the human condition – Page 49

VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda III

This reading carries on from here.

The third chapter of Edward Bernays’s Propaganda is called ‘The New Propagandists’. Here, Bernays gets to the task of who it is that molds public opinion. “Who are the men who, without us realising it, give us our ideas?”

Bernays admits openly that these molders of public opinion decide for us who we admire and who we despise, and what we think about all manner of political issues. They decide our fashions, our speech, and even what jokes we feel like we’re allowed to make. They decide the shape of everything in our societies – but who are they?

These people include all of the top politicians, all of the leaders of the biggest industries, all of the leaders of the largest cultural organisations, the editors of the largest newspapers and magazines, the heads of the various industry groups, the chancellors of the most prominent universities and the main religious figures. Even so, most of these people, in their turn, get their ideas from elsewhere.

In some cases, it’s clear who the wirepullers are. In most cases, it isn’t. But these people control the destinies of millions. The degree to which a small number of people influence a large number of public figures is generally not appreciated. This number will, however, always be small on account of the great expense involved in manipulating the machinery of propaganda to form public opinion.

This has given rise to the new (in 1928) profession of professional propagandist, which has been euphemised as “public relations counsel”. This role is necessary because all governments, no matter what their type, depend on the acquiescence of the people. Bernays here gives us the maxim “Government is only government by virtue of public acquiescence.” Even commercial enterprises need public approval to succeed.

The propagandist is not simply an advertiser. Although he might use letters to the editor, radio, lectures, magazines and more, his work does not duplicate that of the advertiser. His first business is to make sure that his client’s product is something that the public can be brought to accept. The propagandist’s next job is to analyse the public, and how to approach the leaders of the various groups within it.

Bernays contends that, in the age of mass media, corporations found it necessary to give the appearance of conforming to the public’s sense of decency and honesty. As a result, and much like governments, corporations found propagandists necessary in order to get anything done.

The ideal of the propagandist’s profession is making the client understand what the public wants, and making the public understand the objectives of the client. Propagandising can therein be likened to a form of diplomacy. Bernays labours at length the point that the propagandist does not work to hoodwink the public, and lists the ethical considerations of the profession.

If you enjoyed reading this essay, you can get a compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2018 from Amazon for Kindle or Amazon for CreateSpace (for international readers), or TradeMe (for Kiwis). A compilation of the Best VJMP Essays and Articles of 2017 is also available.

How The People Are Divided and Conquered

The ruling classes, faced with the fact that they are outnumbered by thousands to one, have refined an array of techniques to divide the people into groups and set them at each other’s throats. This array covers all of the different aspects of human life, so that individuals are made enemies of each other at every turn. This essay describes how the people are divided and conquered across the entire spectrum of life.

Human life covers the complete spectrum from purely physical concerns to purely spiritual concerns. Physical concerns such as blood and soil are different to matters of class and education, and these are in their turn different to religious and spiritual matters. By means of propaganda, people are divided at each part of the spectrum, and made to believe that someone else has stolen from them.

This stealing is how the other side of the spectrum (any spectrum) is characterised as the bad guys, the stealers, the takers. The mouthpieces of the ruling class will tell their listeners that all of the suffering those listeners feel is because those at the other end of the spectrum have stolen from them. The natural result is that the listeners come to hate those others, and in doing so become divided and conquered.

At the physical end, people belonging to any racial group have been led, by way of propaganda, to feel that other races have collectively worked to steal from them. In America, blacks are made to feel that whites have stolen from them through slavery, and owe them compensation; whites are made to feel that blacks have stolen from them through taxation to fund welfare.

The story is the same all over the West. There was a time when New Zealanders considered themselves Kiwis first and their particular ethnic makeup was a secondary thing. But after decades of rhetoric, many Maoris have come to be convinced that colonisation was an act of evil for which they are owed compensation. White people were convinced, at the same time, that Maoris had stolen from them through taxation-funded welfare and crime, and the end result was to split the Kiwi people down the centre.

Less physical issues do not make people less vulnerable to being divided and conquered. Even if everyone was the same race, it is still possible to divide people along class or religious differences.

The most obvious example is of Communist agitation in a factory. The Communist begins by persuading the workers that they are being stolen from because their wages are not equal to the value of their production. If the worker is not intelligent enough to understand the basics of how a business is run, and does not understand that operating a business requires competencies that he does not necessarily have, he may be persuaded that his boss is stealing from him, and that restitution is owed.

Communist agitation in Rhodesia is an example that combines both race and class. Local blacks were convinced that white settlers had stolen land from them and were trying to enslave them. The blacks were told that everything the whites had was stolen from them, and this theft was why they didn’t have it. This led to rising resentment which eventually tore the entire country in two, a blueprint since repeated all across the world.

Education is another spectrum upon which people are divided. The poorly educated are led to believe that the well educated have arrived at their greater position of wealth through sneakery and trickery, not through study and applied competence. As with the other examples, the poorly educated are then made to become resentful, and so come to fight the well educated instead of co-operating with them as yin and yang.

All of this dividing and conquering works because of the state of spiritual ignorance that we have fallen into. People have forgotten that life is suffering, and that suffering is inherent to existence as a mortal being in this world. Because they have forgotten this, it is possible to convince them that their suffering is unnatural, and that someone else must be to blame. This is an example of chains of gold.

All that’s necessary to start it is to find a spectrum of wealth somewhere within society. It can be a spectrum of wealth along race lines, along class lines, along education lines – it doesn’t matter. As long as the people at both ends are told that the people at the other end have stolen from them or are looking to, both groups will dig themselves in and start hating the other.

From there, it’s a simple matter to point the finger at the other side of the national, racial, education or religious divide and say that all the suffering is because those people have stolen from us, and so individuals from that group are personally responsible for restitution. Once this has been achieved, it’s all but guaranteed that those so blamed will point the finger back, and at this point arguing and fighting begins.

Our ruling Establishment encourages divide and conquer logic, because the more effectively the people can be divided, the less able they are to mount a co-ordinated challenge against the will of that Establishment. This is why the media is daily full of propaganda about “injustice”. They don’t care about preventing injustice – they just want to fan the flames of it so that people are angry and blame each other, instead of the rulers.

Certain incompetent individuals also encourage divide and conquer logic, because they know that if the people were united and competent people promoted, those individuals would be left behind. Incompetent individuals, therefore, have an interest in dividing and conquering so that they can slice off their own little piece of turf and rule the smaller group present in it. They want to keep the group small so as to discourage more competent competition for places in the ruling hierarchy of that group.

In summary, people are divided and conquered because their own spiritual ignorance makes it possible for unscrupulous propagandists to blame the natural suffering of life on acts of theft committed by “others”. Blaming all the suffering inherent to life on others ensures that revenge will be sought, that grievances and vendettas will grow, that the cracks diving society will deepen and therefore that the suffering will never be overcome.

Anyone who denies that life is naturally suffering, and who insists that any suffering that exists is the fault of a particular group of people, is working to divide and conquer society. These people must be considered suspect, and their motives potentially malicious. This is true no matter how powerful, rich, numerous or oppressive the so-called bad guys might be.

VJMP Reads: Edward Bernays’s Propaganda II

This reading carries on from here.

The second chapter of Propaganda is called ‘The New Propaganda’. Here, Bernays elucidates some of the differences between the original approach to propaganda that arose with the advent of mass media, and the “new” approach that was developed after the application of mass psychology techniques to making propaganda more effective.

The industrial revolution has made kings much less powerful than they once were, relative to the masses. It spread economic power, and, with that, political power. The old democrats used to believe that it was possible to educate everyone up to the level where they could participate in rulership – in reality, the average person falls well short of what is required.

Propaganda fills this gap, serving as the means by which the minority can still rule the majority. “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible Government.” The education of the common man, instead of teaching him to think freely, only conditioned him to become receptive to propaganda. Now his mind is receptive to propaganda of all sorts.

Using examples from a daily newspaper, Bernays explains how propaganda works in the mainstream media. Anything stated as true by an authority, such as the State Department, is taken as such. Here Bernays gives us a definition of propaganda: “Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.”

In practice, very little is done nowadays without some kind of propaganda campaign alongside it. Propaganda regiments the public mind every bit as much as the Army regiments the bodies of its soldiers. A group so regimented can be every bit as effective as an army.

Today, the approval of the public is necessary for any large undertaking. Therefore, propaganda is necessary for any large undertaking. Formerly, rulers could set the course of history simply by doing things. Today, the masses have control, so propaganda is needed to wrest that control back. As a consequence, propaganda is here to stay.

It was World War I, and the astonishing success of propaganda in that war to manipulate public opinion, that made people aware of what could be done. This was the first time that not only a multimedia approach was made to encourage people to support the national endeavour, but also key men were brought on board in a massive range of industries.

The new propaganda doesn’t just target the individual, but takes into consideration the structure of society and the way that information spreads through it. This is now a feature of society, because new proposals for reform must be clearly articulated before they will be influential. No-one can get anything done anymore without propaganda.

Bernays concludes this chapter by noting that “In the active proselytizing minorities in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide lie the progress and development of America.” The world is controlled by the small number of men that control propaganda, who make the rest of us think as they will, and society only progresses when their will is in accord with the collective good.

Why Intelligence Can Never Be a Fixed Concept

Intelligence is something that everyone appears to understand, but no-one can agree on a definition. Despite this, people are pretty sure that it can be measured. Although tests that measure IQ have been shown to have a lot of predictive value, a precise definition of term remains elusive. But as this essay will examine, intelligence can never be a fixed concept anyway.

What is intelligence? A common definition of intelligence is “ability to recognise patterns and avoid dangers”. Another is “the ability to apply knowledge and skills”, which assumes that intelligence is an entirely different thing to instinct. Other definitions involve a capacity for learning, logic, reasoning, self-awareness etc. Despite this variety, most people think they know it when they see it.

A previous essay here discussed how there are at least two different spectrums of intelligence, and how both of them might appear to be intelligent in some situations and not in others. Another essay suggested that there is both a masculine and a feminine intelligence and stupidity. What’s apparent from all of these different definitions is that some behaviours are intelligent in some circumstances, and unintelligent in other circumstances, depending on how adaptive they are to the environment.

For example, being able to faithfully repeat what you are told is a sign of intelligence when a student has a good teacher who educates them honestly. When the student is a political cadre being indoctrinated into a dangerous ideology, it’s not a sign of intelligence. However, the underlying neurological and psychological attributes that enable either are roughly the same.

Most people can also accept that intelligence is something that evolved, controversial as that may be when one gets into the specifics of it. The reasons for this evolution are presumably because intelligence provided a selective advantage in either staying alive or finding mates and reproducing.

The first one of these points seems pretty obvious: if you are smart you are better able to avoid the dangers that the natural world has created. Intelligence is highly correlated with pattern recognition, and recognising patterns is the key to recognising dangers. If you notice that the last person who did something died, you are less likely to do it. Therefore, you are more likely to survive to reproductive age yourself.

The second point is more subtle, but equally clear if one thinks about it. The more intelligent a creature is the better shape it will keep itself in, therefore the healthier it will be, and the more attractive a mate it will seem to others of its kind. This greater attractiveness will lead to more mating opportunities, and therefore more offspring (all other things being equal).

However, there’s a hidden paradox in this simple biological definition. If intelligence is biological, then it cannot be a fixed concept, because if it’s an adaptation to the environment it will change along with that environment.

Aside from the odd species like crocodiles, who have found one evolutionary niche and just stayed there, animal species tend to be opportunistic. They tend to range across a number of niches and take food, water and reproductive opportunities when they arise. The most excellent example of this is the human being, who has adapted to many environments and who is capable of anything.

As the environment keeps changing, so too will the optimal behaviours within each environment change.

For instance, much of the behaviour that we currently associate with intelligence has much to do with avoiding impulsive behaviours. Someone who stops and thinks before taking action will be almost universally considered more intelligent than someone who does not. Likewise, someone who saves money will be considered more intelligent than someone who wastes it, and someone who reads books will be considered more intelligent than someone who parties.

This is all well and good in a civilised, industrial society like ours. But if society should break down, then the equilibrium point will shift back from cautious deliberation towards opportunism. If there is no law and order, then there’s no advantage in taking one’s time to consider things. The advantage shifts towards those with the propensity to hit and run before the opportunity is lost. Intelligence would then become a matter of understanding the importance of not hesitating.

Another problem is that the kind of skills and aptitudes that made a person become considered intelligent by their peers in the ancient past are not necessarily the same today. Human survival in the past had a lot to do with astrology, animal husbandry and swordsmanship – all skills that are now only practiced by small minorities. A person might have been considered highly intelligent in the past on account of that their brain made them good at animal husbandry, but the same person might be considered low intelligence today if they can’t find a technological skill.

It might even go the other way. Society might continue to become more and more technological, so that the selective advantage wasn’t in favour of impulsivity but in favour of the kind of semi-autistic gadgetry obsession that distinguishes people who are today considered nerds. Such a society might no longer have any need for social intelligence but would rather operate on computer science aptitude.

In all of these cases, the society that results after massive environmental change will define intelligence as adaptation to it, not as adaptation to some other time and place. Neither will they define intelligence as an adaptation to the natural world in which we evolved, because such a thing no longer exists.

In the end, the concept of intelligence is a biological one, and therefore can only be understood relative to a specific environment, or set of environments. Because the natural world keeps changing – and our social world even faster – the concept of intelligence will keep evolving as humans do. It can therefore never be a fixed and clearly defined concept.