Propaganda. Edward Bernays

Propaganda - Edward Bernays


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General Electric.

      That passage is itself, of course, a stunning bit of propaganda, as it bluntly reconfirms the Manichaean plot that Creel & Co. had hammered home throughout the war: Germans always lie, Americans always tell the truth. How the German propaganda “had come to be associated with deceit and corruption” is a question Creel would rather not address, preferring instead to bury it in that sly (if sly it was) passive construction. There is much to say about Creel’s obfuscation, or evasion, of the fact that his own propagandists had “associated” German propaganda with “corruption” and “deceit”and did so just as Creel does in that passage. At this point, however, our main concern is not propaganda’s crucial self-effacement, but the darkening effect of Allied propaganda on the elusive word itself.

      In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made “propaganda” so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with “the Hun,” the word did not regain its innocence—not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar “the Hun” had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see “propaganda” as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word’s demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it.

       II.

      In Propaganda, as in all his writings, there is none of the utopian grandiosity that marks so many of the decade’s other pro-commercial homilies. Bernays’s tone is managerial, not millenarian, nor does he promise that his methodology will turn this world into a modern paradise. His vision seems quite modest. The world informed by “public relations” will be but “a smoothly functioning society,” where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators.

      While Lippmann’s argument is freighted with complexities and tinged with the melancholy of a disillusioned socialist, Bernays’s adaptation of it is both simple and enthusiastic: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” These “invisible governors” are a heroic elite, who coolly keep it all together, thereby “organizing chaos,” as God did in the Beginning. “It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.” While Lippmann is meticulous—indeed, at times near-Proustian—in demonstrating how and why most people have such trouble thinking straight, Bernays takes all that for granted as “a fact.” It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. “They govern us,” the author writes, “by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.”


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