Methods of Mass Mind Direction
Chapter 6
Propaganda and Political Leadership
On Line 2, Bernays references a truism of his time, “The dogma that the voice of the people is the voice of God tends to make the elected persons the will-less servants of their constituents.”
Admitting this, he claims this dogma to be a partial cause for the political sterility of his time. Sterility, to his advertising mind, is failure to use the public as a soil for planting the seeds of ideas and emotions from which the crop of consumption might be harvested by the managerial classes attuned to propaganda. Below he describes how the propagandist might become the voice of God, His temporal prophet and oracle.
“The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches, and verbal formulas provided by the leaders.”
Slick Eddie reflects that the people must follow, are not capable of leading, and will not for long suffer to be lead by a weak figure, “An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can.”
He goes on to describe the political campaigns of his day as side shows and bombast. At the beginning of paragraph 4 on page 81, he states, “Politics was the first big business in America. … there is a good deal of irony in the fact that business has learned everything that politics has to teach, but that politics has failed to learn very much from business methods of mass distribution of ideas and products.”
Thus begins the salient lesson that has made Bernays the sage of American political thought and so called news and journalism. From pages 82 thru 87, he details 11 lessons from business that politics should adopt. Let us recall that business learned some of these from entertainment and improved upon them.
“The public has lost faith… that campaign pledges are written in sand.”
Nothing has changed there in the intervening 93 years, as all reading this may attest, that even “our guys” once elected, always fail to deliver promises. The art of Bernays is awesome and remarkable, the art that he codified after it was developed organically for greed, along the framework expressed in 1627 according to faithful need. For propaganda, adapted from the art of science-based salesmanship, has convinced Americans who cannot name a politician that made good on a campaign promise, to yet vote. Bernays did not create the magic, but did assemble the spell book crafted to clothe holy lies in the obscuring cloak of truth, under the hood of good.
Emotions are to be targeted as thought is suppressed and bypassed, or used to trigger productive emotion. Three rules of political campaigning are laid out:
a) coincide broad plans with details
b) adapted to many targeted groups
c) conform to the media of the distribution of ideas
Point c lands with a chill in this mind, placing as a point of doctrine, that the mechanics of idea distribution and manipulation are where one shall find the propagandist’s God, the elevation of the Lie as all that is holy because it sparks the feelings of the public. Once roused, the public, may then be ridden like a vast beast of burden.
The reader is then notified that disinterest in politics on the part of the subjects of political rule may be remedied by coordinating issues with the individual’s selfish interests, again, by appealing to the Lesser Angels of Our Nature, which is to say, by seducing the demon within the human heart.
“Events and activities must be created in order to put ideas into circulation…”
Drama is a key tool, explaining the prevalence of that genre as the main form of TV and Movie conditioning among voters. On the next page the politician is rescued from slavery to the group and extolled as its master to, “… mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare…”
The politician is than pictured in the power position over the distribution of ideas he is dependent upon for control over the public mind. This is that the news men look to the politician for news and he thereby controls the flow of political ideas.
Bernays discusses tariff politics and moves on to a sense of timing, by admitting in the oblique, that he advised Thomas Masaryk, first President of Czechoslovakia to announce the formation of his nation on Monday, instead of Sunday, out of respect for his true master, the news cycle, which slumbered on Sunday.
Cultivating an ear for the mob’s beating heart is the subject of the next few pages, including the possible use of a president’s positive personality. Bernays calls for truth and absence of fraud in politics. Yet fraud was the basis for much of ancient democratic politics as demonstrated by the planted men at meetings of the 10,000 in Xenophon’s Anabasis. Lies, invented messengers, bribes, misleading statements, were all bread and butter to ancient politicians, men who came from a world were hand shakes and oaths were sacred, compared to our world where handshakes are not binding and oaths are for fools, and government guns for hire only.
“The public actions of America’s chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stage-managed.”
Despite this, Bernays assures the reader that a skillful politician will use propaganda to become a leader rather than a clumsy instrument of the people. “If he remains merely the reflection of the average intelligence of the community, he might as well go out of politics.”
Bernays encourages the idea of developing a Press Secretary for public interactions. He closes with, “Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses. … education, in the academic sense of the word is not sufficient. It must be Enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important issues.”
