gat

Crystallizing Public Opinion and Propaganda had much to say to the newly minted administrative
classes burgeoning all over American schools and colleges. In Propaganda, Bernays redefined
democratic society, in the interests of the mass-production economy. I’ve selected three short
excerpts from Bernays’ classic which enriched him with corporate work in the seven decades of
life he had left—he died in1995 at the age of 105—after its publication.
The first assertion of Propaganda was that common people had to be regimented and governed
from behind the scenes. Here are Bernays’ actual words:
The need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the
technical means have been invented and developed by which public opinion
may be regimented.
The next important contention was that the critical pollution of language necessary to make this
work was already in use:
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. We are dominated by a
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.
Finally, Bernays attempts to provide a "moral" justification for proceeding as he suggests:
The conscious manipulation of organized habits and opinions of the masses is
an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this
unseen mechanism constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power in this country.
This attitude of manipulation as an important component of "democratic" management entered the
urban factory-school classroom in a big way at a time when psychology was taking over from
academics as the tool of choice in America’s German-inspired teacher training institutions.
Bertrand Russell had been both a witness and an actor in the new climate of public deceits which
characterized the post-WWI epoch. When its first phase was complete, he wrote in The Impact of
Science on Society (1952) that the most important subject for the future would be "mass
psychology" and "propaganda", studies which would be "rigidly confined to the governing class.
The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated."(emphasis added)
9 Less than a decade later, Bernays was proud to add Adolf Hitler to his list of clients.
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