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An important insight one gets from Propaganda is that propaganda is an inevitable effect in a society that goes through an explosion of the amount of available

An important insight one gets from Propaganda is that propaganda is an inevitable effect in a society that goes through an explosion of the amount of available information, and it becomes more about how to deal with it than trying to suppress it. That is in fact what the book is about originally, rather than what "propaganda" has come to mean nowadays. In a way, it's more of a book about how to deal with bounded rationality than about how to persuade people for more or less nefarious purposes (there are better books about that).

ttctciyf 5y ago
To Bernays, propaganda was an essential tool in a democracy. He didn't regard ordinary people as qualified decision makers and saw influencing the masses as the proper function of people like himself. This is what he literally says in the opening paragraphs of his 1928 Propaganda: > The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. > We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. It's pretty clear he is talking about propaganda in the modern sense - using rhetorical and persuasive techniques to bypass the target's rational decision making procedures in order to achieve specific policy goals. Remember Bernays was an alumnus of the first truly industrial scale propaganda effort, the Creel Committee, set up to convince US citizens they should support US entry into WWI. According to him, it > bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice. > Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...] > The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed. (- Bernays, Public Relations, 1951, via [1]) Bernays indeed saw this as desirable and necessary, and very much cast himself as a member of the "invisible government." If you grant impeccable intentions and absolute probity to the "invisible governors" this might still seem a cogent viewpoint, though offensive to most modern sensibilities. Realistically, though, modern history should have taught us the devastation that can result from adoption of propaganda as the primary tool of government, and its inimicability with true democracy. Democracy proper relies on informed consent, and consent under a propagandising state can only ever be misinformed consent. 1: https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays
- davidivadavid 5y ago
  I still don't read it that way, or at least I think there's more to it. What he's expressing is a structural property ("logical consequence") of representative authority, applied to information, much like it is applied to power in democracy. The point is that there's always a limit to informed consent, and that technocracy/"government of experts" is more or less an inevitable property of ("true") democracy itself rather than a choice. That consent can only ever be misinformed is the point or at least the argument debated here.

ttctciyf 5y ago

To Bernays, propaganda was an essential tool in a democracy. He didn't regard ordinary people as qualified decision makers and saw influencing the masses as the proper function of people like himself. This is what he literally says in the opening paragraphs of his 1928 Propaganda: > The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. > We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. It's pretty clear he is talking about propaganda in the modern sense - using rhetorical and persuasive techniques to bypass the target's rational decision making procedures in order to achieve specific policy goals. Remember Bernays was an alumnus of the first truly industrial scale propaganda effort, the Creel Committee, set up to convince US citizens they should support US entry into WWI. According to him, it > bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice. > Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...] > The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed. (- Bernays, Public Relations, 1951, via [1]) Bernays indeed saw this as desirable and necessary, and very much cast himself as a member of the "invisible government." If you grant impeccable intentions and absolute probity to the "invisible governors" this might still seem a cogent viewpoint, though offensive to most modern sensibilities. Realistically, though, modern history should have taught us the devastation that can result from adoption of propaganda as the primary tool of government, and its inimicability with true democracy. Democracy proper relies on informed consent, and consent under a propagandising state can only ever be misinformed consent. 1: https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays https://everything2.com/title/Edward+L.+Bernays

davidivadavid 5y ago
I still don't read it that way, or at least I think there's more to it. What he's expressing is a structural property ("logical consequence") of representative authority, applied to information, much like it is applied to power in democracy. The point is that there's always a limit to informed consent, and that technocracy/"government of experts" is more or less an inevitable property of ("true") democracy itself rather than a choice. That consent can only ever be misinformed is the point or at least the argument debated here.