Angulation of Mass Mind Formation
Chapter 5
Business and the Public
This is Bernays’ master piece and takes up the most pages in the center of his work. He begins with a mention of business interests of the former age which did not concern themselves with public opinion, and to their detriment. He will close with the observation that the circus and theater taught advertising to business, and that, in turn, business cooled down that approach and taught it to entertainment concerns, who thence adopted managerial models of public relations.
Between the age of industrial tyranny and the rise of entertainment as advertising conditioning, Bernays discusses the politics of:
-gelatin
-cereal
-luggage/clothing intersectional marketing
-replacing “ballyhoo” with science
-education
-health
-soap
-cosmetics
-utilities
-universities
-globalism
-industry
-tooth paste
-heating versus clothing interests
-cars
-radio
-hats
-and baby food, in four pages…
Slick Eddie is here proposing the refinement and ethical uplifting to Oracle status of propaganda. His most informative passages still, after five readings, are chilling.
“If today big business were to seek to throttle the public, a new reaction similar to that of twenty years ago would take place and the public would rise and try to throttle big business with restrictive laws.”
He notes that mass production, by solving scarcity, demands of the producer ever-increasing production and thus, “… today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand.”
This chapter is about how to turn the customer or client into a consumer, to understand and manipulate, “… the structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.”
A slow chill went down my spine on this fifth reading of that line.
“… business is seeking to injects itself into the lives and customs of millions of persons.”
Now the biggest business is injecting its products into our bodies, even by use of governmental threat!
“It must dramatize its personality and interpret its objectives in every particular in which it comes into contact with the community (or the nation) of which it is a part.”
Slick Eddie has spelled out the fact that corporations are legal golems fabricated as proxy advantage vectors by conclaves of conspirators. And, at the time when most people saw themselves as beloved members of a nation, he demarcates community from nation, traditional fact, from fabled power creation.
“At whatever point a business impinges on the public consciousness…” the sage of lies suggests that business shape-shift as needed.
“The public has its own standards and demands and habits. You may modify them, but you dare not run counter to them… business does not willingly accept dictation from the public. It should not expect that it can dictate to the public.”
This advice is very similar to a few security men with carefully chosen words and subtle actions controlling a crowd where a line of armored police shouting commands fail. Or, reminiscent of a few cowboys or a heeler dog controlling a herd, where a hunter would merely disperse it and kill one which must be butchered. Bernays here codifies for us the origin of The State as managerial terror supplanting murder.
“Big business studies every move which may express it true personality.”
This statement expresses the desire to create a 100% positive personality. This is an early transhumanism step in scaling up humanity and replacing the conflicted and variable personality of the individual with the group, of erasing tradition with innovation. Imagine the inner schisms in a created creature, “a corporation” that takes all blame for the crimes of the nefarious actors within it, which must also evolve into a perfection of ever-increasing optimism. Such a thing must wax monstrous and many-tentacled, or collapse under its own contradictory weight and expanded bulk. Bernays imagined the construction of a smiling Leviathan come to rescue us from our traditions, blood bonds, morality and faith, to replace all of this with positive images of ever-increasing consumption.
“The president” of such a corporate entity is described as a mere figure head, a living symbol of values, values calculated to appeal to the consumer. This may only be improved by instilling such values in the consumer.
We can imagine this in business. Yet in politics the prospect of the president as a disposable effigy king, is rejected by most. The cultivation of good will as if one grew alfalfa to feed cattle, is blandly related as a mere mechanic. Yet, never fear, “Public opinion itself fosters the growth of mammoth industrial enterprises.”
Fraud is discouraged as dangerous to the increase in perceived value. Bernays does not appear bent on corrupting the public, but rather materially improving the citizen into a consumer. He is proposing a capitalistic collective whose hungers are satisfied by increasing and diversifying that thirst to forget through feeding. His is noting less then the redesign of human consciousness along its converging lines of need and avarice, expanding desire and sanctifying greed.
At the top of page 68 “propaganda” is described as “the weapon.” On page 73, while discussing typewriter manufacture, Bernays describes these internal lines of control: “… by manipulation of the principles familiar to the propagandist—the principles of gregariousness, obedience to authority, emulation, and the like.”
In better words, groups are best controlled by pulling those social strings attached to the weakest facets of their nature.
“Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion.”
Edward Bernays has here concluded that at the core of the system of mass manipulation he has codified incompletely, that the propagandist serves as a physician to the body politic and as a priest or prophet ministering to the ever-yearning needs of its collective soul.
