PROPAGANDA
[1928 pdf] PROPAGANDA By EDWARD L. BERNAYS
Quotes
p37
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 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. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.
p59
Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom
to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public
utilities .. about immigration who tell us how our houses should be designed,
what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve at our table,
what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays
we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire,
what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
p60
A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "around popular
demand," but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen
men sitting L.. around a table in a hotel room.
A man buying a suit of clothe imagines that he is choosing, according to his
taste and his personality, the kind of garment which he prefers. In reality, he
may be obeying the orders of an anonymous gentleman tailor in
The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the increasing
complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for making the actions of
one part of the public understandable to other sectors of the public. It is due,
too, to the increasing dependence of organized power of all sorts upon public
opinion. Governments, whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic
or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their
efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public
acquiescence. Industries, public utilities, educational movements, indeed all
groups representing any concept or product, whether they are majority or
minority ideas, succeed only because of approving public opinion. Public opinion
is the unacknowledged partner in all broad efforts.
The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with modern media of communications and the group formations of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the public.
The systematic study of mass psychology revealed t7 students the potentialities
of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate
man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who approached the subject in a scientific
manner, and Graham Wallas, Walter Lippmann, and others who continued with
searching studies of the group mind, established that the group has mental
characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by
impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of
individual psychology. So the question naturally arose. If we understand the
mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and
regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?
p73
If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious
cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do
not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street
riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by
nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone
in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have
been stamped on it by the group influences.
But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him, because anything associated with "the interests" seemed necessary corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of action.
By playing upon a old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass group emotions.
p75
It is chiefly the psychologists of the
This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons which men give for what they do.
p75
Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work. Only by
understanding them can the propagandist control that vast, loose-jointed
mechanism which is modern society.
p84
... while, under the handicraft of small-unit system of production was that typical a century ago, demand created the supply, today supply must actively seek to create its corresponding demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution than formerly.
p109
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people
expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people
expresses the mind of 3 the people, and that mind is made up for it by the 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
clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
The political apathy of the average voter, of which we hear so much, is
undoubtedly due to the fact that the politician does not know how to meet the
conditions of the public mind. He cannot dramatize himself and his platform in
terms which have real meaning to the public. Acting on the fallacy that the
leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his campaign of all dramatic interest.
An automaton cannot arouse the public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator,
can. But, given our present political conditions under which every office seeker
must cater to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader
can lead is the expert use of propaganda.
p119
It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave to the public's group
prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity
with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for
the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but
know how to sway the public.
p120
Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity can be
sold.
p120
One reason, perhaps, why the politician today is slow to take up methods which
are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media
of communication on which his power depends.
The newspaperman looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.
p123
Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which
the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
p123
The criticism is often made that propaganda tends make the President of the