Another Lagniappe | Edward Bernays

Admin posted a prescient quote from Edward Bernays last Friday.

Bernays is briefly mentioned in Finding Madeleine. Bernay’s backstory is important to understand what occurred to Madeleine and why her family became the lead characters in a multi-year soap opera rivaling the coverage of O.J. Simpson and the death of Princess Diana.

As we discovered in Finding Madeleine, Chapter Two, the media was of the utmost priority to Team Mccann and to the British government.

In the next installment of Finding Madeleine we will meet Sir Clement Freud and his son Matthew Freud. Both Clement and Matthew became closely involved with Madeleine’s parents after she vanished. Clement and Matthew are, respectively, Sigmund Freud’s grandson and great-grandson. Which makes them Edward Bernays’ removed cousins. 

Edward Bernays is the person who made Sigmund Freud famous. They formed a close personal and professional relationship in the early 1900’s. Freud was marginalized and scorned by European society. It was not until after Bernays brought his Uncle Sigmund to the U.S. that Sigmund was to attain his recognition, fame and prestige. 

Not only is Edward Bernays credited with creating the modern public relations industry he coined the term “public relations”. Bernays came up with the public relations moniker as a more commercially appealing alternative to “propaganda”. Which, aside from the mundane term “advertising” is what public relations was commonly referred to before Bernays re-branded it. “Propaganda” is also the title of a book Bernay’s wrote on the subject for which he was the leading expert of his day.

Bernays is one of the most influential persons of the 20th century. Yet few knew his name last century and fewer know it now. Bernays did not care that the masses were largely ignorant of him and of what he did to them. Indeed, he preferred to remain anonymous to the great masses whom he held in great contempt.

Bernays’ name, however, was well known to the political and corporate elites of his time. Politicians, corporate titans, the U.S. government and its propaganda and intelligence agencies sought him out.

Bernay’s was the unseen Wizard who, through his ability to manipulate the mass media, could make the great masses of people think, do say, buy and believe nearly anything. Bernays thought it right and proper for the elites (and him) to purposely and secretly manipulate the unconscious and dim-witted masses. It was, after all, for their own good. Which makes Bernays the intellectual brother of Leo Strauss, the godfather of the Neo-cons.

“Hitler had a profound contempt for the masses—the same contempt that is readily observed in Strauss and his cohorts. But when force of circumstances made it necessary to appeal to the masses, Hitler advocated lies, myths and illusions as necessary pabulum to placate the people and make them comply with the will of the Fuhrer. Strauss’ political philosophy advocates the same solutions to the problems of the recalcitrant masses.” – Dr. Shadia Drury, author of two books on Leo Strauss

Bernay’s arguably influenced the 20th century and today’s world more than his patron, Woodrow Wilson, his Uncle, or Einstein, Picasso, Strauss, Orwell or Huxley who were his historical contemporaries. Bernays provided the tools to exercise non-coercive control over the minds of the great mass of humanity. Without Bernays the great powers of the world look more like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia than the more nuanced neo-con dominated states of the West. Which is the difference between the iron-boot of Orwell and the soma-induced passivity of Huxley.

Bernays provided the undergirding for every western statist who came after him. Josef Goebbels credits Bernays for the techniques he used to propagandize the traumatized and vulnerable German public that saw the installation of the Third Reich and which continued for its duration.

Bernays also pioneered the use of simulated synthetic (i.e. staged) media events that combined elements of street theater and reality as a means to influence public opinion and behavior.

For the benefit of his tobacco clients Bernays staged the Torches of Freedom event during the 1929 NYC Easter Day Parade. The purpose of this event was to conflate smoking and women’s rights and to generate coast-to-coast media coverage. It worked. Tens of millions of women threw off their shackles to claim their inalienable right to smoke in public. Which also liberated tens of millions of women to suffer and die from lung cancer and other associated diseases.

Needless to say, Bernay’s tobacco clients were quite pleased with the results. After which the public relations industry began to promote cigarettes as healthy. Doctors were portrayed as endorsing smoking as knowledge and evidence of their deleterious health effects was denied and suppressed by the tobacco companies. In 1998 the tobacco companies finally admitted in a settlement agreement they had been selling a deadly and addictive product all along. Care to guess how much of the $206+ billion settlement went to pay damages to their victims?

Not one dime.

It all went to the State governments who surely spent it wisely and judiciously. The settlement absolved the tobacco companies of any liability to their victims.

But we digress.

Bernays first proved and perfected his mass propaganda skills working for Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (aka “the Creel Commission”). The Committee was a government propaganda shop aimed at the American public. Walter Lippman was also on board with the Committee. Bernays job was to convince the American public to send their sons, fathers, brothers and uncles across an ocean to die in a senseless war that did not involve them.

It was a tough sell. Millions of newly minted American citizens had recently fled Europe. Why would they want to go back there to die, or send their children?

Bernays came up with the powerful Make the World Safe for Democracy meme that has been used to justify the deaths of untold millions since.

It was just the phrase Wilson needed. Not a soul could explain why World War I was being fought. Making the world safe for democracy imbued the senseless war with a jingoistic feel-good patriotic purpose to justify mass slaughter.

Bernays gave Wilson one of the most powerful weapons ever devised in the form of a short phrase. Since then nearly every American war has been fought to save democracy or bring its benefits to some bereft group or country deemed to be in need of it.

World War I caused the death of upwards of 17 million people. It also set the stage for World War II and every statist regime that came after, be it communist, fascist, socialist neo-con democrat, republican or corporatist.

To Bernays, the idea of making the world safe for democracy must have been a delightfully cruel inside joke. Bernays knew the mob could be ruled and democracy subverted through the mass media organs. Bernays called his manipulation of the masses the “engineering of consent”.

“‘The Engineering of Consent’ is an essay by Edward Bernays first published in 1947. He defines ‘engineering consent’ as the art of manipulating people. It maintained that entire populations, which were undisciplined or lacking in intellectual or definite moral principles, were vulnerable to unconscious influence and thus susceptible to want things that they do not need. This was achieved by linking those products and ideas to their unconscious desires. Ernest Dichter, who is widely considered to be the ‘father of motivational research,’ referred to this as ‘the secret-self of the American consumer. In other words, consumer psychologists have already made the choice for people before they buy a certain product. This is achieved by manipulating desires on an unconscious level. The central idea behind the engineering of consent is that the public or people should not be aware of the manipulation taking place.'”

Bernays’ sophisticated propaganda and simulcra techniques have been adopted by nearly every western government and intelligence agency.

Sigmund Freud knew that individuals were driven by their unconscious needs, desires and fears (the irrational). Bernays applied this insight to great effect by manipulating public opinion and perceived reality through the mass media organs of his day.

Bernays is the intellectual father of every statist/centralist that came after him. We will never be rid of Bernays, the false narratives and the mass pathologies he pioneered until millions come to know his name, recognize his techniques and speak of him with utter contempt.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

To find out more about Finding Madeleine or to order the eBook, please visit our home at:

findingmadeleine.com

Author: Centinel

Just a guy from the neighborhood. View all posts by Centinel