Chapter Eleven in Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘The Mechanics of Propaganda.’ Here Bernays talks about how propaganda gets transmitted to the public.
Bernays defined propaganda here as “the establishing of reciprocal understanding between a person and a group.” Therefore, there is no practical limit to the number and type of media that may be employed to transmit propaganda (one wonders what Bernays would have made of the Internet).
He writes about how the public meeting was the best means of propaganda 50 years ago (i.e. in the 1870s), but people have become “sick of the ballyhoo of the rally,” and prefer to get information from the radio and newspapers. The propagandist must keep up with the shifting patterns of the popularity of various media, as well as anticipate future changes.
Bernays notes here that there is almost no item of news that, if published, would not benefit the interests of some people and harm the interests of others. He notes also that the newspaper does not care about the propaganda value of a piece of information, but only about its news value. Thus, propaganda that is also news is more likely to get propagated.
It’s important to tailor the message to the audience. The propagandist must create propaganda items with specific audiences in mind. To this end, magazines are different to newspapers because they’re not obliged to print news. This also means that magazines are kind of naturally like propaganda organs.
The propagandist might like to consider supplying a propaganda organ with a series of articles that puts the case to a particular audience. This is especially likely to succeed if that organ feels like they can derive prestige from the association with the company the propagandist works for.
Hilariously (with hindsight), Bernays is able to speak about the radio when it was a new invention and its development uncertain. He notes that many newspaper enterprises have moved into radio, correctly in his estimation. Anticipating the Internet, he predicts that various groups will have an ev ever-increasing interest in buying media space for the sake of propagandising.
Incredibly, Bernays was able to write 90 years ago that Hollywood films were major propaganda devices. He also predicts the rise of the cult of personality by noting that “the public instinctively demands a personality to typify a conspicuous corporation or enterprise.” This is acutely true in New Zealand, where our Prime Ministers have little to go on apart from the personality cults.
Bernays notes that the public has already become cynical to attempts at manipulating them through the media, but some interests are universal. People will always have a need for food, for amusement, for beauty and for leadership. For this reason, they will always seek out sources of propaganda.
He leaves us with the statement: “Intelligent men must realise that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.” This statement must be read in the light of World War I, which was itself the result of the old methods of fighting. In this sense, Bernays and this book herald a shift from an Age of Iron to an Age of Silver.
Many historical theories view the world as an eternal struggle between two forces. The Christians call it good and evil, the Communists call it the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the Nazis call it the Aryan and the Jew. A previous essay here suggested it was between the K and r-selected. This essay takes a new approach: that Friedrich Nietzsche was more accurate than anyone else, and the true eternal struggle is between those with a master mentality and those with a slave mentality.
In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche described two basic forms of morality.
Master morality judges actions on the basis of good or bad. Nietzsche defines master morality as the morality of the strong-willed: it is championed by the noble and the powerful. This doesn’t mean that master morality is mere domination – it also prizes honesty and an accurate appraisal of one’s own weaknesses. People with this mentality are not concerned with what the herd thinks. They prefer to pursue their own self-defined form of excellence.
Slave morality, by contrast, judges actions on the basis of good or evil. In slave morality, strong people are equated with evil. In slave morality, goodness is equated with passivity, timidity, agreeableness and an insipid kindness. Slave moralists aren’t concerned with accurate viewpoints – they simply believe whatever makes them feel good. Questioning the herd is a great sin, because it requires strength and therefore only someone evil would do it.
The masters are always fewer in number, and the slaves more numerous. In this regard, master and slave morality maps fairly closely to the mentality of the K-selected vs. the mentality of the r-selected. The major differences are that K-selected people are liable to suffer from pathological altruism, whereas the master morality (not feeling pity) does not, and that r-selected people do not lack vitality and are not prudish, whereas the slave morality is neurotic.
The true course of history has been the ebb and flow of these two different forms of morality.
Nietzsche himself wrote that the ancient Greco-Roman culture encapsulated master morality, but was subverted from the inside by Christianity, one of the original forms of slave morality. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 323 A.D., Westerners became slaves, our natural spiritual traditions having been thoroughly destroyed and replaced with superstition.
This victory of slave morality endured until the Renaissance (an event which a previous essay here called the Minor Renaissance). At this time, some of the old master morality returned in the form of the quest for scientific knowledge, previously hidden or taboo philosophy and exploring the world. Unfortunately, this didn’t last.
The 19th Century was a relative high point for master morality (of course, Nietzsche didn’t know this). During this decade, the European Empires reached their greatest extent. The British Empire had achieved such a state of dominance that it was able to settle Australia and New Zealand – lands on the other side of the planet – at the same time as providing most of the settlers to North America, and all this while keep the world’s shipping lanes open.
Unfortunately, there was no Major Renaissance, as the wider Western consciousness kept falling at the first three hurdles of dumb Abrahamism, blind Materialism or deaf Satanism. The West never managed to revive the master spirituality it had before being poisoned by Christianity some 1,700 years ago.
It has long been observed that empires tend to fall from the inside, rather than get smashed by any outside force. The reason for this is the internal rise of slave morality. The reason why the West has fallen into the decrepitude that it has is because slave morality has risen to the point where it is normal. Accordingly, we are weak.
It has also long been observed that good times lead to weak men, who then create hard times, which leads to strong men, who then create good times. This has been discussed here as the Red Pill-White Pill-Blue Pill-Black Pill sequence. New Zealand philosopher Rick Giles describes it as the Dignity Culture-Honour Culture-Victimhood Culture-Slave Culture quadrichotomy.
Hard times lead to strong men by process of selection. When times are hard, there’s not enough surplus to waste any of it. Therefore, the people in charge of resources have to be discriminating. Even more pressing is the fact that, when times are hard, people will fight over what little resources exist. This fighting, being in the realm of iron, rewards the hard and those who can do without.
This Spartan sense of miserliness leads to efficiency and a masterly mindset. When things operate efficiently, life is good. Everyone has their needs met and, as is usually the case when people’s needs are met, they become wealthy. When everyone is wealthy, everyone tends to be happy, and it is as if a Golden Age had descended upon the land.
When everyone has their needs met, they stop being hard. No-one with a full belly wants to fight – better to just wait until the problem goes away. If there’s no food in the cupboards, that’s when it’s time to worry. People in the “fat and happy” mindset tend to ignore challenges rather than respond to them.
This doesn’t only lead to physical softness but, more crucially, it leads to mental softness. This mental softness prevents people from being able to make sharp and accurate distinctions between the phenomena they encounter. Consequently, they become apathetic and indifferent, a malaise that they mistake for the virtue of tolerance.
This apathy and indifference leads to a failure to adequately deal with corruption. Either corruption is ignored, or the corrupt are not punished – a slave’s mindset. Because no-one is strong enough to challenge the corrupt, they come to positions of dominance. When corrupt people are in power, hard times are just around the corner. And so, the cycle repeats.
In today’s Clown World, slave morality has the total ascendancy. We are so apathetic that our politicians can kick us in the guts on a daily basis and we just roll over and take it. The total victory of slave morality is, perhaps, the fundamental explanation as to why Clown World is the way it is. This is a world without masters. The slaves have completely inverted natural morality.
What’s needed is the Major Renaissance. This would constitute a spiritual renaissance that would reconnect the people of the Western World to God. Being reconnected to God, we would then possess the necessary illumination to see the path forward in the darkness. We need a new set of masters for a new age.
The story of Clown World is a story of collapse. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that all of the signs and symptoms of social collapse in other mammalian species can also be observed in our societies today. The concept of the ‘behavioural sink‘ is an ethological observation that applies just as well to human society.
In the 1950s and 1960s, ethologist John Calhoun ran a series of experiments with Norwegian rats. This involved creating a controlled environment where the rats could thrive – food and quality shelter were limitless. These are sometimes called the Mouse Utopia Experiments on account of that the environment was so conducive to life.
In one of these experiments, known as “Universe 25”, the easy nature of life led to a population explosion, as the natural birth rates of the r-selected rodents (mice in this instance) were not kept in check by the natural death rate that would have existed had they lived in the wild. The overpopulation eventually reached such an extreme degree that the inhabitants of Universe 25 began to exhibit some strange behaviours.
Beyond a certain degree of overpopulation, asocial and then antisocial behaviour became much more common.
First the rodents would start to become asocial. The typical expression of this was a passive form of withdrawal. Some rodents would avoid the others during the daytime, only becoming active at night when the others had settled down. Other rodents, dubbed the “beautiful ones”, came to devote all of their time to grooming, withdrawing from social interaction completely.
If overcrowding became worse than this, the rodents would become aggressive. They would start to randomly attack each other, sometimes fatally. The slightest irritation could trigger a murderous assault. At its worst, infant mortality came close to 100%, as the rodents came to completely neglect their parental duties. Eventually the population would collapse on account of all this homicidal and suicidal behaviour.
Calhoun coined the term ‘behavioural sink’ to describe this societal collapse. He described it as a kind of “spiritual death” that preceded physical death. Observing the disintegration of rodent society on account of this overpopulation gives us great insight into the nature of Clown World. The terrifying truth is that the human animal in Clown World is not so different from the rat and the mouse in the Mouse Utopia Experiments.
The human animal did not evolve in a state of overcrowding. For the vast majority of the 100,000 or so years that humans have existed on this planet, we did so in small bands like the other primates. These bands rarely exceeded 150 or so – if the population of one band would swell beyond this, part of it would split off and form a colony elsewhere.
Because living conditions were so harsh during this time, there was never a time when the birth rate was significantly higher than the death rate. Hunger, disease, natural disaster, tribal warfare and predation from larger animals all worked to keep the human population in check.
This all changed when sanitation and then modern medicine were invented. These two advances meant that the death rate dropped sharply. Because the birth rate initially stayed the same, the human population ballooned. The human population has quintupled since 1900, and most of that growth has been concentrated in urban areas close to the major international trading hubs.
By 2019, the human animal is presented with a set of living conditions very similar to the rats in Calhoun’s study. Perhaps inevitably, we have responded in a similar fashion. The essence of Clown World is the collapse in social behaviour that has come about from the massive overpopulation on our planet. We are exhibiting the same behaviours as the rodents of Universe 25.
In Clown World, many people have withdrawn from social contact completely. This phenomenon is one that we share with the Mouse Utopia. The overpopulation of Clown World has led to a sense that all possible social niches are filled, therefore striving for social success is futile. Many of these people have turned to cyberspace, which offers social contact without being forced into close physical proximity with extremely unpleasant people.
The phenomenon of the beautiful ones is replicated with the rise of the hipster. The 21st century hipster, with his grooming obsession, is simply the result of heavy overcrowding. This is why he is only seen in urban areas. As with the rodents, the modern hipster does not pursue females for reproduction and he does not fight for dominance with the alpha males. He simply withdraws.
Parental incompetence is another feature of overpopulation that the Mouse Utopia shares with Clown World. In the Calhoun experiments, rats in heavily overcrowded pens failed to look after their offspring properly. It was as if the rats became even more r-selected, and adopted attitudes to their offspring normally held by reptiles and amphibians.
This shift towards r-selected patterns of child rearing is also replicated in humans. There have never been a higher proportion of deadbeat dads than there is today. Never before have there been so many single mothers on welfare. Despite the protestations of many conservatives, this isn’t because the welfare system is too generous. It’s because people no longer give a shit.
Consequently, a number of children are growing up feral in Clown World. Their parents have all but given up on life, and so the children wander the streets of their neighbourhoods looking for entertainment. Many of these children end up joining the recluses on the Internet. Others, as in A Clockwork Orange, turn to mindless crime. This breakdown of social order is at the core of Clown World.
A third feature that the Mouse Utopias share with Clown World is this mindlessly random violence. Just this week there was a diversity incident in London where two passers-by were killed by a knife-wielding Muslim. These incidents are becoming so common that they are hardly news anymore. It’s just taken for granted that people are under so much stress nowadays that some will randomly flip out and start killing others.
It’s impossible to understand Clown World without understanding the concept of the behavioural sink. Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiments gave us the chance to observe the behaviour of social mammals in a state of extreme overcrowding. Now, with 8,000,000,000 people on the planet, we can see those same behaviour patterns arising in humans.
We’re going down the plughole of the behavioural sink.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.
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The most strenuously defended falsehood in the world today is not a religion (at least not a recognised one), but a pseudo-scientific dogma. It is the dogma of Equalitarianism. This is the assertion that there are no inherent differences between different human groups, or at least no psychological ones. This dogma, as this essay will show, is the world’s most harmful lie.
There is no doubt that there is large variation among and between almost all human groups in almost all measures. Over a hundred years of scientific literature establishes that this is the case. Not only is there great variation in physical traits such as height, body build and skin colour, but there is also great variation in psychological traits such as IQ and proclivities towards certain behaviours.
The question that does get debated is whether or not this variation is natural or whether it is a function of the environment. This is the great debate in psychology, and is known as the nature versus nurture debate. It’s an extremely important question, because a person’s answer to it is strongly related to their political beliefs. As has been discussed here before, people’s beliefs about human nature are closely tied to their political beliefs. One often predicts the other.
One could argue that the elementary political question is: should the differences between people be made smaller?
The response to that question is usually “It depends.” More specifically, most people usually feel that the answer depends on whether those differences between people are natural or not. Responses to the elementary political question tend to vary based along these lines.
Those who think that the differences between people are natural tend to think that it’s pointless to try and make them smaller. These people would point to the clear differences in height between different races, even when you control for environmental factors such as wealth – just compare the Japanese and Koreans with the Russians and Mongolians. Nature throws up a great amount of variation, and it’s more efficient for us to just let it be.
Those who think that the differences between people are unnatural tend to think that it’s immoral to let them continue to exist. If differences are unnatural, then they must be the result of prejudices inherent to the structure of society. Therefore, we’re morally obliged to restructure society such that those prejudices no longer exist. The favoured strategy for achieving this is mass brainwashing campaigns.
The trouble is that an elementary grounding in science is enough to know that different races will be different in all kinds of ways, it’s just a question of by what measure, in which direction, how much and how meaningfully.
By the time most people are eight years old, they have learned that no two snowflakes are the same. The reason for this is that there are no two identical things anywhere in Nature. There are no two identical people, or mountains, or even worms. All are different by virtue of the fact that there are no two identical things anywhere in the material world.
A more advanced understanding of Nature, in particular evolution, teaches us that no two subgroups of the human species will have gone through precisely the same selective pressures over the course of their biological past, and therefore no two subgroups of the human species will be the same either. This is true no matter which measure one uses. In order words, all subgroups of the human species are different, despite the presence of underlying similarities.
Therefore, we can conclude that the Equalitarian Dogma doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny. It’s not just that the evidence doesn’t support it – elementary scientific principles rule it out from the beginning. However, the Equalitarian Dogma and its supporting dogmas such as the Blank Slate Theory still hold immense sway among the vast majority of people unqualified to understand the science.
The Blank Slate Theory holds that genetics have no influence on a person’s behaviour or personality – all of their behaviours can be best explained by reference to the environment in which they were raised. Humans are born into the world as if a tabula rasa – or blank slate – upon which practically anything can be inscribed.
This is the basis of the Equalitarian Dogma. If we are all the same, then the only way to explain our transparent differences is by appeal to the different environmental influences that have been present during the lives of each person.
A corollary to the Blank Slate Theory is that, as people are simply the products of their environment and nothing else, it’s possible to shape them into anything at all, simply by controlling the schedule of rewards and punishments under which they are raised. Any child could become a university professor or a gang member – it all depends on what shapes their minds when they are growing up.
It’s true that human infants are born into a state of extreme juvenility, and that they learn very quickly by mimicking their elders. It’s also true that the human brain at birth is the most plastic organ of any invertebrate creature. This means that human personalities are supremely malleable – but only up to a point.
The reality is that human behaviour can be shaped by the environment, but only with the bounds of possibility determined by genetics.
For example, the precise height of a man may be influenced by the quality of the nutrition that he received as a child, but this influence only applies to a particular range of height. A lack of nutrition might mean a man grows up stunted, skinny or even sickly, but it won’t make him a dwarf. Likewise, it’s not possible to reliably produce seven-foot tall giants simply by feeding them great quantities of food as children.
The reason why this is so important is because incorrectly understanding the reality about the human condition causes us to make terrible decisions.
The popularity of the Blank Slate Theory among political leaders in Europe caused them to open their borders to millions of Muslim and African immigrants this century, in the belief that those people could simply be conditioned into becoming the same as the native Europeans. Everyone knew they were different, but because of the Blank Slate Theory it was assumed that their children would grow up just the same as any European.
The idea was that, owing to the immense gratitude they would have from being so generously raised from the filth of their home countries, the Muslims and Africans would throw off their old cultural values like so many iron shackles, and embrace the cultural values of Europe. Having done so, they would then be identical to other Europeans.
The reality, of course, was that these Muslims and Africans behave differently to the natives for genetic reasons, and cannot simply be conditioned to suppress their sexual and violent urges the same way a European can. Consequently, all the education didn’t do much. Europe has learned this the hard way, through suffering hundreds of millions of sex crimes and crimes of violence, but they did not need to suffer in this manner.
They only suffered because they made incorrect assumptions about the nature of the human animal.
The Equalitarian Dogma has caused, and continues to cause, tremendous suffering to the people of the West by exposing them to the presence of people who aren’t the same as Westerners when it comes to civility or natural empathy. The assumption that all people are exactly the same implies the assumption that all people commit sex and violence crimes at the same rate as Westerners. It leads to a failure to correctly discriminate between relatively harmful and relatively harmless influences.
The Equalitarian Dogma is the greatest evil in the world because it causes more suffering than any other dogma.
The most evil thing about it is that, like all dogmas, it makes violence between those who submit to it and those who don’t all but inevitable. Those who submit to it truly believe that they are morally superior to those who don’t, and that their opponents are Nazis who only believe in human biodiversity out of pure hatred. This sneering superiority makes dialogue with them all but impossible, and therefore makes violence all but inevitable.
The Equalitarian Dogma has led to a situation where there are now forty million Muslims and Africans in Europe who cannot realistically be integrated, and their continued and growing presence in Europe means continued and growing misery. Eventually one of two things will happen – this population will be expelled violently, or the ruling classes will be destroyed in the native people’s desire to punish someone for what’s been done to them.
Inaccurate, dogmatic conceptions of reality must be opposed at every turn. No matter how virtuous a person may feel for holding them, they cause nothing but misery.
