Pictured is Edward Bernays, sometimes called "the father of modern consumer culture." Yes, his name does rhyme with "mayonnaise." I mention that because "mayonnaise" is made by melding individual ingredients into a soft and pliable condiment that obscures the fact that the individual ingredients from which it is made are actually quite distinct. Our modern world, a world that Bernays has done so much to help bring into being, can also be seen as a world that so well obscures our individual selves that we no longer even recognize what has happened to us.
I have written about Bernays before, though only indirectly, and without even mentioning his name. My non-explicit allusion to Bernays occurred in an earlier blog posting that referenced Zeynep Tufekci's wonderful article, "Engineering The Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics."
If you'd like to read what Tufekci has to say about the impact that Bernays has had upon our society, and upon our politics, and upon our economy, please click the link that I have just provided. Here is a "quick hit" from her article:
The rise of broadcast media altered dynamics of politics in fundamental ways. Public relations pioneer Edward Bernays explained the root of the problem in his famous “Engineering of consent” article where, discussing the impact of broadcast on politics, he argued that the cliché “the world has grown smaller” was actually false (Bernays, 1947). The world is actually much bigger and today’s leaders, he pointed out, are farther removed from the public compared to the past. The world feels smaller partly because modern communication allows these leaders, potent as ever, to communicate and persuade vast numbers of people, and to “engineer their consent” more effectively.Bernays saw this as an unavoidable part of any democracy. He believed, like Dewey, Plato and Lippmann had, that the powerful had a structural advantage over the masses. However, Bernays argued that the techniques of “engineering of consent” were value–neutral with regard to message. He urged well–meaning, technologically and empirically enabled politicians to become “philosopher–kings” through techniques of manipulation and consent engineering.
This current blog posting, with the picture of Bernays at the top, was not inspired by Tufekci's article (though I really do urge anyone reading this blog posting to check out what Tufekci has to say). The picture comes from a more recent essay by Jeremy Lent, who has also been mentioned before in my series of daily blog postings, now heading into its sixteenth year. Here is a link to Lent's article, "Mind Control: It’s Happening To You Right Now."
Lent's article (definitely recommended) points out that we are more and more living in an "online world," and that this fact makes it increasingly easy to manipulate us. The "broadcast media" about which Bernays wrote is but a pale adumbration of the kind of media that is being used to influence us today - media that are delivering tailored, individual messages straight to our brains, with even those sitting or standing right next to us having no idea what we are seeing as "reality," since other people are getting profoundly different messages about what is "real," and what is "not real," even though they live in the same household, city or town, state, or nation.
Let me reiterate what I have said before. It is time for each one of us to realize what is going on, and to cut ourselves off from the manipulations to which we are now succumbing. To do that will require us to return to the "real world," and one way to do that (and maybe the only way) is to "find some friends."
"Real" friends is what I mean, the "flesh and blood" kind of friends, who may well be our last hope. Those who stay within the online realities in which they now, increasingly, live - which "realities" are minutely targeted to appeal just to them, will be "catfished" continually. If we all stay there, and if we don't return to the "common world" which used to be the only world we had, we can just forget about "e pluribus unum," and that will be a problem.
Trust me. It really WILL be a problem. Since we are, inevitably, in this world together, our failure to find the common ground that is actually under our feet, and which is the actual foundation upon which all of our lives are built, is not only going to be a "problem." Such a failure will prove to be fatal.
Here's Arizona State U anthropologist James Greenberg recently on Bernays: https://jamesbgreenberg.substack.com/p/the-century-of-persuasion-how-madison Great minds think much alike, and Greenberg's is another blog well worth following!
ReplyDeleteJust found a compatible quote from Robert Reich, quoting Edmund Burke's 1770 piece, "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent": "...when bad men combine, the good must associate: else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." From Reich's The Common Good, 2018. I'm sure Burke was not imagining us twittering each other, but joining arm in arm.
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