The Covert Ways of Bernays - Propaganda 101

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The Covert Ways of Bernays - Propaganda 101

Do you want to see one of the motors of the world? One of the real social motors, but one hidden from sight?

Here are 4 documentaries made by Adam Curtis for BBC that blew me away yesterday. (I watched all four in a row.) The series is called The Century of Self. Here are the four episodes:

1. Happiness Machines

2. The Engineering of Consent

3. There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

4. Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

I haven't been impressed by a work to the extent this work "got me" in many years. As I was watching the films, one click after another fell in place in my mind. I know I found some serious answers here for some serious lacks I have been glimpsing at in the fog of our mainstream culture.

The documentary says it is about Freud, but it is actually about how Bernays used Freud, and the developments from there. And the drama is the individual versus the collective. The individual in this drama tries to gain understanding and domination over his subconscious drives to gain more autonomy, and the elite uses people's subconscious drives to gain collective consent.

Neither wins the whole jackpot, but one or the other is predominant at specific times. It's like an intellectual tug-of-war, except real money, real power and real guns are used on a sweeping scale. I had no idea before that it was so big.

I have had a more-or-less Objectivist view of recent history (say the last 100 years or so), but it always felt so incomplete. I think if you add it to what the documentaries show, you get a very strong and solid notion of the forces that shaped our world events. Philosophy is part of it, but spin (or propaganda, or public relations, or whatever you want to call engineering consent by manipulating unconscious drives) is just as fundamental.

What good is an idea if nobody buys it? Enter Edward Bernays.

I am putting this in the Beck section because he holds Edward Bernays up as one of the 20th century's ugliest behind-the-scenes villains. He dislikes Bernays so much that he clearly modeled his villain in The Overton Window, Arthur Gardner, after him.

You could even say that Elsworth Toohey was a piker compared to Bernays. Toohey took over a newspaper. Bernays got women to smoke, sold WWI to the USA, toppled a socialist regime in Guatemala for a fruit company (from which the term "banana republic" came--and toppling a socialist government is not bad unless you do it to replace it with a "friendly" dictatorship), advised several USA Presidents, and probably impacted American life more than any single individual during the 20th century.

An interesting note is that Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, claimed that he learned his craft from Bernays, especially Crystallizing Public Opinion.

Looking at this led me to a reformulation of a Rand position I have long held. In For The New Intellectual, Rand postulated two types of evil history-makers and provided the good counterparts. She used terms from Nathaniel Branden for the evil ones.

There is the Attila, the ruler by force. His good counterpart is the Producer.

And there is the evil Witch Doctor, the ruler by faith. His good counterpart is the Intellectual.

I have always felt this was true, but there was something missing. Now I know what it is.

In keeping with using colorful terms for the evil ones, let's call this figure the Pied Piper. He is a spin doctor, a propagandist, a public relations person. The good counterpart is the Motivator, or inspired teacher, or coach, or self-help mentor (not to be confused with Pied Pipers masquerading as self-help mentors).

I will be writing much more on this later. For now, let's say that the Pied Piper sells the message to society that they need to follow some leader other (including following a company or a brand). The Motivator sells the idea that the individual has inner resources that he can and needs to employ by his own free will.

They both come from distinctly opposite world views in terms of society--the same ones that differentiate the evil and good ones of Rand. The Pied Piper sees human beings as metaphysically divided into an elite and the masses--with himself as one of the elite, of course. The Motivator metaphysically sees all human beings with the potential for individual greatness.

There are mixes more often than not. For instance, when a Pied Piper is also an Attila or Witch Doctor, he becomes a cult leader. But the Pied Piper/Motivator category exists in a stand-alone manner, so it is useful as a model for identifying a very real social shaping force.

Enjoy the show, folks. Some of it turned my stomach, but knowledge is power. And boy, was this ever educational.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Happiness Machines

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The Engineering of Consent

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

There is a Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

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[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering

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[9thdoctor]

I just started watching these, there’s quite a bit here, it’ll take time. Nevertheless, I seem to remember it was Freud’s nephew who came up with the idea of bacon and eggs for breakfast. So he can’t be all bad.

[BaalChatzaf]

With regard to Bernay's thesis that the masses have to be guided from above.

So who shall guide the guides? Hmmm?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Bob,

It goes back to Plato and his idea of the Philosopher-King (probably further).

Michael

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob,

It goes back to Plato and his idea of the Philosopher-King (probably further).

Michael

It is sad that Plato's legacy is an operating manual for every god-damned totalitarian dictatorship every conceived, be it on the left, on the right or perpendicular. What if Plato had never written -The Republic-?

Ba'al Chatzaf