The tenth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Art And Science.’ Here Bernays discusses how one can use propaganda in the service of culture.
As in other chapters, Bernays emphasises that the success of almost any enterprise today depends on public acceptance. Therefore, if a gallery is to successfully run an exhibition featuring a particular artist, they will need to first ensure that their works have public acceptance.
Bernays gives us the maxim “In art as in politics the minority rules,” by which he means that those who understand “the anatomy of public opinion” can shape it. He claims that propaganda gives the artist the opportunity to collaborate with industry to improve society.
As in previous chapters, Bernays mentions that the interest of the public can be captured by associations and by dramatic incidents. He gives the example of an American silk manufacturer who forms industry links with Parisian fashion houses for the sake of forming an association.
The effect of aesthetics is laboured in this chapter. Bernays writes that, because mass production has driven the costs of producing propaganda to the floor, propagandists must look for other ways to stand out. One way is by applying aesthetics to their product. There is an economic incentive to meet the public demand for more beauty.
Part of propaganda is to give people something to talk about when they meet up at tea parties. To that end, it’s important to bring people the best of art and aesthetics as they relate to one’s industry. Museums have an interest in making their message intelligible to the public, and to that end they must employ propaganda.
Even in the late 1920s, Bernays was able to write about the phenomenon where scientific research is sponsored by large corporations. This phenomenon was already powerful enough that Bernays could write about it changing the whole world over decade previous to Propaganda being written. Science needs propaganda in order to condition the public to accept the advances it makes.
In Clown World, relations between the genders are not as they should be. As everything in Clown World is a twisted, tragicomic imitation of how things would be in a normal world, so too is dating and romance. One of the phenomena that this has created is that of the MGTOW. This essay explains who these people are and what motivates them.
‘MGTOW’ stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The idea is that MGTOW is a rebellion against the expectations levied upon the average man by society. These expectations, MGTOWs contend, are that a man shall slave away for the vast majority of his life for the sake of providing for a wife and family, without any assurance that any of his work will pay itself off. It’s a raw deal, and so they reject it.
The average MGTOW has an extremely cynical attitude towards women. Their idea of the feminine is deceitful, manipulative, dishonest – women attract men like spiders attract flies. The attitude that women are evil underpins much of the MGTOW movement. After all, if it were true that women were evil, then it would make sense to avoid them.
MGTOWs speak of a time when the average man was afforded a lot more respect. During this time, marriages were stable and women were loyal. Men were not subject to “divorce rape” – in which a formerly happy wife betrays a man and then enlists a lawyer to take everything that man has in divorce proceedings. Cases like Jeff Bezos’s wife, who became a multi-billionaire through a divorce settlement, are emblematic.
The problem with today’s society, MGTOWs contend, is that women are no longer as they once were.
Women are no longer loyal – a combination of decreased social pressure towards loyalty, a legal environment unfavourable to males, and their own inner malice. Therefore, the old social contract, under which a man would labour throughout his productive years in exchange for a pleasant wife who would provide him a family, is no longer valid. Absent this, men are not obliged to be part of society. They can go their own way.
It’s true that the average Western man today has a much shittier situation facing them than the average Western man in the 1950s or 60s. Unlike his grandfathers, he has almost no chance of owning a home and raising a family on his wage alone. The average young New Zealander today has less than 40% of the house-buying power that his parents’ generation enjoyed. Being the breadwinner of a family is many times harder than it used to be.
It’s also true that the balance of power has shifted towards women in recent generations. Our grandfathers were able to literally beat their women into submission, knowing that both their neighbours and the Police would look the other way. Marital rape was legal in New Zealand until 1984. In the 21st century, however, women make up two-thirds of Bachelor’s degree recipients in New Zealand. It’s a woman’s world now.
Moreover, men today have to deal with the reality of hypergamy (all MGTOWs are familiar with this term). Hypergamy is the tendency of the female in sexually reproducing species to try to marry up by attracting the sexual partner with the highest possible social status. MGTOWs contend that the advent of online dating has exacerbated this tendency to such an extreme degree that, today, most women have no interest in the bottom 80% of men.
To many men, this makes the prospect of a fulfilling long-term relationship seem unlikely. MGTOWs will say “women are only as loyal as their options,” and because Tinder gives them effectively infinite options, women no longer have any reason to be loyal. Even worse, they don’t even need a man to raise children because the State will pay for it with welfare (there is great overlap between MGTOWs and the libertarian right when it comes to resenting welfare).
Because there is little reason to work hard and to hold down a job if one does not (or can not) have a family, a number of men have just said “fuck it” and dropped out of society in response to all this. They fill their time mostly with video games, Netflix and television. Others fill their time with pornography (see the Coomer meme). None of this is productive, but there’s no reason for a man who has abandoned (or been abandoned by) society to be productive.
There is a great overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and incels. Both of them share a deep frustration about their failed attempts to get what they want out of women. The difference, in theory, is that MGTOWs are no longer trying to find ways to co-exist with women, whereas incels are still trying but are getting rejected. The incel to MGTOW pathway is obvious.
Curiously, there isn’t much overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and volcels. In theory, there ought to be, because a man who is going his own way is a fitting description for a man who is voluntarily celibate. But a man who is voluntarily celibate is probably doing so for spiritual or mental health reasons – a MGTOW, by contrast, goes his own way out of bitterness and resentment.
One of the main drawbacks of the MGTOW strategy is that most men can’t achieve anything by themselves. Like it or not, individual humans are interdependent with other humans and cannot exist in isolation. Even the greatest of men can’t achieve much without a network of people who make that man’s greatness known to the wider world.
Inevitably, such a network will include women. Therefore, a man who hates or who wants to avoid women is unlikely to also to be supported by a large social network.
If the MGTOWs themselves are correct, then the phenomenon ought to become more prevalent as the economic and social balance of power shifts further in favour of women. This could have social repercussions. If a large proportion of the men in a society are unwilling to act to preserve it then it may well collapse. The prospect of this is something that many MGTOWs look forwards to with joy.
Being a sick and insane circus, Clown World is inherently unstable, and the MGTOW phenomenon may be one that heralds its demise.
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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 ninth chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘Propaganda in Social Service’.
By “Social Service,” Bernays refers to what would today be known as the welfare system. He states that the welfare system requires constant propagandising, on account of that its continued existence is contingent on the will of the wealthy. Here he states the maxim that “Civilization is limited by inertia.”
One striking feature of today’s world, Bernays contends, is the democratisation of propaganda opportunities. Back in the day, change was effected by autocratic rulers who decreed it, but today any person is able at least to try changing public opinion about something.
In this chapter Bernays again underlines the significance of appealing to the leaders of the various groups within society. If a variety of leaders of different social groups can be brought on board, it’s not too hard to get the people they influence on board too. With this achieved, it’s possible to use the approval of these leaders to further propagandise.
Bernays states here that “Social service… is identical with propaganda in many cases.” By this he means that all efforts to effect social change are propaganda efforts. The efforts of the welfare state to raise the wellbeing of people necessitates a propaganda effort. This is especially true when new scientific advances suggest certain changes (as they did in Bernays’s time in the case of prison reform).
He concludes this chapter with the statement that “Social progress is simply the progressive education and enlightenment of the public mind in regard to its immediate and distant social problems.” In this regard, the propagandist has an extremely important role. It’s perhaps telling, though, that Bernays doesn’t write about how the propagandist knows whether they’re enlightening or misleading people with their work.
The hierarchy of iron is characterised by big muscles; the hierarchy of silver is characterised by flash suits
A lot of discussion in social psychology revolves around the idea of the dominance hierarchy. This refers to the fact that humans, as a form of primate, have social dominance hierarchies like other primates (and other mammals). There are actually three separate forms of dominance hierarchy, depending on the nature of the situation, as this essay will examine.
The elementary dominance hierarchy corresponds to the realm of iron. This is the same as the dominance hierarchy that exists in a state of Nature.
In principle, there’s little more to the elementary dominance hierarchy than who can beat up who. The dominance hierarchy relating to iron is similar to the dominance hierarchy that exists in prison. Authority is determined by a capacity and a will to use violence. The top of this hierarchy is held by mighty warriors, warlords and kings.
All the posturing one sees about who could beat up who is establishing a dominance hierarchy in the realm of iron. There is a whole art to posturing in this manner, and males will start learning it while they are still boys. The point of it is to establish who is better at fighting, but without actually fighting. The man who is believed to be the best fighter is at the top of this hierarchy and, if you disagree, he will bash you.
The dominance hierarchy that corresponds to the realm of silver is the same as the social hierarchy.
This hierarchy doesn’t reflect fighting ability but rather social status. In a civilised setting, where peace reigns, the person who generally makes the most intelligent long-term decisions will be at the top of the dominance hierarchy. Fighting in terms of social status means that the loser gets ostracised (or incarcerated) instead of killed.
The dominance hierarchy of silver is the same as the hierarchy of all the people who have agreed to play by civilised rules. The uncivilised can contest the dominance hierarchy of iron by bashing and stabbing each other, but in doing so they will fall down the hierarchy of silver, because civilised men will not respect them.
In practice, the hierarchy of silver often represents the hierarchy of wealth. When it comes down to it, this hierarchy is an extension of the hierarchy of iron because silver gives you the opportunity to hire men of iron to do your bidding. Wealth can buy loyalty, even if only temporarily. It can also buy land, weapons and propaganda.
However, social status can be afforded to people on the basis of their knowledge alone, which is why the hierarchy of silver can, on occasion, promote a knowledgeable man above a wealthy one. This is most obviously the case in the university system, where extremely knowledgeable people are afforded a high status.
The third form of dominance hierarchy is much more subtle, and consequently it corresponds to the realm of gold.
The spiritual hierarchy reflects those who are most closely attuned to the Will of God. Because every person has their own idea of what the Will of God is, it’s rare that people openly agree as to who is at the top of the spiritual hierarchy. Therefore, this hierarchy is subtle, sometimes even occluded.
At the top of the spiritual hierarchy is the person with the greatest knowledge of God. In most cases, this will not only be a person who believes in God, but will also be a person who maintains a practice that keeps them in connection with God. This means that they have explicitly repudiated the other two dominance hierarchies and no longer contest them.
These three hierarchies interplay with each other in many ways.
The hierarchies of iron and silver clash all the time in civilised society. The hierarchy of iron is almost always topped by a male aged between 20 and 40, because it’s in these years that men possess maximum physical strength. The person at the top of the hierarchy of silver, by contrast, will have achieved their position after decades of building social and financial capital, and so will be much older.
This means that the person at the top of the hierarchy of iron is almost never the same as the person at the top of the hierarchy of silver. This is all but inevitable if the population is larger than 50 or so. With two different people at the top of two different dominance hierarchies, conflict between them is possible. This is why some ancient tribes used to split leadership into a war chief (man of iron) and a peace chief (man of silver).
Likewise, the person at the top of the hierarchy of gold will not be the decision-maker all the time. This person will only be in charge as long as others put their egos down and seek wise counsel instead of trying to force their will on others. As long as people choose to fight, then they will fall behind the leadership of either the best physical fighter or the best social fighter, and neither will follow the man of gold.
Because of the Conceit of Silver, people of silver will regularly fancy themselves to be people of gold. This leads many people of silver to adopt the trappings of the people of gold and to start mimicking them. Therefore, one can never be sure that anyone claiming to be a believer in God really is one. This means that the hierarchy of gold cannot be measured.
The hierarchies of silver and gold naturally clash with each other, as those driven by egoic desires for self-aggrandisement clash with those driven to minimise the suffering of all sentient beings. The men of silver are generally happy to cause suffering to other sentient beings if it grants them more power, but in doing so they inevitably provoke the ire of the men of gold.
These three dominance hierarchies can be observed in virtually all human groups. The interplay between physical strength, social strength and moral strength all but ensures that ultimate decision-making power is never held in the same hands for long.
