A Path to Artificial Value Creation

Chapter 8

Propaganda and Education

Bernays lends a paragraph to the idea that educators of his day had a grievance, and that this ill will had been perpetrated upon the “pedagogue” by the public itself, who regard the teacher as second to the businessman.

“The public is not cognizant of the real value of education,” to brain wash them. Bernays suggests a campaign to sell the cult of experts, beginning with the humble teacher, who he zeroes in on as a nascent propagandist. For his methods will work best on a public who has had their minds regimented as children and youths. He described the educator as “out of gear” with more modern, greed-based institutions. The teacher was not yet properly fulfilling his role as a cog in the soul-grinding machine.

“The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his job is two-fold: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist.”

Evil has a name, “the normal school,” first used to train orphans of slain Union soldiers and then to normalize the orphans of hundreds of conquered and corrupted Indian tribes. Furthermore, the educator is properly cited by Slick Eddie as an embittered party, ripe for revolution:

“Judging himself by the standards in common acceptance, he cannot but feel a sense of inferiority because he finds himself continually being compared, in the minds of his pupils, with the successful businessman and the successful leader in the outside world.”

Propaganda for teachers and their profession is stressed stridently, to such a degree, that one suspects that Slick Eddie had identified, and taken exception to, an instinct within “the public” that ran emotionally, perhaps event thought, counter to authoritarian indoctrination, and that such induction should be best performed on younger, more pliable, minds.

The lack of funding for universities is addressed, with Bernays failing to predict the boom in College Football revenue. Well, in his defense, not every evil mastermind is perfect. He suggests a strategy that has, however, grown alongside college sports revenue, that of providing experts for government and business, and most of all, of each university maintaining a newspaper, with links to professional news services, and of employing a public relations officer. This syncing of information vectors and controls would hopefully gain both government and business endowments.

In one of his best lines, Bernays quips about teachers seeking funding, “Men who, through a sense of inferiority, despise money, seek to win the good will of men who love money.”

Key to this process of the seduction of the teacher and his being pimped out as a trainer of blinkered minds, was two-fold, an increase in his pay and an increase in his social standing, two things that may not be separated in a satanic society. The aloof, cloistered scholar, the man of books, letters and thought provocation, must become a man who teaches by omission, indoctrination and thought suppression.

Bernays does warn that an elite spirit among academics must be instilled so that serious students of mass mind control shall not feel inferior to school athletes. This is a a tall order, runs counter to human nature, and has, since the codification of this nefarious mind farming scheme, been expressed by students continuously, from the 1960s thru 2020s, engaging in political and cultural warfare against traditional aspects of the public mind, using methods developed by the CIA to destabilize enemy nations.

“One of the aims of such propaganda,” by the National Education Association, “is of course the improvement in prestige and material position of the teachers themselves.”

Bernays, here focused on colleges, avoids the obvious ominosity, that the education of children was already in the hands of women, and that this doubly embittered demographic would be the hammer that smashed the soul of American boyhood, with most schoolboys now prescribed behavioral drugs. He then, ironically, discusses how the druggist is also an embittered party, second as he is to the doctor and forced to act the grocer and sell sandwiches and sodas to pay the rent.

Slick Eddie does admit that the use of propaganda by university press officers and the greater news apparatus, “… violates the fundamental article in the creed of the old academic societies,” which was to remain independent of money grubbing and influence peddling, but to inhabit a sanctuary of critical thought.

A pimp must be careful of the whore he has created from soiled cloth, for the guiding scruples of her kind are thence forever cast aside.

The president of the university of whores must now, “… concern himself with the kind of mental picture his institution produces on the public mind… in the community mind, and produces the results desired, both in a cultural and in a financial sense.”

This may explain why university graduates are uniquely and intractably unable to, and incapable of understanding U.S. history. Such as to insist on clinging to anachronistic notions that only Africans were ever enslaved in America and that some fantastical designation of ahistorical person an “indentured servant,” actually existed, against all evidence.

The public relations counsel of a university should “… urge that [courses of study] be modified to conform to the impression which the college wishes to create…” might be the most sinister passage in this evil book.

He closes with:

“In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business and politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.”

As the man wrote many times, propaganda is first and foremost a “weapon,” “the weapon,” that is, a tool for harm.