics and popular culture to create a stilted picture of the world. The catch is that we assume we’ll always have to accuse them of these things. We have no frame of reference for what to do when a spokesman for the rich and powerful just comes out and says that that’s what he lives for because most people are stupid and an invisible government of elite propagandists who trick people into doing whatever rich people want them to do, should be in charge. But these are the words of Edward Bernays almost exactly. In fact here are his exact words, from his infamous 1928 book, unceremoniously titled: “Propaganda” just so it doesn’t seem like I’m exaggerating this guy’s position:
“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. …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…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
And just so it doesn’t seem like this very bald faced quote is being taken out of context, here’s a follow up:
“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 cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”
Eddie “What? What Did I Say?” Bernays
Bernays is no outsider either. In fact he’s widely considered to be the father of the modern public relations industry. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and was intimately acquainted with his uncle’s work. So we’re talking about a guy with real establishment chops here. He’s got a clinical, academic backing and he made millions of dollars for all kinds of big businesses for decades, never once getting off message from the sentiments of his signature work as it’s been quoted above here. Far from getting off message so he could fit into the establishment, the establishment got on the propaganda platform. Bernays’ ideas could be taken to the bank, and any major player who was serious about their bank account quickly realized they were going to have to hire someone who was speaking Bernays’ language. In fact when psychology as it was imagined by Frued first came on the academic scene, most people considered it a needlessly vulgar and hopelessly self-important exercise in ivory tower frivolity. It’s been argued that it wasn’t until Bernays started using his uncle’s understanding of the unconscious to help companies cash some very big checks that the academic establishment began to take Frued’s ideas seriously. If Frued was the father of modern psychology, then Bernays was its mother’s pimp.
He wrote books about it so he’d have something to sell other rich guys. Feel good romps with titles like: Engineering Consent, Crystalizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, and of course simply: Public Relations. So the next time someone tells you that’s what they do, you’ll understand why they make you want to shower.
This is what normally makes the Bernays discussion such a bummer. Every other thing he says is the type of thing that’s screamed at a court jester who displeases the king. He talks about “they who pull the wires which control the public mind,” who unlike you and your goobery, mouth breathing friends are “shrewd persons operating behind the scenes,” that are actually “dictators exercising great power,” and who move you around “as if actuated by the touch of a button” The only reasonable reaction for anyone without a million dollars who hears this kind of thing is to tell him to shove it, but he’s obviously right about something. The public responded to his efforts the way he wanted them to and he made a lot of money for a lot of people. Results are results. So then what next? What is there to gain by unwrapping the package of Edward Bernays’ facts any further? It’s a little like finding a bag with your lunch from three weeks ago in the back of your car. Do we really need to shove our faces in this to know what it means?
Understandably, a lot of people close the book on Bernays right there. Pretty much everyone who doesn’t is a member of the public relations industry, and with Bernays as their founding father, that “invisible government” seems to have a hard ceiling on the positive things they can accomplish. But this disgusted dismissal is a huge mistake, one that unwittingly surrenders control of popular culture to the insufferably cunty Edward Bernays of the world and their impossibly condescending self importance. We need to look at what we can do with this million dollar technique that Bernays has laid his hands on, besides surrender our control of it. Once we figure that out we need to pry that power away from the snobby cunts who want to use it against us, and open up our lives to a more complete level of personal freedom.
We can stop accusing. Rich people have confessed.
So let’s start by talking about the things that Bernays has clearly gotten right. First Bernay’s talks about himself as an invisible government, not as a figure of speech, but as an actual job that he’s hired to do by actual governments and companies so big that they can overthrow governments, which we’ll look at a little closer here in a second. His point is basically that people can only choose from the options that are placed in front of them and because there are so many people, the placement of options is specialized work. We like to think this is a perfectly organic process, like the music on the radio is there because it won some grassroots popularity contest, or that the movies that end up on the screen get there because our most talented people have applied themselves to creating them. Bernays is here to remind us that we are bullshitting ourselves about that. Rich people own the devices that deliver our cultural options to us and like Bernays they’re fully aware of what the manipulation of those options can accomplish. Controlling people’s options is a power, and people tend not to leave power laying around, especially not when there have been books about how to make millions of dollars by picking it up that have been commercially available since 1928.
But here is where we need to talk about what Bernays got wrong, or at least what everyone who is reflexively bummed out by the teachings of Bernays has gotten wrong. We have good reason to question the fatalism, or just the spookiness, behind the invisibility of these people. We’re supposed to ooh and ahh at the possibility of an invisible government and then shit out pants at the candor that people like Bernays use to discuss it. Oh look at all this money they’ve made, all this power they’ve accumulated, woe are we the lowly peasants. But if you are not making a jack off motion with your hands yet then you are making a mistake. Because the part of this idea that’s supposed to be spooky is the accusation that most of us are already very comfortable making, that rich people are trying to manipulate society behind the scenes in a way that has no real respect for what’s best for it, and that privately they don’t bother to lie to themselves about that. So let’s follow Bernays lead and simply acknowledge in a straight forward way that that’s what’s happening. After that, how invisible are these people really?
But did you actually see anyone? Then how do you know?
Could you pick your state assemblyman out of a line up for example? Probably not. But you’re aware that there is such a person, and you’re probably a lot more intimately acquainted with what a propagandist does than you are with what a state assemblyman does. Also, let’s say you can pick your state assemblyman out of a line up and you know exactly what job a state assemblyman is supposed to do. How different is your relationship to this guy from your relationship to a propagandist? No matter what your personal beliefs are, chances are your state assemblyman could give a flying fuck, at least in comparison to how receptive he is about what someone from a corporation or a local refinery wants. Your propagandist on the other hand is at least as in the pocket of a special interest as your state assemblyman, but he is much more attuned to what you want personally because he’s got to draw a line between that and the interest he’s been paid to serve. We vote with our dollar in a market economy, and even if we flatter ourselves with the assessment that dollars are worth much less than votes, well we sure shove dollar ballots around a lot more often. So if the visibility of a government is a product of how receptive it is to the people it controls, then your average propagandist is arguably much more visible than your average local politician.
Also what do you think you know about your state assemblyman, even if you are the most literate of all voters? What you know is what bill he has put through, who has endorsed him, etc., meaning you know him based on the government job he does. You don’t know if he kicks his dog or if he threw up on the woman he lost his virginity to or any of the things that normally make you feel like you actually know a person. So what do you know about your propagandist? You know that he’s trying to manipulate you towards things that aren’t necessarily in your best interest because someone else is paying him. What else do you need to know? Do you need to know the life story of the guy who is trying to clean your windshield at a stop light to know that you don’t want his services? Or do you know everything you need to know about that transaction before it takes place, by the much larger writing on the wall that spells out the social message of that situation? That message can involve all kinds of complexity about cycles of poverty and personal responsibility, but the layers involved will be altered in zero ways by how you conduct yourself at the stoplight.
“If we understand 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 about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”
–Edward “My Shit Don’t Stink” Bernays. No thank you sir. Bye.
My point is that once you know this guy is there and that everything that’s important about what he’s doing is designed to not be expressly stated, his entire spooky invisible government power shits its pants. The only thing that really keeps the work of Bernays as relevant today as he thought it was in 1928 is the popular reluctance to take him at his word. Bernays relies on the fact that regular people are not going to know about him, or that if they do know about him, they won’t fully grasp the significance of what he’s saying. The irony is that by dismissing Bernays we prove him right. As tempting as it is to instantly drop the bag with the rotten lunch in it, it’s important that we don’t lose track of our resources, or ignore what they can ferment into when we do.
A couple classics from Bernays’ PR playbook illustrate the point. Maybe one of his most famous campaigns involved a contract he took with a tobacco company to help them sell cigarettes in the 1920’s. Bernays intuitively understood that the most convincing ad is the one that you don’t realize was an ad at all. Instead of punching up some glossy posters with pictures of cigarettes on them, he took a look at the political climate of the time, in which women had very recently been granted the right to vote. At the time it was considered uncouth for women to smoke, which essentially closed off half the market to tobacco sellers. So Bernays honed in on a march that was supposed to be about gender equality. In it he got a reporter to photograph a woman lighting a cigarette, in what appeared to be a brazen defiance of oppressive gender norms. The march was actually about a bunch of other, actually socially significant things, but with this very deliberately staged photo opportunity, it practically became a gay pride parade for lung cancer. Bernays even coined the term “torches of freedom” to refer to cigarettes, which he paid to have run as a caption beneath the photo in what appeared to be a work of journalism, thereby smushing smoking together with the unrelated issue of women voting. He never mentioned the company that hired him and nobody that marched in the parade was really aware that they were essentially staging a giant cigarette commercial for free. Nevertheless, sales for the company that hired him skyrocketed and the message was clear. Rookies, take out your notebooks. This is how it’s done. The classic Bernays play became public relations at its essence, where the line between the fantasy world of advertisement and the seduced consumer is totally dissolved, reducing reality itself to nothing more than a stage and everyone in it into those who either know or don’t know who’s cast them in their roles.
“In 1929, Bernays encouraged women to march down Fifth Avenue during the Easter parade in New York City, and protest against gender inequality. Bernays telegrammed thirty debutantes from a friend at Vogue to participate in the demonstration, encouraging them to combat the prejudice against women smokers…Marches also took place in Boston, Detroit, and San Francisco, and newspapers across the country published stories on it.”
Again though, this seems to be a much more ominous idea than it actually is once we cut it down to size. There are a few ironies in this story. First, it is objectively stupid to say that smoking is unwomanly. Not only that, but the idea that smoking and femininity didn’t go together was likely based on the type of subconscious associations that people like Bernays were supposed to be so evil for exploiting. Women weren’t allowed to smoke at this time because people like Frued were right about men smoking cigars as a way of measuring their dicks. The irony is that Bernays could liberate people from the power of that unconscious suggestion and still have them be less than conscious of what was going on. What Bernays identified here is the narrative format we use to read our own history. It seems like some sinister thing he made up, but all that’s really sinister about it is how easy it is for him to set that stage compared to the average person. A 1920’s suffragette without a million dollar cigarette contract in her pocket was going to have to pound some pavement and ruffle some feathers to get a march organized, whereas a guy like Bernays would have had to make some phone calls and grease some palms. Bernays hasn’t found something that the rest of us don’t know is there, he’s just found himself with a cushy job, one that allows him to set the same stage we have to manually drag together, with all the time, money and equipment anyone could ask for. All Bernays is really saying is that our hassle is his job, and that in the pros people are putting more thought into setting the stage than the average amateur has ever really thought about.
Another classic from the Bernays playbook illustrates the point. Here’s where the fact that Bernays is not figuratively an invisible government in any sense of the word really comes through. In this episode, the United Fruit Company hired Bernays to help them hoc their fruit. Seems like a pretty sharp departure from the much more sinister portrait of the tobacco company doesn’t it? What could go wrong here we ask? After episodes like this one we’ll learn to stop asking Bernays that question. It turns out fruit doesn’t grow just anywhere. Some of the exotic locations it grows in even have the pesky things called popularly elected governments who take very reasonable measures to ensure their people’s well being. United Fruit Company had some plantations in Guatemala and its government enacted a policy under which rich landowners who didn’t live or grow anything on their land could have it seized by the government, who would compensate them for it at fair market value. When we do this in the United States, it’s called eminent domain but with Bernays behind them the United Fruit Company managed to convince the CIA that when Guatamalans did it, it was pure communism, which would no doubt engulf the world in the anarchy of non-malnourished fruit pickers and utilized farm land, if a revolution wasn’t instigated straight away. Bernays again arranged to have a bunch of impossibly stilted articles printed, many of which relied on the impressions they took from tours of fruit plantations that Bernays himself had organized as part of a contract he had with a cruise ship company. He then lobbied the CIA, who then used clandestined tactics to organize a coup in Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit, in one of the many quintessentially revolting foreign policy embarrassments that have stained American history.
“A mere 2 percent of the population controlled more than 72 percent of Guatemala’s arable land. Of all privately held land, less than 12 percent was being cultivated. In a country dedicated primarily to agriculture, this translated into sweeping poverty and malnutrition…the 1952 law mandated the redistribution of idle lands in excess of 223 acres. Compensation for expropriated lands was provided in the form of 25 year bonds with 3 percent interest paid at the declared tax value of the lands in question.”
At first all the hallmarks of the spooky song and dance Bernays seems to want us to perform are there. There are secret, invisible governments using shady, behind the scenes moves to make people work against their own best interest in ugly historical episodes that no one but a handful of rich twats actually wants, all while a public veneer of righteousness obsequiously shields the whole thing from the full force of our disgust. But let’s look a little closer at the writing on the wall in this situation. First, it seems pretty clear that the real operative party in this whole debacle was the CIA, who orchestrated plenty of anti-democratic coups in foreign countries without Bernays or anyone like him to put a bug in their ear about it.
Once we acknowledge that, we have to ask ourselves a few other common sense questions, like: Are the guys in the CIA a bunch of paupers? What did they have to gain from United Fruit? Are we prepared to believe that the high level intelligence operatives employed by the CIA at this time got themselves Liberty Torched into invading another country by someone like Bernays? Probably not. Probably they were also a bunch of upperclass guys who knew full well what they were doing. The CIA invaded on behalf of United Fruit because they were wrong. They were intelligent people who were wrong. If we want to get subconscious at all about it, we can suggest that the secrecy necessary to operate at the highest levels of military intelligence perhaps caused them to overestimate the value of all information which presented itself in a less than overt way. It happens all the time. Talk to a mechanic. Everyone else is an asshole to this man and everything is finally a machine. Pimps believe there’s nothing but pimps and hoes. Preachers think there’s nothing but good and evil. People see things through the lense of how they make their living. So propaganda and the invisible government were not really the problem there. The problem was a part of the government that everyone knows about, the CIA, who made a mistake because they had some chauvinistic ideas. If we want to change the mind of someone who is an intelligence operative or a propagandist, who, if we’re to believe Bernays are the actually powerful people whose decisions will affect everything, then that’s something that can never be accomplished by the tools of propaganda. All these people do is see other people first. They are not gonna be tricked into doing a goddamn thing. To change their minds you’re going to have to do something much more politically dangerous and finally horrifying than anything a propagandist has ever done and tell the truth, and not only that, but be right about what the truth means and have a goal that supports freedom and political stability in the same stroke. You’re going to have to not be intellectually lazy and acknowledge that there are more than two kinds of people in the world, stop overestimating whatever ideology is personally supported by your background and change someone’s mind because a different way of doing things is genuinely a better idea. Holy shit. It’s just crazy enough to work.
There’s kind of only one way to find out.
So again, even as he orchestrates actual coups, this posture that Bernays is trying to affect has no real legitimacy that we don’t agree to give it. First his spooky invisible government isn’t actually invisible in any meaningful sense of the word, and second it is no more dangerous than any other government, who can always end up with a bunch of jerks at its helm, and who can make as many stupid decisions based on half baked and self serving ideas as any schmuck who lites up because of something they saw in the newspaper. People are people. Like Fued, Bernays identified a language of position that’s an automatic part of how we read the world. There aren’t different kinds of people who are more and less susceptible to the manipulation of their own unconscious urges. What there are, are kinds of places we can stand that put more and less weight behind the things that we say. Bernays wasn’t enlightened in some way that allowed him to pull the strings of the CIA. He’ll tell you that himself. He doesn’t believe the things he says. The content of his message doesn’t matter. It’s his professional ability to throw the weight of different organizations around that make him what he is. The real lesson behind the life of Bernays isn’t that there are two kinds of people in the world, but that every part of the world we interact with has another person’s mark on it already. People make their marks on the world intentionally, so they can elicit a certain kind of reaction from other people. That’s what art is. It’s what government is. It’s what stop signs and newspaper articles and paying off public officials is. The work of Bernays is an invitation for us to return to the original power of the marks we can make, which affect people directly before we bother to announce them as art, journalism, advertising or government. Anything less than that is a sucker bet, as Bernays’ clients and their fat pockets will gladly attest to.
“The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.”
The final point that needs to be made about Bernays is that he’s 100% right about the fact that propaganda is never going to go away, but that’s because he didn’t invent propaganda anymore than his Uncle Sigmund invented the unconscious. He’s just discussing a new found literacy in a layer of meaning that was always there. Being against propaganda is like being against the unconscious. It’s just there and we have to be aware of what it means about how we move through the world. But there’s nothing spooky about the unconscious. It’s not some magic power that we can only get through a masters in psychology. The point of talking about the unconscious, and of psychology in general, is to stop bullshitting ourselves about what we really want. Propaganda is an extension of that same movement; the only thing that’s different about it is that now we have to not bullshit ourselves about what powerful people want at the same time. This is the age of data. Yes rich people are constantly staging public life in what are usually absurdly tone deaf and transparent episodes that try to shove something we don’t actually want down our throats. Yes there is a whole class of people who spend and make millions upon millions of dollars doing this and they’ve been totally candid about it to themselves on an industrial scale for at least a century. Yes they are that conniving, but also yes those layers will be there inside of messages of all kinds whether we deliberately control them or not. So have the best interest of all parties involved as front and center as it’s possible to have it the next time a message of any kind is being consumed. To do anything less is to refuse to be in control of ourselves, and if we don’t pick that control up, someone else will.
Bernays and Frued. Keeping it in the creepy family.
Princess Fantastic 