The Public Relations Industry
Mind Control : Controlling the Public Mind.
There’s no doubt that one of the major issues of 20th Century history, surely in the United Staters, is Corporate propaganda. That’s a huge industry. It extends over the, obviously the commercial media, but the whole range of systems that reach the public, the entertainment industry, television, a good bit of what appears in schools, a lot of what appears straight out in the newspapers and so on. A huge amount of that comes straight out of the public relations industry which was established in this country early in this century and it sort of developed mainly in the 20’s and on, and has become an enormous industry – it’s now spreading over the rest of the world, but it’s primarily here. And it’s goal from the beginning, perfectly openly an consciously, was to control the public mind, as they put it. And the reason was the public mind was seen as the greatest threat to corporations. That’s from early in the century.
Business power was strong, but it’s a very free country by comparative standards, and it’s hard to call on state violence, not impossible, but hard to call upon state violence to crush peoples efforts to achieve freedom and rights and justice, so therefore it was recognised early on that it was going to be necessary to control people’s minds. I should say that’s not a new insight either, you can read it in David Hume in the Enlightenment, where it was already recognised, in fact you have the earliest stirring’s of democratic revolutions in England in the 17th century and there already was concern that we’re not going to be able to control people by force and we’re therefore have to control them by other means, controlling what they think, what they feel, their attitudes, their attitudes toward one another, I mean, all sorts of mechanisms of control are going to be have to be devised which will replace the efficient use of force and violence which was available to a much greater extent earlier on and has been fortunately declining, not uniformly but often declining throughout he years particularly, here, leading to the need for other methods of control.
You don’t have to move very far from the Cambridge elite to learn about it. The leading figure of the PR industry is a highly regarded Cambridge liberal, Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal, who died recently, Edward Bernays, who wrote the standard manual of the Public Relations industry back in the 1920’s which is very much worth reading. Remember I’m not talking about the right wing here, this is waay at the left, liberal end of American politics. His book, it’s called Unpropaganda, or maybe just Propaganda.
I should mention that terminology changed during the 2nd world war. Prior to the 2nd world war the term propaganda was used quite openly and freely for controlling the public mind. It got bad connotations during the 2nd because of, you know, Hitler and that sort of thing, so the term was dropped, and now there’s other terms used.
But if you read the literature in the social sciences and public relations industry and so on back in the, say 20’s and 30’s, they describe what they are doing as propaganda.
This manual is for the rising Public Relations industry and he opens by pointing out that the conscious manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is the central feature of a democratic society. It’s the essence of democracy, as he later pointed out.
And he said we have the means to carry this out. He said we have the means to regiment peoples minds as efficiently as armies regiment their bodies. And we must do this. First of all its the essential feature of democracy but also… it’s the way to maintain power structures and authority structures and wealth and so on roughly the way it is.
It’s worth remembering something else that they usually don’t teach you very much about in school, and that is if you go back to the origins of American society, it was founded on the principle that was stated very explicitly by the leading framer, James Madison, at the constitutional convention, that the, as he put it, “The primary responsibility of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”
And Madison recognised, smart guy, that this was going to be a serious problem if the democratic system were established. If people had the right to vote --– he used England as his model. England was the model for democracy in those days, (were talking about 1780’s). He pointed out in the debates on the constitutional convention – something which everyone ought to read in third grade in a free society. I mean this is the origins of our society.
He pointed out that in England, if they had the right to vote (which fortunately they didn’t), he said that pretty soon you would find people calling a redistribution of property and for a tax on property rights, for what nowadays we would call agrarian reform – it was mostly an agricultural society – he didn’t use the term agrarian reform, but it’s the same thing –he said people will start calling for agrarian reform, obviously that’s intolerable. We have to protect our own society against that kind of injustice, by ensuring the rights of property prevail.
He recognised that, he said it’s a problem now, he was already concerned in the 1780’s by what he called by symptoms of a levelling spirit. That is, people are trying to feel that property ought to be more equitably distributed – that’s a danger. But he said that the danger is going to become much more severe over time as more and more people are marginalised and dispossessed and secretly yearn for a more equal distribution of life’s blessings. Now if those people get the vote, we’re going to be in trouble, because it’s going to be hard to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority, which is what government’s all about.
And he therefore designed the constitutional system which was intended to prevent that danger. The system, the way he set it up, he and the other framers, but it was virtually unanimous, there was virtually no disagreement about this. The one person who might have disagreed, Jefferson, was not a part of any of this.
The Constitutional system as he designed it was supposed to put power in the hands of the wealthy, who are the more capable set of men, I’m quoting, “Power must reside in the hands of the wealthy, the more capable set of men, with the general population fragmented, factionalised, dispersed”, you know in conflict and so on and so forth. Well this was like, 1780’s. Okay, it’s been a pretty stable system. And the franchise has increased, so over time more and more people did get the vote. And that just raised the danger.
Furthermore the power of the state to coerce by violence, and that includes the power of private power, like the power of, say, Carnegie to hire Pinkertons and so on, as that has decline, the need to resort to these other measure of factionalisation, instilling hatred, marginalising people, straight propaganda, and so on, that’s increased, and very consciously, so by the time you get to the 1920’s where it started from, it’s recognised that huge resources must go into the conscious manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses and we have to regiment them, their minds, as well an army regiments their bodies. And we have the methods for it, and those methods are advertising, entertainment, straight propaganda, the media, schools, so on and so forth.
From “Propaganda and Control of the Public Mind” by Noam Chomsky
A lecture and question and answer session recorded live at Harvard
Trade Union Program, Cambridge, MA, on February 7, 1997.
A double CD available from G7
Welcoming Committee. (G7 - 005)
Tracks from CD number one.
2. controlling the public mind;
3. propaganda;
4. the public relations industry
5. conscious manipulation
