"When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you can certainly use it for peace, and propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it. So what I did was to try to find other words and so we founded the Committee on Public Information." -Edward Bernays (referring to Pre-US involvement in WWI)
Edward Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Additionally he was one of the first members of a US state propaganda agency, Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information. This agency was created to drive public support for entering the first World War amongst US pacifists.
According to Edward Bernays public relations existed in three spheres: informing people, persuading people and integrating people with people. In our current climate their negatives exist as well: disinforming people, dissuading people, and deintegrating people from people. Fake News is described by those three traits. Propaganda is the application of either of these belief manipulation techniques for the benefit of an agency.
Our experience of distinctness in these words is most commonly an illusion built to define our ideological tribe. This illusion masks our own ideology in a collective web of emotions. This is Russel Conjugation. Mathematician and economist Eric R. Weinstein describes it in the following quote:
In order to understand the concept properly you have to appreciate that most words and phrases are actually defined not by a single dictionary description, but rather two distinct attributes:
I) The factual content of the word or phrase.
II) The emotional content of the construction.Where words can be considered “synonyms” if they carry the same factual content (I) regardless of the emotional content (II). This however leads to the peculiar effect that the synonyms for a positive word like “whistle-blower” cannot be used in its place as they are almost universally negative (with “snitch,” “fink,” “tattletale” being representative examples). This is our first clue that something is wrong, or at least incomplete with our concept of synonym requiring an upgrade to distinguish words that may be content synonyms but emotional antonyms.
From https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27181
Bernays stated that he was manufacturing consent for the sake of the populous. He viewed the uninformed masses as an ineffective method for societal decision making. He believed that it was the intelligent minority's responsibility to mold their society by influencing public opinion. A necessary part was to do this without the public being conscious of the ideology they are persuaded to consume.
Due to his philosophical influences from Freud, Bernays saw the subconscious of the public as a resource to be leveraged to facilitate economic or political gain. Established social order can sustain itself by finding a way to benefit from releasing the public's subconscious desires. With the proper sets of incentives and an encompassing ideology, we can be wired to do amazing and/or horrible things.
Bernays argued that democracy could remain stable only through tapping into unconscious desires and fears of the masses. Additionally, his beliefs meant that those at the helm of societal changes would be the experts. This desire for merit-based technocracy is rational and pragmatic, but the use of propaganda for the hegemonic establishment of culture rejects the spirit of democracy and artificially cultivates the Free Marketplace of Ideas.
I do not believe Democracy is good by definition. However, through the propagation of virtue, egalitarianism, critical thinking, we might be able to provide ourselves a culture worthy of our potential. If only we were to be made up of good citizenry /and/ in a just society.
The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David
In the eyes of Bernays, society progresses when the experts speak for everyone and the noise of layman is converted into what the experts want them to say. Society exists in distinct overlapping dominance hierarchies, and this method of human organizing is inherit to the human condition. Humans are irrational and must be goaded towards the higher truths of the ruling elite.
In its essence, it is pessimistic towards the human condition, whilst saying profound things about an individual's potential to dominate over other humans. It rejects cultivating our rationality as humans, instead, the ruling class has a fiduciary responsibility to increase the irrationality of the individual.
This is not a society that values individualism, but rather the individual set of whims possessed by those who rule. This being the singleton of the dominant ideology.
I do not mean to say that there isn't a competition for ideological dominance. Largely these struggles for power are slight alterations to the overarching pattern. The differences between strains of dominant ideology are amplified within this process of either strain's Fake News campaign. These polarities cultivate tribal thinking in order to sustain the relevancy of their own group think.
There are many parts of the dominant ideology that is here to stay and we must adjust to them. Certainly, we have never voted for the abolishment of Democracy, although the 2016 election did seem (to some) like that was at risk. The 2016 threat of Fascism/Communism was an example of how persuasion can be used to obscure the results of the political choices we make. This 'muddying the waters' is how the public's rationality is turned off by propagandists as to make us more receptive to emotional storytelling.
Jaws, director Steven Spielberg
In this worldview there is no true dialog in the public consciousness. Whether they validate or invalidate the dominant ideology is irrelevant to the questions of agency, as their ideological influences exist as a reaction towards those who are most effective at framing the story of our world.
Through this lens, we can see how our cognitive biases are being exploited by our system. We can start to see how society cultivates members who are deficit in being aware of their own free thought. This lack of free thinking is used to maintain a hegemonic order founded in our human vulnerabilities.
Rather than alleviating fear or desires, influencers instead tap into these as fuel for their own agency. This then leads to agencies having a vested interest in cultivating irrationality as a means of strengthening their grip on the population they are tasked with the ruling. Making lower classes desire material validation from the ruling class while redirecting their angst away from that class is essential to establishing a stable hegemon.
Without force, or implied force, the uneducated masses can only shift society's values in relation to the movie that the cultural elite play before us. The game of political engagement is defined by the dominant ideology. Certainly we can read the movie in a critical way, but ultimately our criticisms reinforce that movie as how we make sense of reality.
Bernay's first major achievement was making cigarette smoking an activity normalized to what we consider to be feminine. Tipping off the news agencies proved a successful way of obtaining free product publicity. These reporters were informed that a group of 'women's suffragists would commit political protest. News headlines across the nation told of 'Torches of Freedom'.
Bernie bro and uncle Siggy, Image from kickasshistory.wordpress.com
This synthesis of the individual's patriotism with their consumption serves to project our egos out of our character into our consumptive aesthetics. Our will for fashion began to express who we are. With this consumption is virtually implanted into our character. To the untrained eye, character and fashion have become indistinguishable.
Having physical commodities being a prerequisite to persuasiveness leads to a positive feedback loop in persuasion. Those who succeed will carry on competing, those who couldn't pay entry will be locked out of the game, perpetuating a positive feedback loop in the opposite direction.
Those who do well usually validate the game, because the game validates them unless of course this individual has been successful in many games and has the ability to evaluate the merit of games. These people who can 'see through systems', instead of 'see in systems', are those to whom success means the ability to change the world.
To those that see the game for what it is whilst succeeding in it, I commend them. The jester and the hero are two highly associated Jungian Archetypes.
This can result in a deck stacked with complacency and contentedness; the rules state the joker cannot be taken out and they are always wild.
Bernays was a part of the US political campaign to overthrow Guatemala's elected leader in 1954. Guatemala's farming land was held by a select few groups, with the majority being possessed by United Fruits.
For decades United Fruits had profited off of Guatemala through bribing their dictators, who were more than glad to have a positive relationship with US corporations.
In 1950 Guatemalan named Colonel Jacobo Arbenz emerged in their political process as their president. The platforms of Arbenz were similar to Democratic Socialism of Europe today. He gathered a populist desire to cease the extraction of Guatemala's resources done by United Fruits. In 1953 he proclaimed that their state would distribute his nation's farmland to the populace. This had affected the income of both United Fruit and the wealthy few Guatemalans who owned land.
Colonel Arbenz
This decision was popular amongst the people who sought a Guatemala free from global capital interests. However, it attracted the ire of Guatemalan elites and of US corporations. As a response to being ejected from a valuable market, United Fruit contracted Edward Bernays to gather public support to remove Colonel Arbenz and to quash his populist movement.
The first step in this process was a rhetorically shift. The goal was to turn the image of Guatemala's actions from a populist movement for economic self-determination brought upon by a democratically elected government to a communist threat immediate to the United States' territory. Within the context of the Cold War, this rhetoric was very effective in leveraging the anxiety towards Communism that had been fostered for US hegemonic interests.
One of the founders of the Committee on Public Information, Creel urged President Wilson to create a government agency to coordinate "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith'".
It is the propagation of faith that we experience in Fake News. It targets beliefs we might irrationally hold and it exploits our faith in said beliefs for the perverted utility of the culture creators. This is done without us even consenting to believe in what the meme explicitly seeks to persuade, but rather prolonged exposure to memes cultivates a subconscious landscape which provides fertile soil for explicit persuasion to take root.
The civil weapons of rationality and facts are cast aside, instead we use our teeth and tribe to settle disputes, imbued with the irrational faith we hold in them. In my usage of faith it is not my intent to disparage those who believe in some form of divinity or creator. Rather it is my intent to speak at the expense to those who believe in their ideology as the Divine.
I mock those audacious enough to claim their ideology explains the totality of our messy and complicated existence; those who create angels of themselves and devils of the Other. They are fools who bought tickets to a movie they liked and mistook it for reality. If only they paid enough attention to see the production behind the scenes.
A web of propaganda exists around us, and unfortunately there are a lot of valuable things built into it. We are unable to be free of external persuasion, instead we have to discuss how persuasion can exist in an ethical and transparent manner.
Emotional conjugation is the tool the cultural influencers use to sculpt the opinions of the masses. Each form of media used by these propaganda campaigns flow together to form a superstructure in which we are born.
These good behaviors will not result in a world without propaganda. It is proven that persuasion will still work if we know about it. Everyone is aware that prices at $9.99 exist to trick the consumer to see it as significantly lower than $10. Yet when companies are honest with us an label their prices at whole increments, our purchasing decreases.
Corporate states no longer have a virtual monopoly on manufacturing consent inside a democratic society. Anyone skilled in eliciting emotions in mass has an edge in entrancing people to act. The culture industry has been swept up by the great equalizer of the digital evolution of humanity. Around this pyramid was the stage for memetic anarchy being committed by those previously discounted as the 'unwashed masses' and their miscellaneous ideologies.
A wide variety of influencing communities compete within our the public sphere. Each group seeks a bigger share of influence. To do this the memes increase in total control over an individual's rational thinking. Our logic is deactivated and we begin acting irrationally.
How should we remove our chains? Should we commit martyrdom to oppose our servitude? I reject romantic sacrifices. The symbol of sacrificing one's life, outside of epic stories and death cults, occurs very infrequently. Mundane sacrifice is more noble and relevant to the current human condition.
Work hard. Act with integrity. Be mindful of others and their perspectives. Communicate prolifically for your beliefs.
Take care of yourself so you can support others. This is how a small individual makes a better world. l emotionally guard myself from persuasion with a goal that benefits myself, grants benefit to those I cherish. It seemed a reasonable choice to negotiate between your self-interests, the ideology being sold to you and criticisms of that dominant ideology. I want everyone to do that, even those I want to persuade, yourself included.
I can sleep happy knowing my personal story fit these three criteria:
- Does it predict the future?
- Does it make me happy?
- If I suffer does it produce value?
If you have stayed with me thus far then I thank you kindly for reading my Steemit page. Leave me an upvote and a follow if you would be so kind. Regardless, I appreciate you entering into my mind and have only my best well-wishes for your wellbeing.