Chomsky : Public Relations.

There’s no doubt that one of the major issues of twentieth-century U.S. history is corporate propaganda.

It’s a huge industry. It extends over, obviously, the commercial media, but includes 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 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 the 20th century and developed mainly from the 1920s on.. now spreading over the rest of the world, but it’s primarily here.

Its goal from the beginning, perfectly openly and consciously, was “control the public mind” - as they put it. The public mind was seen as the greatest threat to corporations, from early in the century. Business power was strong. As it’s a very free country (by comparative standards), it’s hard, not impossible, but hard to call upon state violence, to crush people’s efforts to achieve freedom, rights and justice. Therefore it was recognized, early on that it’s going to be necessary to control people’s minds. I should say that’s not a new insight. You can read it in David Hume in the Enlightenment, where it was already recognized. Go back to the early stirrings of democratic revolution in England in the seventeenth century: already there was concern that we’re not going to be able to control people by force, and we therefore have to control them by other means — controlling what they think, what they feel, their attitudes toward one another. All sorts of mechanisms of control are going to have to be devised which will replace the efficient use of force and violence. That use was available to a much greater extent earlier on, and has been, fortunately, declining — although not uniformly — through the years.

You don’t have to move very far from the Cambridge elite to learn about it. The leading figure of the public relations industry is a highly regarded Cambridge liberal, a Roosevelt-Kennedy liberal who died recently: Edward Bernays, he wrote the standard manual of the public relations industry back in the 1920s. which is very much worth reading. Im not talking about the right wing here. This is way over at the left-liberal end of American politics. His book is Propaganda.

(I should mention that terminology changed during the Second World War. Prior to World War II, the term propaganda was used, quite openly and freely, for controlling the public mind. It got bad connotations during the Second World War because of Hitler, so the term was dropped. Now there are other terms used. But if you read the literature in the social sciences and the public relations industry back into the 1920s and 1930s, they describe what they’re doing as “propaganda.”)

Bernays’s Propaganda is a manual for the rising public relations industry. He opens by pointing out that the conscious manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is the central feature of a democratic society. It’s the “essence of democracy”, he later pointed out. He said, “we have the means to carry this out, the means to regiment people’s minds as efficiently as armies regiment their bodies. And we must do this. First of all, it’s the essential feature of democracy. But alco (as a footnote) it, the way to maintain power structures, and authority structures, and wealth, and so on, roughly the way it is…”

Noam Chomsky : On Public Relations